1 Peter

Hi, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I dive into the sermon, a couple things about worship. First of all, Carly B. killed it on that last song. That was great. Yeah, I don't know where she is, but good job, Carly. Her last name is Buchanan, so we call her Carly B. around here. And then the second thing, I just want to let you in on something. And I feel like this is an important matter to bring to the church. Aaron's back there. He knows what I'm about to talk about. I don't know if you noticed during the second song that Carly and Aaron were smiling and looking at me, and I was laughing. Here's why, and I feel like we should all weigh in on this as partners. If you're not from the South, I don't care what you think about this. One of my favorite things about hymns, I'm just totally, this has nothing to do with anything. I'm just telling you a story. One of my favorite things about hymns is how liberal the writers are with apostrophes. In hymns, they'll apostrophe anything, right? And one of my favorite ones is victory. Not victory like an obnoxious carpetbagger. Victory like a southerner. You know what I'm saying? Like victory. It's best in Victory in Jesus, that old hymn. So anyways, last week we're singing that song that we sang, the second one. What's that called, Aaron? I'm not telling. And there's victory in there. There's the word victory in there, but you sing it victory. You know, you sing it like that, but it's not apostrophe. Now it's bummed out. And then like two slides down, we apostrophed flowers, the E in flowers. How do you even, flowers, how do you even say that? That's not a thing. How are we going to apostrophe flowers and not victory? So it just made me mad. And I told Aaron and Carly last week, and I didn't know we were singing it this week. So it comes up and they're both giggling at me and I'm grinning at them. Anyways, now you know too, and we can together peer pressure him to fix the lyrics. So there is an apostrophe and victory as the Lord intended. Okay, let's get started. Actually, these words don't mean anything to you because I know that I'm the boy that cries excited. I know that. I'm excited about everything that I get to preach. I know that I say that to you. I'm really excited about this. This is a sermon that I knew I was going to preach as soon as we planned the series. I knew that we would arrive at this passage, and I've been very much looking forward to diving into it with you. So if you have a Bible with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn it to John chapter 13. This is the beginning of the Upper Room Discourse. You'll remember that this is a series called Final Thoughts. These are the final things that Jesus shared with the disciples before he was arrested and tried and crucified. And so it's just Jesus and the disciples in the upper room, and he has some final thoughts for them, and they're in John chapters 13 through 17. So the back half of John chapter 13, after washing their feet, Jesus starts to share with them. And if you look at verses 34 and 35, I'm not sure that you could definitively say what the most important and profound words of Christ are in his whole life. I don't know that there would be an agreement among scholars or pastors or believers as to what are the most important, most profound words Jesus ever spoke. But I know that you couldn't have that conversation without talking about what we find in those verses. I believe that what Jesus says here is so profound and powerful that hyperbole is lost on the import of these verses. So I want to look at them and read them with you. If you're a believer, I hope these are well-trodden verses for you. I hope you already almost know them before I even say them. And I hope, if you have your Bible with you, that you'll grab a pen and that you'll underline these verses. And that you'll highlight some of the phrases. We're going to spend the whole morning in these two verses, and we're going to look at three profound statements that Jesus makes in this compact section of text. And I hope that you'll take a pen and you'll underline and you'll mark. I hope that you'll make notes for yourself in your Bible. I've learned from a young age that if you show me a Bible that's falling apart, then I'll show you a person who isn't. So let's beat up our Bibles. Let's mark in them. Let's scratch in them. And let's note this passage together. John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. This is Jesus speaking. A new command I give you. Love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. That's a well-worn passage. This is a passage we ought to be familiar with. This is a passage of which the profundity cannot be overstated. It's so profound and stuck with the disciples so much in their memory that 30 years later, when two people who were in the room, Peter and John, when they write their epistles, when they write their letters to the church to be spread throughout the church and read throughout the church, they both included this maxim in their instructions, in their brief instructions to the church. In 1 Peter 4, 8, Peter says, above all else, love one another dearly. After everything's said and done, love one another dearly. John, in his three letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, over and over and over again, if you say you believe in God and you do not love your brother, then you are a liar and the truth is not in you. He brings it back to love, back to love, back to love. Even Paul, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, was not in this room, did not hear this teaching personally, but heard it proclaimed by the disciples after him. When Paul writes his letter to Corinth, he ends it with that famous love passage. And he says, now after everything is said and done, in eternity, these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these? Love. We cannot overstate the importance, the efficacy, and the power of love. And this is what Jesus commands us here. It's how he opens his closing remarks. And so if it's so powerful and effective that everyone who's ever followed Jesus has reminded the people that they lead of this command, then we ought to look at the command and examine it and pick it apart and seek to understand it. And, I think, let the power of it wash over us. So the first portion of the text I want to point you to, a profound statement, is when he says this, a new command I give you. A new command I give you. Underline that in your Bible. Here's why this is profound. We know, because we have the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus is God. We understand the deity of Christ. They did not. They did not yet understand the deity of Christ. Certainly not the way that we do. You remember that when they're on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is sleeping in the hull of the ship and the wind and the waves are crashing, that they go down and they wake Jesus up. And he says, peace be still. And the storm calms. And he goes back to sleep, a little bit annoyed that his nap got interrupted. And the disciples looked at each other. And they said, it's in the text. And they said, who is this that even the wind and the waves would obey him? They still do not understand the deity of Christ. In this moment, they understand loosely the deity of Christ, but not like we do. And so when Jesus says this new command I give you, he is placing himself solidly in the Trinity. He is placing himself as God because a new command has not been given for 4,000 years. 4,000 years ago, Moses walked down the mountain with two tablets of stone with a lot more than 10 commandments written on them. If you read the text, you find it was the 10, but then they were covered front and back. There's 630 some odd laws in the Old Testament based on Mosaic law. Nobody in Israel since then had given a new commandment because nobody had the authority to do it. Moses gave the commandments from God himself. God himself wrote on those tablets and gave them to Moses, and no one had questioned it since then. No one gives new commandments. That's not a thing that you can do unless you're God. So when Jesus says this, he's claiming that he is God. And I don't know how to help us understand how radical what he's doing is, but the only thing I can equate it to is our Bill of Rights, our Constitution. No citizen can just decide, I'm going to add an amendment. I hereby declare, and then add an amendment. As a matter of fact, we'll test this out. I'd like to add one right now. I hereby declare as an amendment to the United States Constitution that daylight savings time is stupid and abolished. I woke up an hour and a half late this morning. I should have only been a half hour late. But daylight savings time. It's stupid. And likes it. And nobody needs it. We're long since agrarian. All right. Nebraska can keep it if they want it. We're squared away. Thanks. But that doesn't do anything. I don't just get to add amendments willy-nilly. There's a whole process. If we can't add amendments to a document that some guys wrote 200 years ago, you definitely can't start adding commandments that God wrote 4,000 years ago. But Jesus does. And he says it's a new one. And this commandment, one of the things that makes it so radical, is that this commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. This commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. It's not that Jesus is saying, you don't have to worry about any of the stuff that you've been commanded previously. Go be adulterers. Go murder people. Knock yourselves out as long as you're loving people on the way. You're good. That's not the idea. We get a glimpse of the idea earlier in Christ's life when someone says, what's the greatest commandment? And the response is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. These are the greatest commandments with promise. On these hang the law and the prophets, meaning the entire Old Testament. And so what Jesus says in that statement is, basically, if you'll focus on loving God and loving others, the commandments will take care of themselves. It's not that you won't be walking in obedience or you'll be walking in disobedience to them. It's that you will automatically obey them by default. And so Jesus is being even more succinct here with this new commandment to love others as I have loved you and saying, as a matter of fact, just love others as I have loved you. Because if you're doing that, if you are loving the people in your life as Jesus loves us, you will by default be loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Because you cannot love as Jesus loved if you're not fueled by Jesus. You will by default. you're not going to have an affair. You're not going to go around murdering. You're not going to steal. You're not going to say unkind words. You're going to outdo one another in hospitality. You're going to be generous. You're going to be humble. You're not going to be greedy if we simply love other people as Christ loved us. It's the command that summarizes all the other commands, which makes it such an impactful command. And here's why it takes walking with Jesus to love like Jesus. Because Jesus loved in superhuman ways. That's the second big one I want you to underline. Let me just say it real quick. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. That's the new command. Now here's why this is so radical. Have you ever been betrayed? Have you ever let someone into your life? Made yourself vulnerable to them? Given them the power to hurt you? And they have? Which, by the way, I think is vitally important to live vulnerable lives and have people invited into our life who do have the power and the capacity to hurt us because they know us that well and we love them that much. That's okay. That's a good thing. But have you ever done that with somebody who then betrayed you? Who used that exposure to hurt you? I know I've not experienced terrible betrayal, but I've tasted it. I've let people in, shared things, been vulnerable with them, and then that ended up getting used against me. That ended up getting turned towards me. That ended up with them judging me and not loving me. And that's hard. I shared years ago about when I did a sermon on forgiveness about a dear friend of mine whose husband had been having multiple affairs and it all blew up in their face one day. She had five kids under the age of 10. That's betrayal. I've never experienced betrayal like that. But I've tasted what it is to let someone in and then watch them hurt me. And if you've experienced betrayal too, let me ask you a question. If you could go back to when that person who hurt you entered into your life, and there was some sort of divine whisper that came to you and said, hey, just so you know, if you let this person in, they will hurt you. They are going to betray you. They're going to let you down and betray your confidence. If you somehow knew that at the very beginning of the relationship where they entered your life, if you knew it, how differently would you treat them? How much would you let them in? Would you let them in at all? When I think of the people who've hurt me, I go back to those places. If you were to ask me that question, hey, if you knew at the beginning that they were going to hurt you if you let them in, what would you do? I wouldn't be their friend. I wouldn't let them in. If my life forced me to be around them, I would be very guarded. I would have treated them completely differently. How would you treat the people in your life who have hurt you if you knew at the onset that they were going to do that? Would you have loved them differently? Would you have not let them in? Would that relationship have looked different? Something occurred to me as I was thinking through this passage. Immediately before Jesus starts this teaching, do you know what happened? He washed the feet of the disciples. And then he said, one of you is going to betray me. And then it comes that it was Judas. And he looked at Judas and he says one of the coolest lines in the Bible, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And Judas goes to betray him. Don't miss this. Jesus knew. He knew when he invited him in. When he called Judas to be his disciple. He knew. He knew he was going to get betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. He knew that. He knew who Jesus was when he walked up to him and he tapped his shoulder and he said, I want to invite you into my life for three years. I want you to spend every day with me. And I know what you're going to do at the end of those three years and you don't even know it yet. Jesus knew, man. And here's what's amazing. Nobody else did. We have no indication whatsoever from the text that Jesus treated Judas any differently than any of the other disciples. When they're sitting around the table, and Jesus says, one of you is going to betray me, nobody went, it's Judas, isn't it? I knew. I could tell. Nobody did that. Because Jesus treated them all the same. You understand that? He loved them all the same. For three years, he loved Judas with the same consistency and compassion and tenderness that he loved John. Polar opposite of a disciple. Is that not remarkable? How could you do that? How could you walk every day with someone who was going to betray you to be killed? Not just hurt your feelings like a little sissy, but betray you to be killed. Was gonna be the one who kissed you on the cheek to identify you to the guard of the high priest so that they could arrest you and beat you and kill you. And you love them the exact same as all their peers. Right before Jesus was betrayed, he washed Judas' feet. His grimy, sandaled, third world feet. So that he could go collect his betrayal money with clean toes. He had the freshly minted, humble love of Christ on his feet when he went to cash his check. And that's how Jesus loves Judas. Now here's what's important. You are Judas. I am Judas. We have, all of us, betrayed Christ in word and thought and deed. All of us have trampled on the grace of Christ. All of us have presumed upon his mercy. All of us have cheapened the blood of his sacrifice with our actions and our attitudes and our words. All of us. We are Judas. And yet, knowing the betrayal that you would bring, Jesus loves you anyways. That's the reckless nature of the love that we just sang about a few minutes ago. He continues to pursue us. He continues to come after us. He knows you're going to betray him in word and deed. He knows that you're going to trample on his death. He knows that you're going to cheapen his blood. He knows that and he loves you anyways. And you push him away and you betray him and you act in a way during the week that you won't act on a Sunday morning or you won't act on small group or you'll watch things that you're not supposed to watch. You'll take in things that you're not supposed to take in. You'll foster attitudes that you know he doesn't love and that he doesn't approve of. But he died for those anyways. He knew that you were going to betray him over and over and over again and he died for you anyways. He went anyways. He washed your feet anyways. He loved you anyways. That's how Jesus loves. So when Jesus says, go and love as I have loved you, that's what he means. Go love other people like I love Judas. It's not fair. They're going to hurt you. Okay, that's how I loved. They're not going to reciprocate. You're going to feel foolish. Okay. That's how I loved. It's going to cost something from me that I'm not going to get back. Okay. That's how I loved. That love is so powerful and profound that loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. Loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. We just spent two weeks on abiding in Christ. Two weeks on what it means to abide in him. If we are not abiding in Christ, there is no possible way we can love like Jesus loved. And what's interesting is the promise of abiding is abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. What's the fruit of abiding in Christ? This kind of love. Sacrificial, reckless love that overcomes betrayal and humanity and hardship. This is the fruit of abiding in Christ. And here's what's remarkable about this fruit. Here's, not only does loving others as Christ loved us keep us in line with all the commandments, not only does it keep us attached to him and abiding in him because it's the only possible way to love like that, but it also becomes our defining marker. This is the third remarkable statement that we find in these verses. The third one, underline this. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples. Love, we are told, church, is to be our defining marker to the world. And it's interesting to me how off the mark we can get. I remember one time when I missed the mark really, really badly. I was 15 years old, and we were hosting at our house Thanksgiving or Christmas for my mom's family that year. And we were a teetotaling house. No alcohol at all, ever. It was demon's liquor. And my aunt came over with, at the time, her roommate, Molly. And they brought with them a bottle of wine. And we didn't have a corkscrew in the house. We didn't have a wine opener. And so my mom said, son, will you go next door and borrow a corkscrew from our neighbor? And I, in my misguided 15-year-old piety, said, absolutely not. We don't drink alcohol in this house. And we're not starting today. Not doing it. God help my parents. I must have been impossible. Don't worry. Have you met Lily? I've got it coming. I'm going to walk the path. I refused to go. And my mom, I think probably a little misguidedly proud of me then, and now she's as ashamed of this as I am, didn't make me. I just said, well, looks like we're not doing it today, Indiana. And they put their bottle of wine back in the car. Now, Deanna and Molly had walked away from the church at that point. And as I reflect back on my actions that day, I'm so ashamed that I thought that the defining marker for my faith that day needed to be my piety and my holiness and the rules that I followed and the things that I did and didn't do. And we get really misguided at church that the best Christians are the ones who have the best grasp on their behavior, who do the things they're supposed to do and don't do the things they're not supposed to do, and the best knowledge of Scripture. We tend to judge someone's faith not by how well they love, which is what Jesus says the defining marker should be, but we judge the faith of others by how well they've reined in their behavior and how much they've learned about scripture. And don't get me wrong, those things are important. God is a God of holiness. He does want us to press towards piety, but the press towards piety, the press towards holiness, the press towards righteousness, the press towards having a guilt-free conscience should be in a desire to love as Jesus loved, not in a desire to prove ourselves and our holiness to others. And what kind of damage, what message did it send to my aunt that day? Rejection? Judgment? Holier than thou? It was a singularly unloving act to not just go get the stupid corkscrew. And instead, they felt judged. There's no way my actions turned them on to the church. There's no possible way I did that and they're like, you know what? I see Jesus in that boy. I want to know that Jesus because I want to start telling other people where they're screwing up. But isn't that historically what we look to to define spirituality. When Jesus says, the defining marker of your faith, how I want the world to know you, is by your love for other people. It ought to be our defining characteristic. And I'm not going to wade too deeply into these waters this morning because I don't have time and it's messy. But I would simply ask you, as you think about where church sits in the culture of America, is that our defining characteristic? Is that what the outside world would say that we are known for? It is, however, one of the things I am proud of grace for. Because I do think there are spots and moments where we do this really, really well. And what we see when we love really well is that love is actually the greatest apologetic. Love is the most compelling argument for Christ, especially in a culture saturated with church. If there's somebody in your neighborhood, if there's somebody you work with, if there's a friend that you have on your tennis team or wherever you go, and they don't go to church, let me tell you something. It's not because they haven't heard about it. It's not because they don't know. It's not because they haven't heard the name of Jesus and they're just waiting to be told. They know. And let me tell you something. The people that you know who don't go to church, can I just tell you, they have a reason. And can I tell you this? It's probably a good one. So the greatest apologetic to a culture of people who have on purpose turned away from the church is to love them well. It's more convincing than any book. It's more convincing than A Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, although that's a great one. It's more convincing than any argument or TV show. Showing them the love of Christ compels them towards Christ. I think this is the way I put it. Loving someone in the name of Jesus compels them towards Jesus. Loving someone in the name of Christ like Christ loves compels them towards Christ. And here's why I think it can be so effective and so contagious. I heard this story a couple of weeks ago, and I was so proud when I heard it. In the fall, we had the Addis Jamari, one of our great ministry partners doing great work with the orphans in Ethiopia, had an event last fall. And whenever there's an AJ event, Addis Jamari, it's like 75% grace people, at least, right? And so one of our partners invited some friends that they used to work with to come to the event and see what AJ does. And the friends that they invited are a part of a church in the kind of way that there's a church where you're on their membership role, which is, and you have to remove your letter and stuff like that, which is, I don't understand. I don't understand it. I got a, germane to nothing, I got a letter early on in my tenure here that someone who I had never met was requesting removal of their letter from this church to this other church down the road. And I just wrote them back and I was like, consider all letters moved, ever. You don't have to ever ask me this again. I don't know what this means. So some churches had their letter for like 20 years, but they don't really go. I haven't been since their kids went around. They're kind of cold to church. But they came to this AJ event. And after spending an evening around grace people, they pulled my friend aside and they said, there's something different here. You guys actually like, you like each other. You guys see, everyone knows everyone's name. You seem to get along. This is not like churches we've been around. We want to find out more about your church. So they did. They went to dinner. They told them a little bit more. And I've gotten to spend some time around them. And they say that they're wanting to start coming. They may be watching online. Hey. But it wasn't an argument. It wasn't an invitation. It wasn't a book. It wasn't a moment of conviction. It was an exposure to a group of people who want to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. It was an exposure to the love and the community shared in the church. And they said, I want to be a part of that. That is a compelling love. The challenge, church, is not simply to love each other that way, but to love everyone that way and to be obedient to this new command. Can you imagine with me the power and efficacy of a church that is zealous about loving as Christ loves. Can you imagine how contagious that faith would be? Can you imagine how exuberant our worship would be every Sunday? Can you imagine how much better I'm going to have to step it up to preach to you because you've been preaching to yourself the love of Christ every day and loving everybody in your neighborhood? Can you imagine the power of a group of people who comes together and takes seriously this new command that Jesus gives us and says, you know what? Everything else is fine. It'll take care of itself. I'm going to focus on the loving. And we took steps to abide in Christ, to walk with him, and we let him produce the fruit in our lives, which is this love. And we love everybody the way that Jesus loves Judas and loves us. Can you imagine what God could do with a church of people like that? I asked you earlier, what do you think the Big C Church is known for? What's our defining characteristic? And I don't know where you went and I don't know what you thought, but here's what I do know. We don't have any say over what other churches do, nor should we, by the way. We barely deserve say here, I question it. But we have say over who we are and over what we do. And wouldn't it be amazing if when people heard the name Grace Raleigh in our community, if the first thing they thought was, that church loves well. What if that were our defining characteristic? Let's make it so, Grace. Let's be Christians who love well. Let's be Christians who make that our identifying trait over and above all the other elements of our faith. And let's watch what God can do with a church of people who love like him. Let's pray. Father, we love you because you love us. We can never hope to love like you without you. We thank you for your reckless, sacrificial love. For watching your son suffer and die the way that he did. So that you could claim souls to heaven that would betray you and trample on you over and over again on our way there. God, if nothing else, would we sit humbly and graciously in the reality of your love for us? And as we do that, Father, would it please compel us to go love others in your name? We ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being a part of our Sunday. Welcome to Grace. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that. If you're here and it's your first time and I haven't had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You're here on the perfect Sunday. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So as soon as the service is over, we're going to clear the chairs out to the wall. We're going to throw down some tables. We've got a huge grill out there to grill some hamburgers and some cheeseburgers and some hot dogs. If yours feels a little bland when you have it, I mean, they are the frozen bricks. Katie McWilliams right there brings her own seasoning in her purse for all of these events. So I'm sure there's plenty to go around. She's not selfish. So just ask her. If you're wondering where is this section of the church, they're around the grill. Like there's 20 dudes just staring at the grill. No one's doing anything, and they won't do anything for another 45 minutes. But they're all out there because that's where men go. It's just like moth to a flame. That's what they're doing. And just as a point of order to my Panthers friends, fans, congratulations. You really gave it to us last week. I was telling somebody I was coaching a soccer game at the end of the Falcons-Panthers game. And for those that don't know, last week I ran my mouth about my Falcons cup because I'm a Falcons fan. And now everyone is in Panthers gear. There was a baby shoved in my face wearing a Panthers onesie. People who have been wearing Panthers t-shirts have forced themselves on me with hugs. Which, this is the Lord's house, alright? We need to be serious about this. But I got, I was coaching a game, and so I wasn't looking at my phone, and the game ended while I was coaching the game. And then I checked my phone after the game, and I had 27 texts from you jerks. One of you, and this one was my favorite, just no words sent me a picture of a Panthers cup. That was it, which is really good. A few weeks ago, we're continuing in our series, Gentle and Lowly, looking at kind of loosely working through the book, Gentle and Lowly, by a guy named Dane Ortlund. And so this is the fourth part of the series, and I'm going to be focused on chapter five, where it talks about Jesus as a high priest. A few weeks ago, I did a wedding, and as normally happens at weddings, I have the same conversation with Uncle So-and-So. Uncle So-and-So, one of the uncles, one of the dads, is going to, at some point or another, about half the time, half the weddings I do, is going to come up to me and say, it's always these questions, it's always in this order. Do you have a church? Yes, I have a church. What's it called? It's called Grace Raleigh. Oh, where is it? It's near Triangle Mall, corner of Capitol and 540. Oh, that's cool. What denomination is it? Every time. Those questions in that order. And so I had this conversation. And he said, what denomination is it? And I got to explain one of my favorite things about grace, which is we are not non-denominational. And I don't know if you know this. We are not non-denominational. We are inter-denominational. And I didn't learn that word until I came to grace. But the people who started it told me what it was, and I think it's beautiful. So I got to explain it to Uncle So-and-So what that means. And what it means is we acknowledge. We're not non-denominational. We don't expect you to. If you grew up in a particular denomination, the gentleman I was talking to was Lutheran. And then when he said Lutheran, I said, okay. He said I was sprinkled as a baby. Does that count? And then he wanted to have the baptism discussion. Just right there. That's what happens in my life. But I was able to explain to him that we're interdenominational, meaning in our church body, we have represented just about every mainline denomination in the United States. We have Lutherans. We certainly have Presbyterians. We have Baptists. We have Pentecostals. We have Catholics. We have people that have converted from Judaism. We have everything represented in this church. And rather than being non-denominational and leaving all of that wonderful heritage at the door when you come in, we say that we are interdenominational, meaning we find beauty and purpose and truth in every segment of God's church. And we believe that people from all kinds of different denominations have something to offer here and that those denominations have beautiful, wonderful things that we should be humble and learn from. We have not cornered the market on truth at grace. And I got to explain that to Uncle So-and-So, and that's one of my favorite things about the church. But because of that, because we're interdenominational and because we have people from all different backgrounds, when we hear the word priest, we think of it totally differently. Many of us think about it in many different ways. This week we're looking at Jesus as our high priest and what that means. But before we can appreciate what that means, we have to appreciate what it is to be a priest. Because if you grew up Catholic, you have a very good idea of what you expect a priest to do and be. If you grew up Jewish, you have an understanding of what a priest is, but it's different than the Catholic view. If you're like me and you grew up Baptist, I only know priests from TV shows and clips and what my very conservative professors would say about the priesthood. I don't have the good working knowledge of what it means to be a priest and why that's important. And so I understand that in this room, if I were to ask 10 of you, what is a priest? What's the role? What do they do? It would, they would be probably similar answers, but probably not the same. And I doubt any of us are succinct about it, which is why I appreciate this quote at the beginning of chapter 5 when Dane explains what a priest is. He says this, and this is how we're going to understand it this morning. Chapter 5 opens like this. I think it's a wonderful description of a priest. And he asserts, and I think this is in part right. I don't think it's the only thrust of the book of Hebrews, but it was written in part to show us what it is to have Jesus as a high priest. And I love that imagery of on in earth, the king is God's representative to the people, but the priest is the people's representative to God. He goes and advocates for us. That's why it's such a big deal that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father advocating for you and I. He is our high priest. And I also love the thought that it is in the shadow of that great priest that all other priests, pastors, ministers, leaders stand. And it is to him that all other priests, pastors, ministers, leaders should point all the time. You should come here and I should point you to Jesus. And lest you think this example is just for me because I'm the only pastor speaking in the room right now. So this is just for me. In 1 Peter chapter 2, Peter acquaints us with this idea called the priesthood of the believers. Meaning if you are a Christian, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then you are in the priesthood of the believers. You are in the holy priesthood. It is your job to minister to the people around us. So in a sense, if you are saved, you are also in here a priest, which means you stand in the shadow of our great high priest. And it is your job to point back to that great high priest. Now, as I think about Jesus as a priest, I think about what would his demeanor towards us be? If you were the priest, if you were perfect, divine, and you were the priest of all of the Christians on the planet and you represented them, what would your demeanor towards them be? Don't you think you'd be a little disappointed? Don't you think you'd be a little frustrated? Don't you think Jesus has the right to get exasperated with us? We get a hint of this in the Gospels when the disciples offer some dumb answer for a question and Jesus says, how long must I put up with this faithless generation? Just this little glimpse of Jesus getting a little bit worn out with it, fed up with us. And I think to be our high priest and to watch us wallow in the mud and like is depicted in the Bible, we are like dogs that return to our own vomit when we sin. To watch my children do that over and over and over again, wouldn't that be exasperating? Parents, you know this to be true. There's things in my house that are absolutely unnecessary behaviors. One of my children is in a stage where they like to pinch you to get back at you. They pinch their sibling to get back at them. And I have told them, do not pinch your sibling. Don't do that. You don't have to do it. You never have to do it. Don't pinch your sibling. Another one of them likes to put their feet on the other one. Just randomly, just rest my foot on your head. What a jerk move that is. And I've told that child, do not touch your sibling with your feet. Don't do it. Just don't do it. And there's other things that they do that test my patience, but nothing makes me lose my mind when I look over and child A is putting their feet on child B and I'm like, knock it off. Stop. You don't have to do that. They hate it. I hate seeing it. Feet are gross. Never touch me with them. By the way, men over 30, you should never have your toes exposed if you are not directly adjacent to water for any reason. Do not wear flip-flops to dinner, guys. Knock it off. It's gross. Nobody likes it. Anyways, I wasn't planning on saying that. You do what you want with your toesies. But it drives me nuts when they do a thing that I've told them not to do over and over and over again, and it's an easily conquerable behavior. They don't care. And if that drives me nuts, how much more nuts must we drive Jesus as he watches us in the squalor, returning to a defeatable behavior over and over and over again? Wouldn't you, if you were him, just want to slap you on the back of the head and go, knock it off? What are you doing? This is preventable. Stop it. I would expect Jesus's demeanor towards us to be one of exasperation. And yet this is not how he is described by the author of Hebrews. Hebrews 5.2 describes our high priest. I'm going to read one as well. Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He, this is Jesus, is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness. This Jesus that has every right as our high priest to approach us with exasperation chooses instead to approach us with gentleness, chooses instead to have what's known about him and written about him in the book of Hebrews be that he is our high priest and he is gentle with us because he shares in our weaknesses. He's been tempted like us before. He's a human like us. We talked about this last week, which causes our high priest not to be exasperated, not to be angry, not to be frustrated, not to be fed up, not to be disappointed, but to be gentle with us. And this falls right in line with how Jesus describes himself. I'll remind you, this is the keystone verse for the whole book. Matthew 11, 29, take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble or lowly in only way Jesus describes himself is gentle and lowly. Ortlund's assertion in the book is that there's no other place in the Gospels where Jesus describes himself, where Jesus tells you what he is or what his assessment of himself is or what he wants you to know him for. This is the one place. And what does he choose? Gentle and lowly. And so this morning, we're going to really hone in on that gentleness. We're going to marvel at it. We're going to look at the effect that it has on us and think about how we can be more like Christ and our gentleness as well. But it's miraculous to me that this all-powerful, perfect Jesus who sits at the right hand of the Father, who lived a perfect life and died a perfect death and has watched. Can you imagine the frustration just banging your head against the wall, watching generation after generation after generation of Christians commit the same sins and the same atrocities and the same mistakes and run into the end and stub their toe on the same objects generation after generation? Can you imagine what it would be like to watch you wanting what's best for you and watching you hurt yourself over and over and over again? And yet, despite all of that, despite all that generational sin, despite it spilling down through the centuries and the millennia, Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and his demeanor towards you is gentle and humble. And here's the thing that I want us to catch. If you look back at the verse, it says he is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray. And when you read that at first, it says that Jesus deals gently with those who are ignorant and going astray. And in our Christian brains, many of us have been believers for a long time. And so in our longtime believer brains, more than a few years, we've been walking with Jesus or at least claiming to, trying to, varying degrees of success. We read that verse and I think we flag it. Jesus is gentle towards new and non-believers. He's gentle towards the ignorant who are going wayward, the people who don't know any better. I remember Jesus's prayer. I think of Jesus's prayer on the cross when they're casting lots for his garments and they're torturing him. And Jesus prays, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. They're ignorant in their sin. And so this verse, when he just, on a surface reading, it looks like that he is gentle towards those who are ignorant to their sin and therefore are wayward and wandering away from Jesus. Meaning for us, for mature believers, those of us who've been walking with him for a while, we know better. I bet for many of you, whatever your sins are, they're not ignorant. You know what you're doing. You know the choice you're making. You know you're choosing to harbor a wrong attitude, to commit a wrong action, to say a wrong thing, to withhold the wrong thing, whatever it is. Most of us, once you've been walking with God for a little bit, your sins are no longer ignorant. And so maybe this Jesus isn't gentle with me. But I love what Ortland points out in this chapter of the book. When you get into the sentence, and this is always tricky, and I don't do a lot of translation stuff, and I'm not going to go deep in it now, but it's always tricky to translate Greek into English. Everything's different, right? Well, when you really get into it, what you find is that the author intended to identify two different categories of people. So think of it this way. Jesus deals gently with the ignorant, with those who sin without knowing it. A few days ago, John held up his middle finger at me and said, Dad, what's this? And I said, it's a thing we don't do, buddy. That was ignorant. Typically, you could consider it a sin to hang the bird at your dad. That's not good. But I don't condemn John for that. He didn't know it was in ignorance. And sometimes we do things in ignorance. We hurt people in ignorance. We didn't mean it. We didn't know we did it. And God forgives. Jesus is gentle for us for that in our ignorance. But then there's the wayward and the way that is best read is. And Jesus is also gentle with the wayward, with the ones who are wandering. He's gentle with ignorant sin and he's gentle with intentional sin. Meaning we can say for sure Jesus deals gently with all sinners. Jesus deals gently with all sinners, not just the new believers, not just the non-believers, not just the innocent four-year-old asking a question. He deals gently with the ignorant, and he deals gently with the wayward. So Jesus, our high priest, deals gently with all of us, which is an incredible comfort. And I believe that there is a method to this. I believe there's a method to this because he could be harsh. He could be rough. We deserve it. He has every right to it. And yet, he chooses to be gentle. He chooses to be kind. He chooses to be meek. And I think that there's a reason for this. When I was in high school, I went to a really small private high school. I like to joke, Jen, my wife, she graduated 43rd in her class. There's like 775 people in her class. She was a really, she was an assiduous, diligent student, really committed, worked hard. I used to try to get her to like skip homework and skip class in college and she never would. She was really a straight straight liner and she worked really hard. She got 43rd in her class and I always like to brag that I didn't even try that hard and I got 24th in my class but there was only 25 people in there. But numbers are numbers. I did learn that in school. And so it was this small familial atmosphere and it was kind of fun and I actually liked having the experience of doing school like that. And there was one, it was the first day of school, my 10th grade year, and children in the room, I'm not advocating this kind of behavior, I'm just saying that I did it. It was the first day of school, 10th grade year, and we got a new Spanish teacher. It was our first day of class with her. She's writing her name on the board. I'm going to really try to not say her name. She's writing her name on the board, and we're talking, I guess. I don't know. We're in, like, 10th grade. Of course we're talking we're talking. This is a new teacher's first day of school. Everyone's happy to see everybody, whatever. And something happened, something innocuous. My buddy Clint wouldn't be quiet. And she turned around and within the first 90 seconds of class at a new school, absolutely screamed at him to be quiet and to be respectful. Just let him have it. Like I've never seen a teacher act in my life before or since. And we were all blown away. Now, what effect do you think that had on our class? We like this lady. We're going to behave the best we can for her. Lord, no. It was like, okay, you pick the fight. We're going to finish it. And we gave her heck. I remember one instance in particular, a year or two later, it was either my junior or senior year. She was late to class. And I kind of stood up and I looked at the rest of the folks in the class and said, hey, guys, listen. When she gets back in here, when she turns her back and she's writing on the board, just do what I do. Okay? Just do what I do. And they're like, all right. So she gets in and we're all kind of like looking at each other, you know. And she turns her back to the board. She starts writing. Turns back to the class. Rather, she starts writing. And I just start going like this. That's it. Just like that. And she turns around. And there should have been 25 people doing it, but there was only 23 because Dawn and Marcy were the valedictorian and salutatorian, and they were lame. And I still have not forgiven them for their betrayal. But she turns around, and there's 23 seniors. Just going like this. In unison. And she's kind of, stop, stop it, stop, stop, stop it. So we stop. Then, a few minutes later, she turns around to right, and I start going like this. She turns around. There's 23 kids doing this. Stop it! Stop! Right? Then, a few minutes later, she turns around again. I'm in my desk. I start going like this. She turns around. There's 23 kids going like this. Awesome. And she finally just goes, Nathan! Nathan! Go to the principal's office. I'm like, I'm not doing it. I'm just doing what they're doing. She's like, it's your fault. Go! She was right. So I go to the principal's office, also known as my soccer coach. And he said, what'd you do? And I told him. And he was like, that's pretty funny. Why don't you just stay in my office for the rest of the time? She was so harsh that at no point did that engender any sort of alignment with her. As a matter of fact, her harshness engendered within us resentment and rebellion. If you're going to treat us like this, this is how we're going to act towards you. That harsh treatment does not work. And you know this to be true, parents. When you get harsh, when you verbalize, I call it when you yell over your kid to get their attention. In my house, I'm not applying this to you. You do whatever is right with your kids. But for me, I call that verbal bullying. I know that that can work on my nine-year-old daughter, but when she's 16, I better have a new tactic. I better have something better than that because that's not going to work. She's going to leave and go to her boyfriend's house, which is my nightmare. So I have to figure out how to be calm now because that harsh attitude doesn't work. On the flip side of the Spanish teacher was my English teacher, Mr. Totten. I loved Mr. Totten. I loved him so much that a while back, a couple months ago, I was just, for whatever reason I thought about him, I Googled him. He's still at the church from which the school sprang. He's an elder there. I got to listen to one of his sermons, and it was so good to hear his voice. Now, Mr. Totten was the strictest teacher in the school. He was absolutely stern. He put up with nothing, absolutely nothing. He was straight-laced in that classroom. But when you would get out of line, which I did increasingly less over the years because of how much I loved and respected him, he would call you up to his desk or he would quietly take you into the hallway without embarrassing you. And then he would tell you, you know, you can't do this. That's not how you want to be. That's not the young man you want to be. And I can't, if I love you, I cannot allow you to act like that in my class. And I cannot allow that to go unpunished. So you're going to get some demerits. That's what we got at my school. You're going to get some demerits. I have to do it. Do you understand? Yes, sir. I'm sorry. Go back in. I'm good. He was gentle. He was kind. Had nothing to do with the standards. The standards could be raised because he was gentle with us. And we all respected him and walked in lockstep. Harsh treatment from people engenders rebellion and resentment. Gentle treatment aligns us and inclines us towards the person treating us with that gentleness, particularly when we are aware that we do not deserve it. I believe that among many reasons, I believe that gentleness is just the very nature of Jesus. He has no choice but to act with that gentleness, to act gently towards us. But I also believe that it's something that he does intentionally because he knows that it inclines us to him. Paul says it this way in Romans, or do you show contempt in the hallway and we're going, you're right, I am sorry, that is not who I want to be. I've dishonored you and I've dishonored myself with the choices that I've made and I will make those choices no longer. Thank you. That kind of gentleness inclines us towards Christ. It's his kindness that leads to repentance. And I would say this and then tell you a little bit more about what I mean. Think about this. Aren't you grateful the Lord has dealt with you gently? And doesn't that incline you towards him? Aren't you grateful the Lord has dealt with you gently and doesn't that incline you towards him? Here's what I mean. I don't know if you have any of these moments in your life. I would argue that if you've been paying attention to your life and done some self-reflection, that you have. But I know I've had a few of these moments, and I've never pretended to be perfect as your pastor. I've had a few of these moments, maybe two, three, four times in my life where I was wayward. I had allowed sin in my life. I was intentionally choosing that sin. That sin was driving a wedge between me and Jesus and I was wandering off because I was choosing a sin. I began to hide things in the shadows of my life. And whenever that's happened in my life, whenever I've had something in my life that's causing a separation and is rendering me wayward, there is a necessary light that must shine on the shadows. That stuff always comes to light. It always comes out. It's always something you have to deal with. And when I think about the times in my life when I have things in the shadows and I'm ashamed of them, I don't want anyone to know about them. I don't want anyone to see them. I certainly don't want to have to talk to Jen or my friends or whoever about those things. I'd like to just deal with them privately and not deal with the shame of it. Whenever light has been shined in those places, in the moment, it's so hard. That's a bad day. That's a hard night's sleep. There's a lot of gross that stirs up in that. There's a lot of pain when light hits the shadows for the first time and you're exposed. But as I think back on those times, what I marvel at is the reality that for me, when that has happened, when God has brought the dark things into the light in my life, every single time that's happened, I can tell you, God did it in the most gentle way possible. He did it in the most kind way possible. Yeah, things were brought to light. And it was hard and it stunk and I felt shame. But it could have been a lot worse than it was. It could have been a lot worse. Jesus could have dealt with that in a different way. He could have shed that light in the dark places in a totally different way that would have absolutely humiliated me or cost me something or whatever it is. He could have done it worse. But every time I've felt the kindness of God compelling me towards repentance, every time he and his goodness has brought something in the dark into the light in my life, as I reflect back on it, I realize that he did it in the And what's been in the shadows is brought into the light. And I wonder if it's not true that if you think back on that hard day, that hard season, did God not do that in the most gentle way possible to protect you and the people around you? I bet he did. I bet he did. Because we have a gentle high priest who calls us into the hallway and tells us in private who holds us. And we talked about at the end of Moses, we talked about we have this God that has justice in one hand and a desire for our conviction in one hand and comfort in the other. He holds conviction and comfort and then he embraces us with both of those. This is how our gentle high priest treats us. So we marvel this morning at the gentleness of Jesus, our high priest. Now, here's the question for you. Sometimes I will just end there and say let's marvel at the gentleness of Jesus. But I have a question for you because I think we can press it just a little bit further. If Jesus is characterized by gentleness, shouldn't his followers be as well? If Jesus is characterized by gentleness, shouldn't his followers be as well? We talk at Grace about the sanctification process. The time that elapses between justification and glorification. When we become Christians and when our salvation is made complete because we are in heaven with God forever, we are in glory. The time between, I almost said betwixt for fun, The time between is the sanctification process. Sanctification is to become the process through which we become more like Christ in character. Every single one of you in here who claims Jesus as your Savior, you are in the process, the slow, muddy, troublesome, difficult process of becoming more like Christ in character as God molds you over the years. And if we are going to become more like Christ in character and the way that Jesus is depicted over and over and over again and the only way that he depicts himself is that he is gentle, should we not also be gentle? Should we, church, be characterized by our gentleness? And now let me make this point too. There are some weeks when I preach to y'all, but most weeks I preach to us. Most weeks I'm here. I'm not up there. Do you know how convicting this was this week for me? If you guys just go out into the community and someone asks you about your church, and you say you like your church, and they go, oh yeah, do you like your pastor? You're like, yeah, he's all right. Tell me about your pastor. Let me tell you what I know. It's not coming out of your mouth. Dude is gentle. Like one of the most gentle souls I've ever known. I wouldn't even say it's way down on the list. It's not on the list. All jokes aside, I've been sitting with that all week. Sometimes I'm harsh with people. Sometimes in my house I'm harsh. I lose my patience. But guys, isn't it true that if our Savior defines himself as gentle primarily, that if we want to become more like him in character, that we should be too? And if that's how our Savior depicts himself, is that not what his body, the church, should be known for? Our gentleness in our communities? In different spheres of life? And I'm afraid that that's not what the church is known for right now. Big C Church. And we can't impact Big C Church very much. But we have total control over what this little C Church does. We can begin with gentleness here. And so I have three things for you to think about. If we're going to be gentle people, if this is going to matter to us, if we're going to allow God's kindness to convict us towards seeking to intentionally be more gentle people, three thoughts for you. The first thought is think of gentleness in what I call concentric circles of concern. So think of gentleness to the general public, the cashier, the server, people in traffic, folks that you see out at the ball field, people that you walk past grocery shopping. Think about being gentle to those people. It's probably the easiest to be gentle to those people, if we're being honest. Then with your friends friends and your acquaintances do they know you for being gentle with them do they know you for being kind and for being considerate so we should think about how do we be gentle to our co-workers how do we be gentle to the people we see on a regular basis to the people who know my name and I know theirs how can we be gentle towards like Jesus is gentle? And then where it gets the toughest is how can we be gentle towards our family and our intimate friends and the people that we love the most? Because I'll tell you, if everybody in the general public thinks I'm kind and gentle, if everybody in this room, my outer circle of acquaintances, thinks I'm kind and gentle, but my kids think I'm a jerk, I've failed. Right? I've failed. It's easiest to be nice to the cashier, and then it gets harder and harder. There's one more layer to that, but that'll be the third thought. So the first way to think about gentleness is outside in. And where the rubber meets the road is when you're kind and gentle to your family and the people who you love the most and who also get under your skin the most. Another thing to think about is this. We are gentle both inwardly and outwardly. We are gentle both inwardly and outwardly. It occurs to me that it's possible to treat someone with gentleness, to be kind to someone in the public forum, while inwardly you're dog cussing them. Yeah? You ever done this? You're nice to somebody? No, not you, Tom. I saw you shake your head. I would never blame you for that. We're nice to people. I've been in conversations. I shouldn't tell you this, but I've been in conversations where on the outside I'm being nice and I'm engaging in the conversation. And on the inside, I'm going, wrap it up. Like I got, I lost interest five minutes ago. I can barely hang on. Please hurry. And then I leave and I'm like, I'm not talking to that person again. Like maybe I was gentle on the outside, but on the inside, I gave them a very poor estimation. And we do this, don't we? We're outwardly kind to somebody. I think about my passive-aggressive friends. I think about my conflict-averse friends, where you're going to do whatever you have to do to be nice in the moment, but in your head, you cannot stand this person. And then you go home to your spouse and you complain about them. So if we're going to be truly gentle, we have to do so inwardly and outwardly. And the last thing to think about as we think about being people who are gentle is actually one concentric circle of concern tighter than our family and our friends. It's yourself. I have no doubt that this room is filled with some grade A self-loathers. Some of you are so hard on yourself. Some of you are so mean to yourselves. Some of you have this voice that says awful things about you, that tells you that you can't, and that you shouldn't, and that you won't, and that no one will believe you, and that you're not worth anything. And if you heard someone talk to your friend the way that you talk to yourself, you would never forgive that person for how rude and mean and critical and harsh they were. And yet you talk to yourself like that. Your Savior is gentle with you. His estimation of you is gracious. It's kind. And some of us who refuse to be gentle with ourselves, I believe it hurts the heart of Jesus to know that that's how you're talking about his daughter. That's how you think about his son. Because he did not create you to do that. And he does not want you to do that. So this morning, let's marvel at the fact that we have a high priest who treats us gently. And let's understand that that gentleness inclines us towards him, that we might be more desirous of him and exist in a state of gratitude for about if he is gentle, then we ought to as well. And we ought to be gentle in concentric circles of concern outward in until we get to us and we are generous with ourselves and we allow Jesus to tell us the truth about ourselves, not that voice in our head that lies to us and makes us feel like crud. And let's go from here and let's be people who are gentle. I expect the kindest, most generous teardown of the chairs and standing in line for the hootenanny after this sermon this morning. Everyone's going to be like, no, after you, after you. Let's be a church that's known, as Jesus was, for being gentle. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for the opportunity to celebrate everything that you've done here and what you continue to do here. Thank you for a church that we can call home, where we can love you, where we can be honest and we can be ourselves. Thank you for treating us gently, for inclining us towards you and drawing us in. Thank you, Jesus, for being our high priest and advocating for us. And as we are about to go here and eat, go from here and eat together, God, I just pray that you would bless the food, that you would bless the meal, that there would be good laughter, there would be good fellowship, and that we would see you as the author of the joy that's taking place now and will take place then. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being a part of our Sunday. Welcome to Grace. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that. If you're here and it's your first time and I haven't had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You're here on the perfect Sunday. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So as soon as the service is over, we're going to clear the chairs out to the wall. We're going to throw down some tables. We've got a huge grill out there to grill some hamburgers and some cheeseburgers and some hot dogs. If yours feels a little bland when you have it, I mean, they are the frozen bricks. Katie McWilliams right there brings her own seasoning in her purse for all of these events. So I'm sure there's plenty to go around. She's not selfish. So just ask her. If you're wondering where is this section of the church, they're around the grill. Like there's 20 dudes just staring at the grill. No one's doing anything, and they won't do anything for another 45 minutes. But they're all out there because that's where men go. It's just like moth to a flame. That's what they're doing. And just as a point of order to my Panthers friends, fans, congratulations. You really gave it to us last week. I was telling somebody I was coaching a soccer game at the end of the Falcons-Panthers game. And for those that don't know, last week I ran my mouth about my Falcons cup because I'm a Falcons fan. And now everyone is in Panthers gear. There was a baby shoved in my face wearing a Panthers onesie. People who have been wearing Panthers t-shirts have forced themselves on me with hugs. Which, this is the Lord's house, alright? We need to be serious about this. But I got, I was coaching a game, and so I wasn't looking at my phone, and the game ended while I was coaching the game. And then I checked my phone after the game, and I had 27 texts from you jerks. One of you, and this one was my favorite, just no words sent me a picture of a Panthers cup. That was it, which is really good. A few weeks ago, we're continuing in our series, Gentle and Lowly, looking at kind of loosely working through the book, Gentle and Lowly, by a guy named Dane Ortlund. And so this is the fourth part of the series, and I'm going to be focused on chapter five, where it talks about Jesus as a high priest. A few weeks ago, I did a wedding, and as normally happens at weddings, I have the same conversation with Uncle So-and-So. Uncle So-and-So, one of the uncles, one of the dads, is going to, at some point or another, about half the time, half the weddings I do, is going to come up to me and say, it's always these questions, it's always in this order. Do you have a church? Yes, I have a church. What's it called? It's called Grace Raleigh. Oh, where is it? It's near Triangle Mall, corner of Capitol and 540. Oh, that's cool. What denomination is it? Every time. Those questions in that order. And so I had this conversation. And he said, what denomination is it? And I got to explain one of my favorite things about grace, which is we are not non-denominational. And I don't know if you know this. We are not non-denominational. We are inter-denominational. And I didn't learn that word until I came to grace. But the people who started it told me what it was, and I think it's beautiful. So I got to explain it to Uncle So-and-So what that means. And what it means is we acknowledge. We're not non-denominational. We don't expect you to. If you grew up in a particular denomination, the gentleman I was talking to was Lutheran. And then when he said Lutheran, I said, okay. He said I was sprinkled as a baby. Does that count? And then he wanted to have the baptism discussion. Just right there. That's what happens in my life. But I was able to explain to him that we're interdenominational, meaning in our church body, we have represented just about every mainline denomination in the United States. We have Lutherans. We certainly have Presbyterians. We have Baptists. We have Pentecostals. We have Catholics. We have people that have converted from Judaism. We have everything represented in this church. And rather than being non-denominational and leaving all of that wonderful heritage at the door when you come in, we say that we are interdenominational, meaning we find beauty and purpose and truth in every segment of God's church. And we believe that people from all kinds of different denominations have something to offer here and that those denominations have beautiful, wonderful things that we should be humble and learn from. We have not cornered the market on truth at grace. And I got to explain that to Uncle So-and-So, and that's one of my favorite things about the church. But because of that, because we're interdenominational and because we have people from all different backgrounds, when we hear the word priest, we think of it totally differently. Many of us think about it in many different ways. This week we're looking at Jesus as our high priest and what that means. But before we can appreciate what that means, we have to appreciate what it is to be a priest. Because if you grew up Catholic, you have a very good idea of what you expect a priest to do and be. If you grew up Jewish, you have an understanding of what a priest is, but it's different than the Catholic view. If you're like me and you grew up Baptist, I only know priests from TV shows and clips and what my very conservative professors would say about the priesthood. I don't have the good working knowledge of what it means to be a priest and why that's important. And so I understand that in this room, if I were to ask 10 of you, what is a priest? What's the role? What do they do? It would, they would be probably similar answers, but probably not the same. And I doubt any of us are succinct about it, which is why I appreciate this quote at the beginning of chapter 5 when Dane explains what a priest is. He says this, and this is how we're going to understand it this morning. Chapter 5 opens like this. I think it's a wonderful description of a priest. And he asserts, and I think this is in part right. I don't think it's the only thrust of the book of Hebrews, but it was written in part to show us what it is to have Jesus as a high priest. And I love that imagery of on in earth, the king is God's representative to the people, but the priest is the people's representative to God. He goes and advocates for us. That's why it's such a big deal that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father advocating for you and I. He is our high priest. And I also love the thought that it is in the shadow of that great priest that all other priests, pastors, ministers, leaders stand. And it is to him that all other priests, pastors, ministers, leaders should point all the time. You should come here and I should point you to Jesus. And lest you think this example is just for me because I'm the only pastor speaking in the room right now. So this is just for me. In 1 Peter chapter 2, Peter acquaints us with this idea called the priesthood of the believers. Meaning if you are a Christian, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then you are in the priesthood of the believers. You are in the holy priesthood. It is your job to minister to the people around us. So in a sense, if you are saved, you are also in here a priest, which means you stand in the shadow of our great high priest. And it is your job to point back to that great high priest. Now, as I think about Jesus as a priest, I think about what would his demeanor towards us be? If you were the priest, if you were perfect, divine, and you were the priest of all of the Christians on the planet and you represented them, what would your demeanor towards them be? Don't you think you'd be a little disappointed? Don't you think you'd be a little frustrated? Don't you think Jesus has the right to get exasperated with us? We get a hint of this in the Gospels when the disciples offer some dumb answer for a question and Jesus says, how long must I put up with this faithless generation? Just this little glimpse of Jesus getting a little bit worn out with it, fed up with us. And I think to be our high priest and to watch us wallow in the mud and like is depicted in the Bible, we are like dogs that return to our own vomit when we sin. To watch my children do that over and over and over again, wouldn't that be exasperating? Parents, you know this to be true. There's things in my house that are absolutely unnecessary behaviors. One of my children is in a stage where they like to pinch you to get back at you. They pinch their sibling to get back at them. And I have told them, do not pinch your sibling. Don't do that. You don't have to do it. You never have to do it. Don't pinch your sibling. Another one of them likes to put their feet on the other one. Just randomly, just rest my foot on your head. What a jerk move that is. And I've told that child, do not touch your sibling with your feet. Don't do it. Just don't do it. And there's other things that they do that test my patience, but nothing makes me lose my mind when I look over and child A is putting their feet on child B and I'm like, knock it off. Stop. You don't have to do that. They hate it. I hate seeing it. Feet are gross. Never touch me with them. By the way, men over 30, you should never have your toes exposed if you are not directly adjacent to water for any reason. Do not wear flip-flops to dinner, guys. Knock it off. It's gross. Nobody likes it. Anyways, I wasn't planning on saying that. You do what you want with your toesies. But it drives me nuts when they do a thing that I've told them not to do over and over and over again, and it's an easily conquerable behavior. They don't care. And if that drives me nuts, how much more nuts must we drive Jesus as he watches us in the squalor, returning to a defeatable behavior over and over and over again? Wouldn't you, if you were him, just want to slap you on the back of the head and go, knock it off? What are you doing? This is preventable. Stop it. I would expect Jesus's demeanor towards us to be one of exasperation. And yet this is not how he is described by the author of Hebrews. Hebrews 5.2 describes our high priest. I'm going to read one as well. Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He, this is Jesus, is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness. This Jesus that has every right as our high priest to approach us with exasperation chooses instead to approach us with gentleness, chooses instead to have what's known about him and written about him in the book of Hebrews be that he is our high priest and he is gentle with us because he shares in our weaknesses. He's been tempted like us before. He's a human like us. We talked about this last week, which causes our high priest not to be exasperated, not to be angry, not to be frustrated, not to be fed up, not to be disappointed, but to be gentle with us. And this falls right in line with how Jesus describes himself. I'll remind you, this is the keystone verse for the whole book. Matthew 11, 29, take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble or lowly in only way Jesus describes himself is gentle and lowly. Ortlund's assertion in the book is that there's no other place in the Gospels where Jesus describes himself, where Jesus tells you what he is or what his assessment of himself is or what he wants you to know him for. This is the one place. And what does he choose? Gentle and lowly. And so this morning, we're going to really hone in on that gentleness. We're going to marvel at it. We're going to look at the effect that it has on us and think about how we can be more like Christ and our gentleness as well. But it's miraculous to me that this all-powerful, perfect Jesus who sits at the right hand of the Father, who lived a perfect life and died a perfect death and has watched. Can you imagine the frustration just banging your head against the wall, watching generation after generation after generation of Christians commit the same sins and the same atrocities and the same mistakes and run into the end and stub their toe on the same objects generation after generation? Can you imagine what it would be like to watch you wanting what's best for you and watching you hurt yourself over and over and over again? And yet, despite all of that, despite all that generational sin, despite it spilling down through the centuries and the millennia, Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and his demeanor towards you is gentle and humble. And here's the thing that I want us to catch. If you look back at the verse, it says he is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray. And when you read that at first, it says that Jesus deals gently with those who are ignorant and going astray. And in our Christian brains, many of us have been believers for a long time. And so in our longtime believer brains, more than a few years, we've been walking with Jesus or at least claiming to, trying to, varying degrees of success. We read that verse and I think we flag it. Jesus is gentle towards new and non-believers. He's gentle towards the ignorant who are going wayward, the people who don't know any better. I remember Jesus's prayer. I think of Jesus's prayer on the cross when they're casting lots for his garments and they're torturing him. And Jesus prays, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. They're ignorant in their sin. And so this verse, when he just, on a surface reading, it looks like that he is gentle towards those who are ignorant to their sin and therefore are wayward and wandering away from Jesus. Meaning for us, for mature believers, those of us who've been walking with him for a while, we know better. I bet for many of you, whatever your sins are, they're not ignorant. You know what you're doing. You know the choice you're making. You know you're choosing to harbor a wrong attitude, to commit a wrong action, to say a wrong thing, to withhold the wrong thing, whatever it is. Most of us, once you've been walking with God for a little bit, your sins are no longer ignorant. And so maybe this Jesus isn't gentle with me. But I love what Ortland points out in this chapter of the book. When you get into the sentence, and this is always tricky, and I don't do a lot of translation stuff, and I'm not going to go deep in it now, but it's always tricky to translate Greek into English. Everything's different, right? Well, when you really get into it, what you find is that the author intended to identify two different categories of people. So think of it this way. Jesus deals gently with the ignorant, with those who sin without knowing it. A few days ago, John held up his middle finger at me and said, Dad, what's this? And I said, it's a thing we don't do, buddy. That was ignorant. Typically, you could consider it a sin to hang the bird at your dad. That's not good. But I don't condemn John for that. He didn't know it was in ignorance. And sometimes we do things in ignorance. We hurt people in ignorance. We didn't mean it. We didn't know we did it. And God forgives. Jesus is gentle for us for that in our ignorance. But then there's the wayward and the way that is best read is. And Jesus is also gentle with the wayward, with the ones who are wandering. He's gentle with ignorant sin and he's gentle with intentional sin. Meaning we can say for sure Jesus deals gently with all sinners. Jesus deals gently with all sinners, not just the new believers, not just the non-believers, not just the innocent four-year-old asking a question. He deals gently with the ignorant, and he deals gently with the wayward. So Jesus, our high priest, deals gently with all of us, which is an incredible comfort. And I believe that there is a method to this. I believe there's a method to this because he could be harsh. He could be rough. We deserve it. He has every right to it. And yet, he chooses to be gentle. He chooses to be kind. He chooses to be meek. And I think that there's a reason for this. When I was in high school, I went to a really small private high school. I like to joke, Jen, my wife, she graduated 43rd in her class. There's like 775 people in her class. She was a really, she was an assiduous, diligent student, really committed, worked hard. I used to try to get her to like skip homework and skip class in college and she never would. She was really a straight straight liner and she worked really hard. She got 43rd in her class and I always like to brag that I didn't even try that hard and I got 24th in my class but there was only 25 people in there. But numbers are numbers. I did learn that in school. And so it was this small familial atmosphere and it was kind of fun and I actually liked having the experience of doing school like that. And there was one, it was the first day of school, my 10th grade year, and children in the room, I'm not advocating this kind of behavior, I'm just saying that I did it. It was the first day of school, 10th grade year, and we got a new Spanish teacher. It was our first day of class with her. She's writing her name on the board. I'm going to really try to not say her name. She's writing her name on the board, and we're talking, I guess. I don't know. We're in, like, 10th grade. Of course we're talking we're talking. This is a new teacher's first day of school. Everyone's happy to see everybody, whatever. And something happened, something innocuous. My buddy Clint wouldn't be quiet. And she turned around and within the first 90 seconds of class at a new school, absolutely screamed at him to be quiet and to be respectful. Just let him have it. Like I've never seen a teacher act in my life before or since. And we were all blown away. Now, what effect do you think that had on our class? We like this lady. We're going to behave the best we can for her. Lord, no. It was like, okay, you pick the fight. We're going to finish it. And we gave her heck. I remember one instance in particular, a year or two later, it was either my junior or senior year. She was late to class. And I kind of stood up and I looked at the rest of the folks in the class and said, hey, guys, listen. When she gets back in here, when she turns her back and she's writing on the board, just do what I do. Okay? Just do what I do. And they're like, all right. So she gets in and we're all kind of like looking at each other, you know. And she turns her back to the board. She starts writing. Turns back to the class. Rather, she starts writing. And I just start going like this. That's it. Just like that. And she turns around. And there should have been 25 people doing it, but there was only 23 because Dawn and Marcy were the valedictorian and salutatorian, and they were lame. And I still have not forgiven them for their betrayal. But she turns around, and there's 23 seniors. Just going like this. In unison. And she's kind of, stop, stop it, stop, stop, stop it. So we stop. Then, a few minutes later, she turns around to right, and I start going like this. She turns around. There's 23 kids doing this. Stop it! Stop! Right? Then, a few minutes later, she turns around again. I'm in my desk. I start going like this. She turns around. There's 23 kids going like this. Awesome. And she finally just goes, Nathan! Nathan! Go to the principal's office. I'm like, I'm not doing it. I'm just doing what they're doing. She's like, it's your fault. Go! She was right. So I go to the principal's office, also known as my soccer coach. And he said, what'd you do? And I told him. And he was like, that's pretty funny. Why don't you just stay in my office for the rest of the time? She was so harsh that at no point did that engender any sort of alignment with her. As a matter of fact, her harshness engendered within us resentment and rebellion. If you're going to treat us like this, this is how we're going to act towards you. That harsh treatment does not work. And you know this to be true, parents. When you get harsh, when you verbalize, I call it when you yell over your kid to get their attention. In my house, I'm not applying this to you. You do whatever is right with your kids. But for me, I call that verbal bullying. I know that that can work on my nine-year-old daughter, but when she's 16, I better have a new tactic. I better have something better than that because that's not going to work. She's going to leave and go to her boyfriend's house, which is my nightmare. So I have to figure out how to be calm now because that harsh attitude doesn't work. On the flip side of the Spanish teacher was my English teacher, Mr. Totten. I loved Mr. Totten. I loved him so much that a while back, a couple months ago, I was just, for whatever reason I thought about him, I Googled him. He's still at the church from which the school sprang. He's an elder there. I got to listen to one of his sermons, and it was so good to hear his voice. Now, Mr. Totten was the strictest teacher in the school. He was absolutely stern. He put up with nothing, absolutely nothing. He was straight-laced in that classroom. But when you would get out of line, which I did increasingly less over the years because of how much I loved and respected him, he would call you up to his desk or he would quietly take you into the hallway without embarrassing you. And then he would tell you, you know, you can't do this. That's not how you want to be. That's not the young man you want to be. And I can't, if I love you, I cannot allow you to act like that in my class. And I cannot allow that to go unpunished. So you're going to get some demerits. That's what we got at my school. You're going to get some demerits. I have to do it. Do you understand? Yes, sir. I'm sorry. Go back in. I'm good. He was gentle. He was kind. Had nothing to do with the standards. The standards could be raised because he was gentle with us. And we all respected him and walked in lockstep. Harsh treatment from people engenders rebellion and resentment. Gentle treatment aligns us and inclines us towards the person treating us with that gentleness, particularly when we are aware that we do not deserve it. I believe that among many reasons, I believe that gentleness is just the very nature of Jesus. He has no choice but to act with that gentleness, to act gently towards us. But I also believe that it's something that he does intentionally because he knows that it inclines us to him. Paul says it this way in Romans, or do you show contempt in the hallway and we're going, you're right, I am sorry, that is not who I want to be. I've dishonored you and I've dishonored myself with the choices that I've made and I will make those choices no longer. Thank you. That kind of gentleness inclines us towards Christ. It's his kindness that leads to repentance. And I would say this and then tell you a little bit more about what I mean. Think about this. Aren't you grateful the Lord has dealt with you gently? And doesn't that incline you towards him? Aren't you grateful the Lord has dealt with you gently and doesn't that incline you towards him? Here's what I mean. I don't know if you have any of these moments in your life. I would argue that if you've been paying attention to your life and done some self-reflection, that you have. But I know I've had a few of these moments, and I've never pretended to be perfect as your pastor. I've had a few of these moments, maybe two, three, four times in my life where I was wayward. I had allowed sin in my life. I was intentionally choosing that sin. That sin was driving a wedge between me and Jesus and I was wandering off because I was choosing a sin. I began to hide things in the shadows of my life. And whenever that's happened in my life, whenever I've had something in my life that's causing a separation and is rendering me wayward, there is a necessary light that must shine on the shadows. That stuff always comes to light. It always comes out. It's always something you have to deal with. And when I think about the times in my life when I have things in the shadows and I'm ashamed of them, I don't want anyone to know about them. I don't want anyone to see them. I certainly don't want to have to talk to Jen or my friends or whoever about those things. I'd like to just deal with them privately and not deal with the shame of it. Whenever light has been shined in those places, in the moment, it's so hard. That's a bad day. That's a hard night's sleep. There's a lot of gross that stirs up in that. There's a lot of pain when light hits the shadows for the first time and you're exposed. But as I think back on those times, what I marvel at is the reality that for me, when that has happened, when God has brought the dark things into the light in my life, every single time that's happened, I can tell you, God did it in the most gentle way possible. He did it in the most kind way possible. Yeah, things were brought to light. And it was hard and it stunk and I felt shame. But it could have been a lot worse than it was. It could have been a lot worse. Jesus could have dealt with that in a different way. He could have shed that light in the dark places in a totally different way that would have absolutely humiliated me or cost me something or whatever it is. He could have done it worse. But every time I've felt the kindness of God compelling me towards repentance, every time he and his goodness has brought something in the dark into the light in my life, as I reflect back on it, I realize that he did it in the And what's been in the shadows is brought into the light. And I wonder if it's not true that if you think back on that hard day, that hard season, did God not do that in the most gentle way possible to protect you and the people around you? I bet he did. I bet he did. Because we have a gentle high priest who calls us into the hallway and tells us in private who holds us. And we talked about at the end of Moses, we talked about we have this God that has justice in one hand and a desire for our conviction in one hand and comfort in the other. He holds conviction and comfort and then he embraces us with both of those. This is how our gentle high priest treats us. So we marvel this morning at the gentleness of Jesus, our high priest. Now, here's the question for you. Sometimes I will just end there and say let's marvel at the gentleness of Jesus. But I have a question for you because I think we can press it just a little bit further. If Jesus is characterized by gentleness, shouldn't his followers be as well? If Jesus is characterized by gentleness, shouldn't his followers be as well? We talk at Grace about the sanctification process. The time that elapses between justification and glorification. When we become Christians and when our salvation is made complete because we are in heaven with God forever, we are in glory. The time between, I almost said betwixt for fun, The time between is the sanctification process. Sanctification is to become the process through which we become more like Christ in character. Every single one of you in here who claims Jesus as your Savior, you are in the process, the slow, muddy, troublesome, difficult process of becoming more like Christ in character as God molds you over the years. And if we are going to become more like Christ in character and the way that Jesus is depicted over and over and over again and the only way that he depicts himself is that he is gentle, should we not also be gentle? Should we, church, be characterized by our gentleness? And now let me make this point too. There are some weeks when I preach to y'all, but most weeks I preach to us. Most weeks I'm here. I'm not up there. Do you know how convicting this was this week for me? If you guys just go out into the community and someone asks you about your church, and you say you like your church, and they go, oh yeah, do you like your pastor? You're like, yeah, he's all right. Tell me about your pastor. Let me tell you what I know. It's not coming out of your mouth. Dude is gentle. Like one of the most gentle souls I've ever known. I wouldn't even say it's way down on the list. It's not on the list. All jokes aside, I've been sitting with that all week. Sometimes I'm harsh with people. Sometimes in my house I'm harsh. I lose my patience. But guys, isn't it true that if our Savior defines himself as gentle primarily, that if we want to become more like him in character, that we should be too? And if that's how our Savior depicts himself, is that not what his body, the church, should be known for? Our gentleness in our communities? In different spheres of life? And I'm afraid that that's not what the church is known for right now. Big C Church. And we can't impact Big C Church very much. But we have total control over what this little C Church does. We can begin with gentleness here. And so I have three things for you to think about. If we're going to be gentle people, if this is going to matter to us, if we're going to allow God's kindness to convict us towards seeking to intentionally be more gentle people, three thoughts for you. The first thought is think of gentleness in what I call concentric circles of concern. So think of gentleness to the general public, the cashier, the server, people in traffic, folks that you see out at the ball field, people that you walk past grocery shopping. Think about being gentle to those people. It's probably the easiest to be gentle to those people, if we're being honest. Then with your friends friends and your acquaintances do they know you for being gentle with them do they know you for being kind and for being considerate so we should think about how do we be gentle to our co-workers how do we be gentle to the people we see on a regular basis to the people who know my name and I know theirs how can we be gentle towards like Jesus is gentle? And then where it gets the toughest is how can we be gentle towards our family and our intimate friends and the people that we love the most? Because I'll tell you, if everybody in the general public thinks I'm kind and gentle, if everybody in this room, my outer circle of acquaintances, thinks I'm kind and gentle, but my kids think I'm a jerk, I've failed. Right? I've failed. It's easiest to be nice to the cashier, and then it gets harder and harder. There's one more layer to that, but that'll be the third thought. So the first way to think about gentleness is outside in. And where the rubber meets the road is when you're kind and gentle to your family and the people who you love the most and who also get under your skin the most. Another thing to think about is this. We are gentle both inwardly and outwardly. We are gentle both inwardly and outwardly. It occurs to me that it's possible to treat someone with gentleness, to be kind to someone in the public forum, while inwardly you're dog cussing them. Yeah? You ever done this? You're nice to somebody? No, not you, Tom. I saw you shake your head. I would never blame you for that. We're nice to people. I've been in conversations. I shouldn't tell you this, but I've been in conversations where on the outside I'm being nice and I'm engaging in the conversation. And on the inside, I'm going, wrap it up. Like I got, I lost interest five minutes ago. I can barely hang on. Please hurry. And then I leave and I'm like, I'm not talking to that person again. Like maybe I was gentle on the outside, but on the inside, I gave them a very poor estimation. And we do this, don't we? We're outwardly kind to somebody. I think about my passive-aggressive friends. I think about my conflict-averse friends, where you're going to do whatever you have to do to be nice in the moment, but in your head, you cannot stand this person. And then you go home to your spouse and you complain about them. So if we're going to be truly gentle, we have to do so inwardly and outwardly. And the last thing to think about as we think about being people who are gentle is actually one concentric circle of concern tighter than our family and our friends. It's yourself. I have no doubt that this room is filled with some grade A self-loathers. Some of you are so hard on yourself. Some of you are so mean to yourselves. Some of you have this voice that says awful things about you, that tells you that you can't, and that you shouldn't, and that you won't, and that no one will believe you, and that you're not worth anything. And if you heard someone talk to your friend the way that you talk to yourself, you would never forgive that person for how rude and mean and critical and harsh they were. And yet you talk to yourself like that. Your Savior is gentle with you. His estimation of you is gracious. It's kind. And some of us who refuse to be gentle with ourselves, I believe it hurts the heart of Jesus to know that that's how you're talking about his daughter. That's how you think about his son. Because he did not create you to do that. And he does not want you to do that. So this morning, let's marvel at the fact that we have a high priest who treats us gently. And let's understand that that gentleness inclines us towards him, that we might be more desirous of him and exist in a state of gratitude for about if he is gentle, then we ought to as well. And we ought to be gentle in concentric circles of concern outward in until we get to us and we are generous with ourselves and we allow Jesus to tell us the truth about ourselves, not that voice in our head that lies to us and makes us feel like crud. And let's go from here and let's be people who are gentle. I expect the kindest, most generous teardown of the chairs and standing in line for the hootenanny after this sermon this morning. Everyone's going to be like, no, after you, after you. Let's be a church that's known, as Jesus was, for being gentle. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for the opportunity to celebrate everything that you've done here and what you continue to do here. Thank you for a church that we can call home, where we can love you, where we can be honest and we can be ourselves. Thank you for treating us gently, for inclining us towards you and drawing us in. Thank you, Jesus, for being our high priest and advocating for us. And as we are about to go here and eat, go from here and eat together, God, I just pray that you would bless the food, that you would bless the meal, that there would be good laughter, there would be good fellowship, and that we would see you as the author of the joy that's taking place now and will take place then. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being a part of our Sunday. Welcome to Grace. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that. If you're here and it's your first time and I haven't had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You're here on the perfect Sunday. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So as soon as the service is over, we're going to clear the chairs out to the wall. We're going to throw down some tables. We've got a huge grill out there to grill some hamburgers and some cheeseburgers and some hot dogs. If yours feels a little bland when you have it, I mean, they are the frozen bricks. Katie McWilliams right there brings her own seasoning in her purse for all of these events. So I'm sure there's plenty to go around. She's not selfish. So just ask her. If you're wondering where is this section of the church, they're around the grill. Like there's 20 dudes just staring at the grill. No one's doing anything, and they won't do anything for another 45 minutes. But they're all out there because that's where men go. It's just like moth to a flame. That's what they're doing. And just as a point of order to my Panthers friends, fans, congratulations. You really gave it to us last week. I was telling somebody I was coaching a soccer game at the end of the Falcons-Panthers game. And for those that don't know, last week I ran my mouth about my Falcons cup because I'm a Falcons fan. And now everyone is in Panthers gear. There was a baby shoved in my face wearing a Panthers onesie. People who have been wearing Panthers t-shirts have forced themselves on me with hugs. Which, this is the Lord's house, alright? We need to be serious about this. But I got, I was coaching a game, and so I wasn't looking at my phone, and the game ended while I was coaching the game. And then I checked my phone after the game, and I had 27 texts from you jerks. One of you, and this one was my favorite, just no words sent me a picture of a Panthers cup. That was it, which is really good. A few weeks ago, we're continuing in our series, Gentle and Lowly, looking at kind of loosely working through the book, Gentle and Lowly, by a guy named Dane Ortlund. And so this is the fourth part of the series, and I'm going to be focused on chapter five, where it talks about Jesus as a high priest. A few weeks ago, I did a wedding, and as normally happens at weddings, I have the same conversation with Uncle So-and-So. Uncle So-and-So, one of the uncles, one of the dads, is going to, at some point or another, about half the time, half the weddings I do, is going to come up to me and say, it's always these questions, it's always in this order. Do you have a church? Yes, I have a church. What's it called? It's called Grace Raleigh. Oh, where is it? It's near Triangle Mall, corner of Capitol and 540. Oh, that's cool. What denomination is it? Every time. Those questions in that order. And so I had this conversation. And he said, what denomination is it? And I got to explain one of my favorite things about grace, which is we are not non-denominational. And I don't know if you know this. We are not non-denominational. We are inter-denominational. And I didn't learn that word until I came to grace. But the people who started it told me what it was, and I think it's beautiful. So I got to explain it to Uncle So-and-So what that means. And what it means is we acknowledge. We're not non-denominational. We don't expect you to. If you grew up in a particular denomination, the gentleman I was talking to was Lutheran. And then when he said Lutheran, I said, okay. He said I was sprinkled as a baby. Does that count? And then he wanted to have the baptism discussion. Just right there. That's what happens in my life. But I was able to explain to him that we're interdenominational, meaning in our church body, we have represented just about every mainline denomination in the United States. We have Lutherans. We certainly have Presbyterians. We have Baptists. We have Pentecostals. We have Catholics. We have people that have converted from Judaism. We have everything represented in this church. And rather than being non-denominational and leaving all of that wonderful heritage at the door when you come in, we say that we are interdenominational, meaning we find beauty and purpose and truth in every segment of God's church. And we believe that people from all kinds of different denominations have something to offer here and that those denominations have beautiful, wonderful things that we should be humble and learn from. We have not cornered the market on truth at grace. And I got to explain that to Uncle So-and-So, and that's one of my favorite things about the church. But because of that, because we're interdenominational and because we have people from all different backgrounds, when we hear the word priest, we think of it totally differently. Many of us think about it in many different ways. This week we're looking at Jesus as our high priest and what that means. But before we can appreciate what that means, we have to appreciate what it is to be a priest. Because if you grew up Catholic, you have a very good idea of what you expect a priest to do and be. If you grew up Jewish, you have an understanding of what a priest is, but it's different than the Catholic view. If you're like me and you grew up Baptist, I only know priests from TV shows and clips and what my very conservative professors would say about the priesthood. I don't have the good working knowledge of what it means to be a priest and why that's important. And so I understand that in this room, if I were to ask 10 of you, what is a priest? What's the role? What do they do? It would, they would be probably similar answers, but probably not the same. And I doubt any of us are succinct about it, which is why I appreciate this quote at the beginning of chapter 5 when Dane explains what a priest is. He says this, and this is how we're going to understand it this morning. Chapter 5 opens like this. I think it's a wonderful description of a priest. And he asserts, and I think this is in part right. I don't think it's the only thrust of the book of Hebrews, but it was written in part to show us what it is to have Jesus as a high priest. And I love that imagery of on in earth, the king is God's representative to the people, but the priest is the people's representative to God. He goes and advocates for us. That's why it's such a big deal that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father advocating for you and I. He is our high priest. And I also love the thought that it is in the shadow of that great priest that all other priests, pastors, ministers, leaders stand. And it is to him that all other priests, pastors, ministers, leaders should point all the time. You should come here and I should point you to Jesus. And lest you think this example is just for me because I'm the only pastor speaking in the room right now. So this is just for me. In 1 Peter chapter 2, Peter acquaints us with this idea called the priesthood of the believers. Meaning if you are a Christian, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then you are in the priesthood of the believers. You are in the holy priesthood. It is your job to minister to the people around us. So in a sense, if you are saved, you are also in here a priest, which means you stand in the shadow of our great high priest. And it is your job to point back to that great high priest. Now, as I think about Jesus as a priest, I think about what would his demeanor towards us be? If you were the priest, if you were perfect, divine, and you were the priest of all of the Christians on the planet and you represented them, what would your demeanor towards them be? Don't you think you'd be a little disappointed? Don't you think you'd be a little frustrated? Don't you think Jesus has the right to get exasperated with us? We get a hint of this in the Gospels when the disciples offer some dumb answer for a question and Jesus says, how long must I put up with this faithless generation? Just this little glimpse of Jesus getting a little bit worn out with it, fed up with us. And I think to be our high priest and to watch us wallow in the mud and like is depicted in the Bible, we are like dogs that return to our own vomit when we sin. To watch my children do that over and over and over again, wouldn't that be exasperating? Parents, you know this to be true. There's things in my house that are absolutely unnecessary behaviors. One of my children is in a stage where they like to pinch you to get back at you. They pinch their sibling to get back at them. And I have told them, do not pinch your sibling. Don't do that. You don't have to do it. You never have to do it. Don't pinch your sibling. Another one of them likes to put their feet on the other one. Just randomly, just rest my foot on your head. What a jerk move that is. And I've told that child, do not touch your sibling with your feet. Don't do it. Just don't do it. And there's other things that they do that test my patience, but nothing makes me lose my mind when I look over and child A is putting their feet on child B and I'm like, knock it off. Stop. You don't have to do that. They hate it. I hate seeing it. Feet are gross. Never touch me with them. By the way, men over 30, you should never have your toes exposed if you are not directly adjacent to water for any reason. Do not wear flip-flops to dinner, guys. Knock it off. It's gross. Nobody likes it. Anyways, I wasn't planning on saying that. You do what you want with your toesies. But it drives me nuts when they do a thing that I've told them not to do over and over and over again, and it's an easily conquerable behavior. They don't care. And if that drives me nuts, how much more nuts must we drive Jesus as he watches us in the squalor, returning to a defeatable behavior over and over and over again? Wouldn't you, if you were him, just want to slap you on the back of the head and go, knock it off? What are you doing? This is preventable. Stop it. I would expect Jesus's demeanor towards us to be one of exasperation. And yet this is not how he is described by the author of Hebrews. Hebrews 5.2 describes our high priest. I'm going to read one as well. Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He, this is Jesus, is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness. This Jesus that has every right as our high priest to approach us with exasperation chooses instead to approach us with gentleness, chooses instead to have what's known about him and written about him in the book of Hebrews be that he is our high priest and he is gentle with us because he shares in our weaknesses. He's been tempted like us before. He's a human like us. We talked about this last week, which causes our high priest not to be exasperated, not to be angry, not to be frustrated, not to be fed up, not to be disappointed, but to be gentle with us. And this falls right in line with how Jesus describes himself. I'll remind you, this is the keystone verse for the whole book. Matthew 11, 29, take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble or lowly in only way Jesus describes himself is gentle and lowly. Ortlund's assertion in the book is that there's no other place in the Gospels where Jesus describes himself, where Jesus tells you what he is or what his assessment of himself is or what he wants you to know him for. This is the one place. And what does he choose? Gentle and lowly. And so this morning, we're going to really hone in on that gentleness. We're going to marvel at it. We're going to look at the effect that it has on us and think about how we can be more like Christ and our gentleness as well. But it's miraculous to me that this all-powerful, perfect Jesus who sits at the right hand of the Father, who lived a perfect life and died a perfect death and has watched. Can you imagine the frustration just banging your head against the wall, watching generation after generation after generation of Christians commit the same sins and the same atrocities and the same mistakes and run into the end and stub their toe on the same objects generation after generation? Can you imagine what it would be like to watch you wanting what's best for you and watching you hurt yourself over and over and over again? And yet, despite all of that, despite all that generational sin, despite it spilling down through the centuries and the millennia, Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and his demeanor towards you is gentle and humble. And here's the thing that I want us to catch. If you look back at the verse, it says he is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray. And when you read that at first, it says that Jesus deals gently with those who are ignorant and going astray. And in our Christian brains, many of us have been believers for a long time. And so in our longtime believer brains, more than a few years, we've been walking with Jesus or at least claiming to, trying to, varying degrees of success. We read that verse and I think we flag it. Jesus is gentle towards new and non-believers. He's gentle towards the ignorant who are going wayward, the people who don't know any better. I remember Jesus's prayer. I think of Jesus's prayer on the cross when they're casting lots for his garments and they're torturing him. And Jesus prays, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. They're ignorant in their sin. And so this verse, when he just, on a surface reading, it looks like that he is gentle towards those who are ignorant to their sin and therefore are wayward and wandering away from Jesus. Meaning for us, for mature believers, those of us who've been walking with him for a while, we know better. I bet for many of you, whatever your sins are, they're not ignorant. You know what you're doing. You know the choice you're making. You know you're choosing to harbor a wrong attitude, to commit a wrong action, to say a wrong thing, to withhold the wrong thing, whatever it is. Most of us, once you've been walking with God for a little bit, your sins are no longer ignorant. And so maybe this Jesus isn't gentle with me. But I love what Ortland points out in this chapter of the book. When you get into the sentence, and this is always tricky, and I don't do a lot of translation stuff, and I'm not going to go deep in it now, but it's always tricky to translate Greek into English. Everything's different, right? Well, when you really get into it, what you find is that the author intended to identify two different categories of people. So think of it this way. Jesus deals gently with the ignorant, with those who sin without knowing it. A few days ago, John held up his middle finger at me and said, Dad, what's this? And I said, it's a thing we don't do, buddy. That was ignorant. Typically, you could consider it a sin to hang the bird at your dad. That's not good. But I don't condemn John for that. He didn't know it was in ignorance. And sometimes we do things in ignorance. We hurt people in ignorance. We didn't mean it. We didn't know we did it. And God forgives. Jesus is gentle for us for that in our ignorance. But then there's the wayward and the way that is best read is. And Jesus is also gentle with the wayward, with the ones who are wandering. He's gentle with ignorant sin and he's gentle with intentional sin. Meaning we can say for sure Jesus deals gently with all sinners. Jesus deals gently with all sinners, not just the new believers, not just the non-believers, not just the innocent four-year-old asking a question. He deals gently with the ignorant, and he deals gently with the wayward. So Jesus, our high priest, deals gently with all of us, which is an incredible comfort. And I believe that there is a method to this. I believe there's a method to this because he could be harsh. He could be rough. We deserve it. He has every right to it. And yet, he chooses to be gentle. He chooses to be kind. He chooses to be meek. And I think that there's a reason for this. When I was in high school, I went to a really small private high school. I like to joke, Jen, my wife, she graduated 43rd in her class. There's like 775 people in her class. She was a really, she was an assiduous, diligent student, really committed, worked hard. I used to try to get her to like skip homework and skip class in college and she never would. She was really a straight straight liner and she worked really hard. She got 43rd in her class and I always like to brag that I didn't even try that hard and I got 24th in my class but there was only 25 people in there. But numbers are numbers. I did learn that in school. And so it was this small familial atmosphere and it was kind of fun and I actually liked having the experience of doing school like that. And there was one, it was the first day of school, my 10th grade year, and children in the room, I'm not advocating this kind of behavior, I'm just saying that I did it. It was the first day of school, 10th grade year, and we got a new Spanish teacher. It was our first day of class with her. She's writing her name on the board. I'm going to really try to not say her name. She's writing her name on the board, and we're talking, I guess. I don't know. We're in, like, 10th grade. Of course we're talking we're talking. This is a new teacher's first day of school. Everyone's happy to see everybody, whatever. And something happened, something innocuous. My buddy Clint wouldn't be quiet. And she turned around and within the first 90 seconds of class at a new school, absolutely screamed at him to be quiet and to be respectful. Just let him have it. Like I've never seen a teacher act in my life before or since. And we were all blown away. Now, what effect do you think that had on our class? We like this lady. We're going to behave the best we can for her. Lord, no. It was like, okay, you pick the fight. We're going to finish it. And we gave her heck. I remember one instance in particular, a year or two later, it was either my junior or senior year. She was late to class. And I kind of stood up and I looked at the rest of the folks in the class and said, hey, guys, listen. When she gets back in here, when she turns her back and she's writing on the board, just do what I do. Okay? Just do what I do. And they're like, all right. So she gets in and we're all kind of like looking at each other, you know. And she turns her back to the board. She starts writing. Turns back to the class. Rather, she starts writing. And I just start going like this. That's it. Just like that. And she turns around. And there should have been 25 people doing it, but there was only 23 because Dawn and Marcy were the valedictorian and salutatorian, and they were lame. And I still have not forgiven them for their betrayal. But she turns around, and there's 23 seniors. Just going like this. In unison. And she's kind of, stop, stop it, stop, stop, stop it. So we stop. Then, a few minutes later, she turns around to right, and I start going like this. She turns around. There's 23 kids doing this. Stop it! Stop! Right? Then, a few minutes later, she turns around again. I'm in my desk. I start going like this. She turns around. There's 23 kids going like this. Awesome. And she finally just goes, Nathan! Nathan! Go to the principal's office. I'm like, I'm not doing it. I'm just doing what they're doing. She's like, it's your fault. Go! She was right. So I go to the principal's office, also known as my soccer coach. And he said, what'd you do? And I told him. And he was like, that's pretty funny. Why don't you just stay in my office for the rest of the time? She was so harsh that at no point did that engender any sort of alignment with her. As a matter of fact, her harshness engendered within us resentment and rebellion. If you're going to treat us like this, this is how we're going to act towards you. That harsh treatment does not work. And you know this to be true, parents. When you get harsh, when you verbalize, I call it when you yell over your kid to get their attention. In my house, I'm not applying this to you. You do whatever is right with your kids. But for me, I call that verbal bullying. I know that that can work on my nine-year-old daughter, but when she's 16, I better have a new tactic. I better have something better than that because that's not going to work. She's going to leave and go to her boyfriend's house, which is my nightmare. So I have to figure out how to be calm now because that harsh attitude doesn't work. On the flip side of the Spanish teacher was my English teacher, Mr. Totten. I loved Mr. Totten. I loved him so much that a while back, a couple months ago, I was just, for whatever reason I thought about him, I Googled him. He's still at the church from which the school sprang. He's an elder there. I got to listen to one of his sermons, and it was so good to hear his voice. Now, Mr. Totten was the strictest teacher in the school. He was absolutely stern. He put up with nothing, absolutely nothing. He was straight-laced in that classroom. But when you would get out of line, which I did increasingly less over the years because of how much I loved and respected him, he would call you up to his desk or he would quietly take you into the hallway without embarrassing you. And then he would tell you, you know, you can't do this. That's not how you want to be. That's not the young man you want to be. And I can't, if I love you, I cannot allow you to act like that in my class. And I cannot allow that to go unpunished. So you're going to get some demerits. That's what we got at my school. You're going to get some demerits. I have to do it. Do you understand? Yes, sir. I'm sorry. Go back in. I'm good. He was gentle. He was kind. Had nothing to do with the standards. The standards could be raised because he was gentle with us. And we all respected him and walked in lockstep. Harsh treatment from people engenders rebellion and resentment. Gentle treatment aligns us and inclines us towards the person treating us with that gentleness, particularly when we are aware that we do not deserve it. I believe that among many reasons, I believe that gentleness is just the very nature of Jesus. He has no choice but to act with that gentleness, to act gently towards us. But I also believe that it's something that he does intentionally because he knows that it inclines us to him. Paul says it this way in Romans, or do you show contempt in the hallway and we're going, you're right, I am sorry, that is not who I want to be. I've dishonored you and I've dishonored myself with the choices that I've made and I will make those choices no longer. Thank you. That kind of gentleness inclines us towards Christ. It's his kindness that leads to repentance. And I would say this and then tell you a little bit more about what I mean. Think about this. Aren't you grateful the Lord has dealt with you gently? And doesn't that incline you towards him? Aren't you grateful the Lord has dealt with you gently and doesn't that incline you towards him? Here's what I mean. I don't know if you have any of these moments in your life. I would argue that if you've been paying attention to your life and done some self-reflection, that you have. But I know I've had a few of these moments, and I've never pretended to be perfect as your pastor. I've had a few of these moments, maybe two, three, four times in my life where I was wayward. I had allowed sin in my life. I was intentionally choosing that sin. That sin was driving a wedge between me and Jesus and I was wandering off because I was choosing a sin. I began to hide things in the shadows of my life. And whenever that's happened in my life, whenever I've had something in my life that's causing a separation and is rendering me wayward, there is a necessary light that must shine on the shadows. That stuff always comes to light. It always comes out. It's always something you have to deal with. And when I think about the times in my life when I have things in the shadows and I'm ashamed of them, I don't want anyone to know about them. I don't want anyone to see them. I certainly don't want to have to talk to Jen or my friends or whoever about those things. I'd like to just deal with them privately and not deal with the shame of it. Whenever light has been shined in those places, in the moment, it's so hard. That's a bad day. That's a hard night's sleep. There's a lot of gross that stirs up in that. There's a lot of pain when light hits the shadows for the first time and you're exposed. But as I think back on those times, what I marvel at is the reality that for me, when that has happened, when God has brought the dark things into the light in my life, every single time that's happened, I can tell you, God did it in the most gentle way possible. He did it in the most kind way possible. Yeah, things were brought to light. And it was hard and it stunk and I felt shame. But it could have been a lot worse than it was. It could have been a lot worse. Jesus could have dealt with that in a different way. He could have shed that light in the dark places in a totally different way that would have absolutely humiliated me or cost me something or whatever it is. He could have done it worse. But every time I've felt the kindness of God compelling me towards repentance, every time he and his goodness has brought something in the dark into the light in my life, as I reflect back on it, I realize that he did it in the And what's been in the shadows is brought into the light. And I wonder if it's not true that if you think back on that hard day, that hard season, did God not do that in the most gentle way possible to protect you and the people around you? I bet he did. I bet he did. Because we have a gentle high priest who calls us into the hallway and tells us in private who holds us. And we talked about at the end of Moses, we talked about we have this God that has justice in one hand and a desire for our conviction in one hand and comfort in the other. He holds conviction and comfort and then he embraces us with both of those. This is how our gentle high priest treats us. So we marvel this morning at the gentleness of Jesus, our high priest. Now, here's the question for you. Sometimes I will just end there and say let's marvel at the gentleness of Jesus. But I have a question for you because I think we can press it just a little bit further. If Jesus is characterized by gentleness, shouldn't his followers be as well? If Jesus is characterized by gentleness, shouldn't his followers be as well? We talk at Grace about the sanctification process. The time that elapses between justification and glorification. When we become Christians and when our salvation is made complete because we are in heaven with God forever, we are in glory. The time between, I almost said betwixt for fun, The time between is the sanctification process. Sanctification is to become the process through which we become more like Christ in character. Every single one of you in here who claims Jesus as your Savior, you are in the process, the slow, muddy, troublesome, difficult process of becoming more like Christ in character as God molds you over the years. And if we are going to become more like Christ in character and the way that Jesus is depicted over and over and over again and the only way that he depicts himself is that he is gentle, should we not also be gentle? Should we, church, be characterized by our gentleness? And now let me make this point too. There are some weeks when I preach to y'all, but most weeks I preach to us. Most weeks I'm here. I'm not up there. Do you know how convicting this was this week for me? If you guys just go out into the community and someone asks you about your church, and you say you like your church, and they go, oh yeah, do you like your pastor? You're like, yeah, he's all right. Tell me about your pastor. Let me tell you what I know. It's not coming out of your mouth. Dude is gentle. Like one of the most gentle souls I've ever known. I wouldn't even say it's way down on the list. It's not on the list. All jokes aside, I've been sitting with that all week. Sometimes I'm harsh with people. Sometimes in my house I'm harsh. I lose my patience. But guys, isn't it true that if our Savior defines himself as gentle primarily, that if we want to become more like him in character, that we should be too? And if that's how our Savior depicts himself, is that not what his body, the church, should be known for? Our gentleness in our communities? In different spheres of life? And I'm afraid that that's not what the church is known for right now. Big C Church. And we can't impact Big C Church very much. But we have total control over what this little C Church does. We can begin with gentleness here. And so I have three things for you to think about. If we're going to be gentle people, if this is going to matter to us, if we're going to allow God's kindness to convict us towards seeking to intentionally be more gentle people, three thoughts for you. The first thought is think of gentleness in what I call concentric circles of concern. So think of gentleness to the general public, the cashier, the server, people in traffic, folks that you see out at the ball field, people that you walk past grocery shopping. Think about being gentle to those people. It's probably the easiest to be gentle to those people, if we're being honest. Then with your friends friends and your acquaintances do they know you for being gentle with them do they know you for being kind and for being considerate so we should think about how do we be gentle to our co-workers how do we be gentle to the people we see on a regular basis to the people who know my name and I know theirs how can we be gentle towards like Jesus is gentle? And then where it gets the toughest is how can we be gentle towards our family and our intimate friends and the people that we love the most? Because I'll tell you, if everybody in the general public thinks I'm kind and gentle, if everybody in this room, my outer circle of acquaintances, thinks I'm kind and gentle, but my kids think I'm a jerk, I've failed. Right? I've failed. It's easiest to be nice to the cashier, and then it gets harder and harder. There's one more layer to that, but that'll be the third thought. So the first way to think about gentleness is outside in. And where the rubber meets the road is when you're kind and gentle to your family and the people who you love the most and who also get under your skin the most. Another thing to think about is this. We are gentle both inwardly and outwardly. We are gentle both inwardly and outwardly. It occurs to me that it's possible to treat someone with gentleness, to be kind to someone in the public forum, while inwardly you're dog cussing them. Yeah? You ever done this? You're nice to somebody? No, not you, Tom. I saw you shake your head. I would never blame you for that. We're nice to people. I've been in conversations. I shouldn't tell you this, but I've been in conversations where on the outside I'm being nice and I'm engaging in the conversation. And on the inside, I'm going, wrap it up. Like I got, I lost interest five minutes ago. I can barely hang on. Please hurry. And then I leave and I'm like, I'm not talking to that person again. Like maybe I was gentle on the outside, but on the inside, I gave them a very poor estimation. And we do this, don't we? We're outwardly kind to somebody. I think about my passive-aggressive friends. I think about my conflict-averse friends, where you're going to do whatever you have to do to be nice in the moment, but in your head, you cannot stand this person. And then you go home to your spouse and you complain about them. So if we're going to be truly gentle, we have to do so inwardly and outwardly. And the last thing to think about as we think about being people who are gentle is actually one concentric circle of concern tighter than our family and our friends. It's yourself. I have no doubt that this room is filled with some grade A self-loathers. Some of you are so hard on yourself. Some of you are so mean to yourselves. Some of you have this voice that says awful things about you, that tells you that you can't, and that you shouldn't, and that you won't, and that no one will believe you, and that you're not worth anything. And if you heard someone talk to your friend the way that you talk to yourself, you would never forgive that person for how rude and mean and critical and harsh they were. And yet you talk to yourself like that. Your Savior is gentle with you. His estimation of you is gracious. It's kind. And some of us who refuse to be gentle with ourselves, I believe it hurts the heart of Jesus to know that that's how you're talking about his daughter. That's how you think about his son. Because he did not create you to do that. And he does not want you to do that. So this morning, let's marvel at the fact that we have a high priest who treats us gently. And let's understand that that gentleness inclines us towards him, that we might be more desirous of him and exist in a state of gratitude for about if he is gentle, then we ought to as well. And we ought to be gentle in concentric circles of concern outward in until we get to us and we are generous with ourselves and we allow Jesus to tell us the truth about ourselves, not that voice in our head that lies to us and makes us feel like crud. And let's go from here and let's be people who are gentle. I expect the kindest, most generous teardown of the chairs and standing in line for the hootenanny after this sermon this morning. Everyone's going to be like, no, after you, after you. Let's be a church that's known, as Jesus was, for being gentle. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for the opportunity to celebrate everything that you've done here and what you continue to do here. Thank you for a church that we can call home, where we can love you, where we can be honest and we can be ourselves. Thank you for treating us gently, for inclining us towards you and drawing us in. Thank you, Jesus, for being our high priest and advocating for us. And as we are about to go here and eat, go from here and eat together, God, I just pray that you would bless the food, that you would bless the meal, that there would be good laughter, there would be good fellowship, and that we would see you as the author of the joy that's taking place now and will take place then. In Jesus' name, amen.