If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else? And what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day they're not nearly as big of a deal? What are our big rocks And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Isn't it cute in that video how I assumed that we were just charging right back into normal? And then here we are in masks again. Boy, the naivety as we roll into each wave of this is pretty funny, especially to think back. I can remember back in March of 2020 having conversations. Joe, the moderator of our board, called me in between the 8th and the 15th of March, and he said, hey, I think maybe we need to take a break. Maybe we can't meet in person this Sunday. And I was like, Joe, this is a big decision. I don't know if we should do this. And he goes, no, man, I really think we need to. And I'm like, Joe, listen to me. This is not going to be like a two-week thing. This could go well into April. So who the heck knows? But it's good to see everybody. Thank you for doing your part. And this is the last part of our series called Big Rocks, which if you've been here all four weeks or you've watched online all four weeks and you've watched that intro video of me four times in a row, good for you. That's serious partner of the year stuff right there. This week, as we talk about our priorities in life and approaching this fall, we're going to talk about the idea and the topic of community. And if you've been in church for any amount of time, you've heard a sermon on community. If you've been here, you've probably heard me talk about the importance of community. In our mission statement, we emphasize community by saying that grace exists to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. So you might be tempted when I say that the sermon this week is on community, you might be tempted to kind of glaze over and go, yep, got it. Christian community is important. I'm going to do it. Good. And then start thinking about whatever you've got going on the rest of the day, lunch plans, or if you're me trying to get the grass cut before the thunderstorm start, whatever it is you've got going on, you might be tempted to take your head there when I say that the sermon is going to be on community because we might feel like we kind of get it. But if that's you, I want to encourage you to lean in this morning. Because I hope that what we'll do is I'll leave here or I'll turn off our TVs, wherever we might be consuming this, that we will finish this experience this morning or whenever you're listening, thinking differently about the power and efficacy of community than when we started. I hope that we will be inspired to pursue it as if our lives depended on it. I think the idea of community is incredibly important. And if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the Gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament and you pay attention, what you'll find is a lot of we's and ours and collective you. Like when Paul writes in the letters that he says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And he says, I pray for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. That's not you as an individual. That's a collective you as the church in Rome or Philippi or Ephesus. The Gospels are written to an audience, are written to a church, are written to a group of people. You find in the New Testament very few personal, singular pronouns. You find very you singular yous. You should do this, you should do that, God did this, whatever it is for just you. You don't find those in the New Testament. What you find in the New Testament is collective we and are. The New Testament assumes that your faith will be communal. It assumes that you have other Christians around you walking in the same direction you are pursuing, the same Jesus that you are pursuing. As a matter of fact, if you go to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that's not in your notes, so you can write that down if you want to. You can turn there if you get bored at some point in the sermon, which is likely to happen. Turn to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, and make sure that I'm not making this stuff up. That is the quintessential church passage. There is no pastor who has preached more than two sermons on community and has not based one of the sermons in that passage. It is a quintessential church passage. It describes what the church looked like and did in its very infancy. As soon as Christ ascends and we have Pentecost and Peter and the disciples share the gospel, we see 3,000 people come to faith that day. That's the birth of the church. And then Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47 describes what the church did and how it behaved in its infancy. It is the barometer by which all church for the rest of time is measured. And if you read those verses, what you find is collective wheeze. It's communal. The church did this and they committed themselves to the apostle teaching. They devoted themselves to prayer. They met in one another's homes day by day. They were together all the time pursuing teaching, sharing meals, praying together, learning together, pursuing Jesus together. It is a communal activity. Your faith, if you have it, is quintessentially communal, which is why there's a little bit of an issue in evangelical churches with this phrase that we like to use sometimes. Raise your hand if you've ever heard the phrase that Christianity is about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Have you ever heard that? Now listen. Christianity is about a personal faith. It's about a personal belief that God is the creator and author of the universe, that to reconcile his creation to himself, namely you, he sent his son to die in your place, and we place our faith in Jesus' death on the cross, and we place our hope in his resurrection on Easter, that one day we will be united with our God and reunited with those who also have faith in our Jesus, and we have a hope that will not put us to shame. To be a Christian, you need to individually believe that and have faith in that, and one of the remarkable things about Christianity is that our God does offer us a personal relationship with him. But listen to me closely. We must have an individual faith, but your faith is not about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ because your relationship with Jesus Christ is not personal. It is communal. We see it over and over again in Scripture. It is a communal faith. It is not just your business. It is our business as a church. We don't see that phrase, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, pop up in the Bible. We see a necessity for an individually claimed faith. But make no mistake about it, your faith is quintessentially communal. It is, I would argue, it is impossible to grow close to Jesus and have a vibrant walk with him totally by yourself. To take your Bible and a prayer book and to wander off in the desert like these mystical people who have existed before us that we somehow, we look at and we think that they were the ones who had nailed faith. And I don't think any of those existed, but the people who just go off by themselves and just totally ensconced in God's word and in prayer, and it's just them and God. you can't have a vibrant walk with Jesus doing that because loving Jesus requires you to love others. If your love from Jesus does not cause you to pour out love onto other people, then you are not expressing the love that Jesus has lavished on you. You are bottling that up. You are keeping that to yourself. To live a non-communal faith is fundamentally self-centered. And we miss out on who Jesus is by not lavishing his love on others in the same way that he loves us. John tells us in his letters at the end of the Bible that if we love Jesus, then we will love others. The Christian faith was not designed to live alone. I think that there are parts of Jesus that you find in loving other people. We cannot come to know Christ in the way that he wants to be known if we are trying to do it void of loving others and serving others and doing his work. This is why the mission statement at Grace is connecting people to Jesus first, but also connecting people to people. Because your walk with God will not be as vibrant and as healthy as it can be if it is void of community as you share your faith. So community and our faiths is vitally important. It's why I think that community is God's primary tool for tethering, comforting, and sustaining his children. Community is God's primary tool for tethering his children to him, for comforting his children in their time of need and for sustaining them in their walks and in the commitments that he's led you to make. Now, I would offer you a caveat here. I need to, if you have notes, if you're a note taker, please write this in your notes. Community is God's primary tool dash outside of heaven. It's God's primary tool this side of heaven to tether us and to sustain us and to comfort us. Because he tethers us with his son. He sustains us with his spirit. He comforts us with Jesus as he weeps with us. But these things, this community I'm going to show you is the way that God gives himself time to work in your life to bring you to a place where you're walking with him. It's the way that God the Father throws his arms around you in times of trouble. It's the way that God comes beside you and sustains you when your faith and your commitments are faltering. So I do not at any point want to replace the work that the Holy Spirit and God the Father and Jesus are doing in our lives and moving in us, but I do want us to see that community is often the tool that they use to work powerfully and effectively in our lives. I say that it's the primary tool for tethering, for kind of keeping us attached to the faith, even at times when we might be wandering off. With that in mind, I'm going to share something with you that I really am not sure that I'm all the way ready to share, because if I share it and then I don't do it, I'm a failure and a quitter. But last week, I committed with some friends of mine to run a half marathon at the end of February. I committed to do this because I'm fat now, and I need to. Somebody asked me before the service, why is your shirt tucked down? Like, are you being serious today? I'm like, no, no, I'm fat. I need to be able to blouse a little bit for the camera, you know? But I'm sharing that with you because if you know me well, you know that I've got a group of really good buddies. One guy I've been best friends with since I was five years old, so we've been friends for 35 years. And then there's eight of us total. We've been friends together, all of us, for at least 20 years. And we talk on this app called Marco Polo. It's probably for high school girls, but we love it and we use it to talk back and forth. We talk every day. And so there's eight of us and we legit, we talk every day. Whatever's going on in the world, whatever's happening in sports, whatever's happening in our lives, we talk about it. Just this morning, I was watching my friend, he dropped his daughter off at college yesterday and was telling us how emotional he got about it. And I'm in my office getting emotional about Lily starting kindergarten tomorrow. And if I talk about it for too long, I'm gonna get emotional in front of you. So we talk about stuff all the time. And then we have different threads for different topics. You know, different things that some of us may wanna talk about, but not everybody does. Anyways, we've got one for exercising. I can't tell you the name of it. There's a cuss word in it, but we've got one for exercising. And I started it. I started it back in January. I was like, guys, I'm fat now. I think I want to start eating well. I think I want to start exercising. Is anybody with me? And seven of them were like, yeah, let's do it. My one buddy, Tim, God bless him. He does not care. And I wish I could be more like Tim. But the rest of us were in there. And so we're encouraging each other every day, right? But eventually, I just stopped caring. I kind of fell off the wagon. Having a nine-month-old or an eight-month-pregnant wife will do that to you. And then so will having an infant and a three-month-old. It kind of takes you out of your regular rhythm. So it's been more difficult, and I kind of just lost my desire to do it, and to the point where they were daily talking about their workouts and the stuff that they're doing and yada, yada, yada. And I would just skip. Like, I wouldn't even listen. I would just fast-forward to the last one, hit play, skip to the end of that one, and so that those didn't show up as new, because I don't know. You people that just leave notifications on your phone, I don't know how you live with yourself. So I would have to go and just skip all the way through it, right? Ignoring it. And then I even became the devil on the shoulder of the people. They would share sometimes when I would listen, like, I didn't do anything today. I've been eating like crud lately. I just don't feel good about myself. And then I'd go out there and be like, come on over. It's great over here. There's barbecue and sweet tea. This is wonderful. Just buy larger fishing shirts and you're good. Like you can just let it all hang out. It's really, really great. It's good over here. But somewhere in that week and a half ago, my buddy got on there and he said, hey, I found a half marathon in Greenville and I think it would be fun if we would train for it together and try to run it together. And something about it, I don't know what it was. I don't know. I had some weakness that day and I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Like it caught me on a good day. And I said, let's do this. Let's do it. And they were all very surprised that I was into it. But now I think there's five or six of us who are going to do it. And I'm only a week and a half in and I'm just a slow lumbering mess. As a matter of fact, if you live in my neighborhood, Falls River and then Bedford or whatever, and you see me running, can you just do me a favor and avert your eyes? And we'll just both pretend like that never happened. Do not honk at me or wave. I do not want to know that you saw me. I'd just like to live in this world where no one can see me lumbering down the road. But it's been fun to get back to it and to begin to train and begin to exercise and share that with my buddies. And I feel more inspired now to do this than I have in a long time. And I really think it might stick. So barring injury, which is more of a factor than it's ever been in my life, Lord willing, I'll run that thing in February and I'm looking forward to doing that. I share that story because I believe that this is what Christian community does with us for the church. To be a Christian for any amount of time is to go through a season of wandering. It's to go through a season where I was once committed, I once cared very much about my spiritual health, I was once very consistent in going to church and going to small group and reading my Bible and praying on my own, and I can remember seasons of vibrancy in my life, but now I'm just, whatever you want to call it, I'm in a rut, I'm wandering off, I don't feel it right now, I just am not, I'm going through some things and I just not sure that I can really connect with God. I'm not really sure that's a thing that I want. To be a Christian is to have gone through a season of wandering and probably not just one. And what community does is it keeps us tethered to our faith, even in times when we're not necessarily very committed to our faith. I didn't leave that thread because I like my buddies. I wanted to know what they were talking about. I wanted the community there. Even though I wasn't engaged in what they were engaged in, even though I wasn't pursuing what they were pursuing, I didn't want to totally detach myself because I thought maybe one day I will. Plus, I want to know what my friends are talking about. I don't want to have FOMO. So I stayed in there. And then one day, because I was tethered to that group by the community in that group, something caught me right. And I said, yeah, I'm going to make that choice for my health or for my children. Church community does this too. As we're going through a season of wandering, maybe we're not feeling faith right now. Maybe we're not super committed to it. Maybe we're not doing the things in private that we know we ought to be doing, but we keep showing up because we love the people in our small group. We keep showing up because we love to serve on Sunday morning. We keep showing up because that's our community and we don't want to miss out and those are our people. And then one day when you're at church or your small group or you're having a conversation or one day God speaks to you. He shows you something. You have an experience that moves you. Something catches you right. And that's what clicks and you re-engage in your spiritual life and you begin to pursue Jesus again. Our community tethers us to God in a very real way. Don't raise your hand, but I would ask you, those of you who are Christians, has there been a season of your life where if you didn't have Christian brothers and sisters who loved you and who just accepted you, not who came after you and got onto you and tried to convict you for the decisions that you were making, but who simply loved you, have you had seasons in your life that if it weren't for your Christian community tethering you to your faith, that you would have walked away from it entirely? Yeah. Or you're not being honest. God places us in community because he knows there will be times when we wander, and when we do, he's tethering us about this wandering at the end of his book. he writes this, my brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Not only do we have brothers and sisters who love us as we begin to wander and tether us to our faith and kind of draw us back to God as God works on our souls to soften them back to himself. But we also have the opportunity in Christian community, in church community, to be the one that pulls back a wandering brother or sister. To be the one who just consistently loves, who just consistently shows up for, who just consistently says, I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to love you. I'm here to enjoy you. Not a project friendship, deep, meaningful friendship. When we express that with one another, when we express the kind of community that I've seen at Grace, we are used by God to tether people to their faith and draw them back towards him. You are a tool in his hand used to draw back a wondering brother or sister by simply maintaining community with people even if it feels like they're wandering. So those of you who have wandering friends, which, has there ever been an easier time than now to wander away from the church? Continue to love them. Continue to be that tether that lets them know anytime you want to come back, we're here, we love you. And you can be a brother or a sister that is blessed according to James as we do that. The community here is absolutely a huge way that God keeps us tethered to him and to our faith. Community is also an enormous tool in the hands of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit as they seek to comfort us. We're told in Psalms that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, that he saves those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we're at our lowest, God is at his closest. I've preached from stage many times, John 11, 35, the miracle of that verse. It's the shortest verse in the Bible that says that Jesus wept when he met Mary in her sorrow at the loss of her brother Lazarus. Jesus' response was to weep with her. And we get to preach and we get to claim and we get to know that we have a Jesus who weeps with us. And that's wonderful. But have you ever thought about how he does that? Have you ever thought about how God brings himself close to the brokenhearted? Will he bring his presence and his spirit close to the brokenhearted? Yes, absolutely he will. And he will speak into difficult times. Just yesterday, I was sitting on my porch swing and we've had a difficult couple of days and I felt pretty stressed. And I was just sitting there in the rain because that's what I love to do. And it was a good storm yesterday. And there was just this moment where God spoke some encouragement into my life. And it instantly gave me a peace. And so God will absolutely do that and comfort us in that way. But have you ever considered that the church community itself is also how God wraps his arms around us? Have you ever considered that our church community crying with us is also how Jesus weeps with us? Have you ever considered that that might be why Paul tells us to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn? Because that is the expression of the very body of Christ hurting with those who hurt. Jen told me as I was talking through this sermon with her, she said, you got to tell the Lisa story. And I'm actually glad she's not here. Jen's not here this morning, because we'd be a sobbing mess. But if you've been going here since the end of last year, at least, then you likely know that in December of 2020, December 29th of 2020, just to cap off a real humdinger of a year, we lost Jen's dad, John, to pancreatic cancer. That's who our son is named after. And so in the months prior, Jen had been down there a lot. They're located in Athens. Jen had been down there back and forth a lot. And at some point she came home. After Thanksgiving, she came back with me and we were home. And John has a brother-in-law named Edwin who's a doctor. And Edwin and Mary stayed with John. And Edwin told me, Nate, go back home, take your family. We don't really know what's going on with John. But when you need to be here, when it's time for family to be around him, we'll call you. I said, all right. So we came back. We were back for about a week. No, it was just a couple days. It wasn't even a week. And it was the Sunday of December 6th. And at the time, we weren't meeting in person because we'd had a COVID flare up, and so we were just chilling out for a little bit. And so I had to come that morning on December 6th, and we did a live service. So we had worship worship and then I was to preach, right? And five minutes before the service started, my phone rings and it's Edwin. And he says, you need to get down here. So I said, all right. So I called Jen. So we need to get down there. I'm going to go ahead and preach this sermon. And then we'll hop in the car and we'll go home. Let me tell you something. I have no idea what I preached December 6th. I have never been less present for a sermon in my whole life. If you watched it and got something out of it, the Holy Spirit is good, okay? Because my mind was not on that sermon. And I got done and things felt so urgent that I literally, and I never do this, I just pulled off my mic and everything. I set it down. I got right in my car and I drove away. Steve was still playing. The band was still going. Folks were still here. I just got in my car and I left. And when I got in my car, I texted Steve and Kyle because they were both here that morning. And I said, hey, I'm so sorry for leaving so quickly. Here's what's going on. We got to head home. And I go home. I get Jen and we're scrambling to get out the door. We scrambled to get out the door so quickly that to pack for this trip, I just opened up the biggest suitcase I have and dumped all my dirty clothes in it and then grabbed clean clothes and threw them in there, zipped it up, and we headed out the door. I can do laundry where I'm going. I don't know how long I'm going to be there. But that's the kind of urgency that we were trying to get out the door with. In the middle of that, somebody rings our doorbell. And we're like, who's ringing our doorbell on a Sunday morning? And we look, and it's Lisa Goldberg, Steve's wife. And she's at our door, and clearly Steve had called her or texted her and told her what was going on. And see, Lisa's mom passed away of pancreatic cancer a few years prior. Actually, right before, right as Steve and Lisa were moving here to become a part of Grace. And she knew the road that Jen was about to walk. So Jen goes and answers the door. And Lisa has a little gift bag prepared for her and hands it to her and just gives her a hug and starts crying. And Jen was telling me about it this week, and she said she can't even remember Lisa saying any words. Maybe I'm sorry. They just hugged for a really long time. And then we got in the car and we left. And that hug and those tears meant more to Jen in the following weeks than they did in the moment. Because in the moment, she didn't know the hell that she was about to walk through. But Lisa did because she had walked it. And so that provided her with comfort as she walked through that period. You can't tell me that that morning wasn't Jesus coming to our door and wrapping his arms around my wife. He did. That's how he weeps with us. That's how he comforts us. That's why he tells us to weep together. Because when we do those things, we're the hands and feet of God. We're the hands and feet of Jesus wrapping ourselves around people who are hurting. That's how God expresses his love to us. That's how we express ourselves as the body of Christ. He places us in community so that our community can comfort us when we need it. So that he can be close to the brokenhearted. So that we can experience having a God that weeps with us. That's what community does. And it also sustains us. And this is my favorite. Community sustains us. There's this great picture in Exodus. Exodus chapter 17. I'm just going to tell you the synopsis of it, but the story is in verses 8 through 16. I'm going to be a mess. David, can you go get me a tissue? Do you mind doing that? Thank you, sir. Oh, Wes is on it. Thanks, Wes. That's why Wes is an elder, because he does things like that. Oh. That's why Cindy's a resting elder. Thank you. All right, give me a second. I'm sorry. Especially if you're watching online. You're just going to watch me turn my back. All right. Does anybody else need some of these? I saw a couple of tears out there. In Exodus 17, there's a guy named Amalek who's brought his armies against Israel. Moses is the head of the nation at this point. Joshua is his general. Moses is too old to lead people into battle. And so Moses tells Joshua, you go down into the select some men, go down into this valley and you fight Amalek. And as you fight him, I will be up here and I will have my hands raised to God. And as long as my hands are raised to God, then you will win the day. And Joshua says, okay. So he goes down and he begins to fight Amalek. And as he's fighting Amalek, Moses is on the top of the mountain with his hands raised. And as his hands are raised, then what he said comes true. And God is with Joshua and Joshua is winning the battle. But battles are long and Moses is old. And I guarantee you, he had lived a life of shepherding for 40 years. If you wanted to have a hold your hands over your head contest, he would crush everybody in this room. But at one point or another, no matter how strong you are, you'd get fatigued. And he needed to take a rest and let the blood get back in his shoulders. And when he would rest, the army would begin to be defeated and the battle would go towards Amalek. And so he's in this struggle of trying to hold his hands up, but not having enough strength to do it. And they're losing the battle if he can't hold his hands up. So what happens? Well, his brother Aaron and his friend named Hur, H-U-R, are next to him and they find a rock and they put a rock behind him and they tell him to sit on it and then they stand. I love this picture. They stand next to him and they hold his hands up so that he doesn't have to anymore. That's the best picture of community in the Bible. Because each of you, your husband, your wife, your friend, your Christian, your son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, if you're a woman in this church who's married and you have children, you've got a marriage that you're holding up, that you're offering to God. You've got children that you're trusting to God. You've got concerns in your own life. You've got your own faith that you need to carry. You've got your own stresses and your own anxieties and your own worries, and you're facing those battles. And life is long, and I don't care how strong you are. At some point or another, your hands get tired. At some point or another, you think, I don't know if I can do it with this marriage. I don't know if I have the energy it takes to make this thing go. I just don't know if I can pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can continue to love these kids the way they need to be loved. I don't know what to do. I can't pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can walk in faith. I just can't see it. I have so many questions. God's disappointed me in these ways. I just don't know if I can keep doing this anymore. And when you're on your own, you're right, you can't. This is why we're placed in community, for our friends to come up beside us and grab our hands and say, hey, buddy, I got you right now. I will fight for your marriage right now. I will hold your hands up and fight for your faith right now. I will stand beside you and hold your hands up for your children and for your business and for your health and for your love of Christ right now. I will stand in this gap for you, and I will be the strength that you don't have. That's what community does for us. Our friends come alongside us, and they hold our hands up, and they give us the energy and the strength for the battle that we can't fight right now. And that's what community offers to others. This is why I think that community, this side of heaven, is the most powerful and effective tool that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit use to tether us to him, to comfort us, and to sustain us in our faith and the commitments that he's led us to making. And I'll end with this because I think this is important. Community is a choice. It's a choice. That kind of community, that kind of community where someone shows up at your door just to wrap their arms around you because they know what you're about to walk through, that kind of community that grabs your hand and holds you up when you can't do it, that kind of community that loves you when you're wandering and keeps you tethered to your faith so that you can wander back. That kind of community, that doesn't happen by default, man. We don't just stumble into that. That kind of community we show up for. Sometimes in small groups, I'll talk about it in a second, we sign up for. And then we let the Lord do his work in bringing us together and knitting lives together. We have to choose that community. Just last night, some friends of ours had a birthday party. And our childcare fell through, and so we had to figure out what to do. And so we decided that Jen was going to go to dinner, and they were going to go to drinks afterwards. Jen was going to go to dinner, and then when she got home, I was going to go and have a drink or two with our friends and then come back. That's what we decided we were going to do. Well, Jen stayed at dinner until like 9.15. I needed her to be back at like 6.15. Do you think, listen, I don't know how well you guys all know me. You think I wanted to go anywhere at 9.30 on Saturday night? No, I was in my gym shorts with paint on them and a big baggy t-shirt and Crocs and I was unshowered. I didn't want to go anywhere. But I also knew that I couldn't get up here today and preach about community if I wasn't going to prioritize my own. So they got Saturday night and ate and I showed up just how I was dressed. And we had ourselves a grand old time over at, I think, Tonic in Wake Forest. We have to choose community. It's not always convenient. You're not always going to want to go to small group. You're not always going to want to prioritize it. Parents of elementary and middle school age kids, you'll never be in a busier season in your whole life. It's so hard right now to prioritize small group. Do it. Community is a choice. It's an essential tool that God has placed in our life to bring us closer to him, to experience his love of us. In a minute, I'm going to talk more about small groups. But I want to encourage you here at the end of the sermon to sign up for them. If you're not in one, join one. Step into this community and let's begin to pursue it together and let's let God use this place to further connect us to him. Let's pray. God, thank you for you. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for who you are. God, thank you for our friends. Thank you for the people who love us, who we get to share life with. Thank you for our brothers and sisters who draw us back in our wandering. Thank you for the ones who comfort us. Thank you for the ones who sustain us and hold up our hands when we are too weak to do it. God, give us the desire and the conviction to choose community. To choose to live our faith with those around us. Remove any obstacles that we might have, whether fabricated or real, and knit us together, God, as a church family, that we might love one another well, that we might express your love for one another well. That we might support and sustain one another well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else? And what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day they're not nearly as big of a deal? What are our big rocks And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Isn't it cute in that video how I assumed that we were just charging right back into normal? And then here we are in masks again. Boy, the naivety as we roll into each wave of this is pretty funny, especially to think back. I can remember back in March of 2020 having conversations. Joe, the moderator of our board, called me in between the 8th and the 15th of March, and he said, hey, I think maybe we need to take a break. Maybe we can't meet in person this Sunday. And I was like, Joe, this is a big decision. I don't know if we should do this. And he goes, no, man, I really think we need to. And I'm like, Joe, listen to me. This is not going to be like a two-week thing. This could go well into April. So who the heck knows? But it's good to see everybody. Thank you for doing your part. And this is the last part of our series called Big Rocks, which if you've been here all four weeks or you've watched online all four weeks and you've watched that intro video of me four times in a row, good for you. That's serious partner of the year stuff right there. This week, as we talk about our priorities in life and approaching this fall, we're going to talk about the idea and the topic of community. And if you've been in church for any amount of time, you've heard a sermon on community. If you've been here, you've probably heard me talk about the importance of community. In our mission statement, we emphasize community by saying that grace exists to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. So you might be tempted when I say that the sermon this week is on community, you might be tempted to kind of glaze over and go, yep, got it. Christian community is important. I'm going to do it. Good. And then start thinking about whatever you've got going on the rest of the day, lunch plans, or if you're me trying to get the grass cut before the thunderstorm start, whatever it is you've got going on, you might be tempted to take your head there when I say that the sermon is going to be on community because we might feel like we kind of get it. But if that's you, I want to encourage you to lean in this morning. Because I hope that what we'll do is I'll leave here or I'll turn off our TVs, wherever we might be consuming this, that we will finish this experience this morning or whenever you're listening, thinking differently about the power and efficacy of community than when we started. I hope that we will be inspired to pursue it as if our lives depended on it. I think the idea of community is incredibly important. And if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the Gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament and you pay attention, what you'll find is a lot of we's and ours and collective you. Like when Paul writes in the letters that he says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And he says, I pray for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. That's not you as an individual. That's a collective you as the church in Rome or Philippi or Ephesus. The Gospels are written to an audience, are written to a church, are written to a group of people. You find in the New Testament very few personal, singular pronouns. You find very you singular yous. You should do this, you should do that, God did this, whatever it is for just you. You don't find those in the New Testament. What you find in the New Testament is collective we and are. The New Testament assumes that your faith will be communal. It assumes that you have other Christians around you walking in the same direction you are pursuing, the same Jesus that you are pursuing. As a matter of fact, if you go to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that's not in your notes, so you can write that down if you want to. You can turn there if you get bored at some point in the sermon, which is likely to happen. Turn to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, and make sure that I'm not making this stuff up. That is the quintessential church passage. There is no pastor who has preached more than two sermons on community and has not based one of the sermons in that passage. It is a quintessential church passage. It describes what the church looked like and did in its very infancy. As soon as Christ ascends and we have Pentecost and Peter and the disciples share the gospel, we see 3,000 people come to faith that day. That's the birth of the church. And then Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47 describes what the church did and how it behaved in its infancy. It is the barometer by which all church for the rest of time is measured. And if you read those verses, what you find is collective wheeze. It's communal. The church did this and they committed themselves to the apostle teaching. They devoted themselves to prayer. They met in one another's homes day by day. They were together all the time pursuing teaching, sharing meals, praying together, learning together, pursuing Jesus together. It is a communal activity. Your faith, if you have it, is quintessentially communal, which is why there's a little bit of an issue in evangelical churches with this phrase that we like to use sometimes. Raise your hand if you've ever heard the phrase that Christianity is about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Have you ever heard that? Now listen. Christianity is about a personal faith. It's about a personal belief that God is the creator and author of the universe, that to reconcile his creation to himself, namely you, he sent his son to die in your place, and we place our faith in Jesus' death on the cross, and we place our hope in his resurrection on Easter, that one day we will be united with our God and reunited with those who also have faith in our Jesus, and we have a hope that will not put us to shame. To be a Christian, you need to individually believe that and have faith in that, and one of the remarkable things about Christianity is that our God does offer us a personal relationship with him. But listen to me closely. We must have an individual faith, but your faith is not about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ because your relationship with Jesus Christ is not personal. It is communal. We see it over and over again in Scripture. It is a communal faith. It is not just your business. It is our business as a church. We don't see that phrase, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, pop up in the Bible. We see a necessity for an individually claimed faith. But make no mistake about it, your faith is quintessentially communal. It is, I would argue, it is impossible to grow close to Jesus and have a vibrant walk with him totally by yourself. To take your Bible and a prayer book and to wander off in the desert like these mystical people who have existed before us that we somehow, we look at and we think that they were the ones who had nailed faith. And I don't think any of those existed, but the people who just go off by themselves and just totally ensconced in God's word and in prayer, and it's just them and God. you can't have a vibrant walk with Jesus doing that because loving Jesus requires you to love others. If your love from Jesus does not cause you to pour out love onto other people, then you are not expressing the love that Jesus has lavished on you. You are bottling that up. You are keeping that to yourself. To live a non-communal faith is fundamentally self-centered. And we miss out on who Jesus is by not lavishing his love on others in the same way that he loves us. John tells us in his letters at the end of the Bible that if we love Jesus, then we will love others. The Christian faith was not designed to live alone. I think that there are parts of Jesus that you find in loving other people. We cannot come to know Christ in the way that he wants to be known if we are trying to do it void of loving others and serving others and doing his work. This is why the mission statement at Grace is connecting people to Jesus first, but also connecting people to people. Because your walk with God will not be as vibrant and as healthy as it can be if it is void of community as you share your faith. So community and our faiths is vitally important. It's why I think that community is God's primary tool for tethering, comforting, and sustaining his children. Community is God's primary tool for tethering his children to him, for comforting his children in their time of need and for sustaining them in their walks and in the commitments that he's led you to make. Now, I would offer you a caveat here. I need to, if you have notes, if you're a note taker, please write this in your notes. Community is God's primary tool dash outside of heaven. It's God's primary tool this side of heaven to tether us and to sustain us and to comfort us. Because he tethers us with his son. He sustains us with his spirit. He comforts us with Jesus as he weeps with us. But these things, this community I'm going to show you is the way that God gives himself time to work in your life to bring you to a place where you're walking with him. It's the way that God the Father throws his arms around you in times of trouble. It's the way that God comes beside you and sustains you when your faith and your commitments are faltering. So I do not at any point want to replace the work that the Holy Spirit and God the Father and Jesus are doing in our lives and moving in us, but I do want us to see that community is often the tool that they use to work powerfully and effectively in our lives. I say that it's the primary tool for tethering, for kind of keeping us attached to the faith, even at times when we might be wandering off. With that in mind, I'm going to share something with you that I really am not sure that I'm all the way ready to share, because if I share it and then I don't do it, I'm a failure and a quitter. But last week, I committed with some friends of mine to run a half marathon at the end of February. I committed to do this because I'm fat now, and I need to. Somebody asked me before the service, why is your shirt tucked down? Like, are you being serious today? I'm like, no, no, I'm fat. I need to be able to blouse a little bit for the camera, you know? But I'm sharing that with you because if you know me well, you know that I've got a group of really good buddies. One guy I've been best friends with since I was five years old, so we've been friends for 35 years. And then there's eight of us total. We've been friends together, all of us, for at least 20 years. And we talk on this app called Marco Polo. It's probably for high school girls, but we love it and we use it to talk back and forth. We talk every day. And so there's eight of us and we legit, we talk every day. Whatever's going on in the world, whatever's happening in sports, whatever's happening in our lives, we talk about it. Just this morning, I was watching my friend, he dropped his daughter off at college yesterday and was telling us how emotional he got about it. And I'm in my office getting emotional about Lily starting kindergarten tomorrow. And if I talk about it for too long, I'm gonna get emotional in front of you. So we talk about stuff all the time. And then we have different threads for different topics. You know, different things that some of us may wanna talk about, but not everybody does. Anyways, we've got one for exercising. I can't tell you the name of it. There's a cuss word in it, but we've got one for exercising. And I started it. I started it back in January. I was like, guys, I'm fat now. I think I want to start eating well. I think I want to start exercising. Is anybody with me? And seven of them were like, yeah, let's do it. My one buddy, Tim, God bless him. He does not care. And I wish I could be more like Tim. But the rest of us were in there. And so we're encouraging each other every day, right? But eventually, I just stopped caring. I kind of fell off the wagon. Having a nine-month-old or an eight-month-pregnant wife will do that to you. And then so will having an infant and a three-month-old. It kind of takes you out of your regular rhythm. So it's been more difficult, and I kind of just lost my desire to do it, and to the point where they were daily talking about their workouts and the stuff that they're doing and yada, yada, yada. And I would just skip. Like, I wouldn't even listen. I would just fast-forward to the last one, hit play, skip to the end of that one, and so that those didn't show up as new, because I don't know. You people that just leave notifications on your phone, I don't know how you live with yourself. So I would have to go and just skip all the way through it, right? Ignoring it. And then I even became the devil on the shoulder of the people. They would share sometimes when I would listen, like, I didn't do anything today. I've been eating like crud lately. I just don't feel good about myself. And then I'd go out there and be like, come on over. It's great over here. There's barbecue and sweet tea. This is wonderful. Just buy larger fishing shirts and you're good. Like you can just let it all hang out. It's really, really great. It's good over here. But somewhere in that week and a half ago, my buddy got on there and he said, hey, I found a half marathon in Greenville and I think it would be fun if we would train for it together and try to run it together. And something about it, I don't know what it was. I don't know. I had some weakness that day and I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Like it caught me on a good day. And I said, let's do this. Let's do it. And they were all very surprised that I was into it. But now I think there's five or six of us who are going to do it. And I'm only a week and a half in and I'm just a slow lumbering mess. As a matter of fact, if you live in my neighborhood, Falls River and then Bedford or whatever, and you see me running, can you just do me a favor and avert your eyes? And we'll just both pretend like that never happened. Do not honk at me or wave. I do not want to know that you saw me. I'd just like to live in this world where no one can see me lumbering down the road. But it's been fun to get back to it and to begin to train and begin to exercise and share that with my buddies. And I feel more inspired now to do this than I have in a long time. And I really think it might stick. So barring injury, which is more of a factor than it's ever been in my life, Lord willing, I'll run that thing in February and I'm looking forward to doing that. I share that story because I believe that this is what Christian community does with us for the church. To be a Christian for any amount of time is to go through a season of wandering. It's to go through a season where I was once committed, I once cared very much about my spiritual health, I was once very consistent in going to church and going to small group and reading my Bible and praying on my own, and I can remember seasons of vibrancy in my life, but now I'm just, whatever you want to call it, I'm in a rut, I'm wandering off, I don't feel it right now, I just am not, I'm going through some things and I just not sure that I can really connect with God. I'm not really sure that's a thing that I want. To be a Christian is to have gone through a season of wandering and probably not just one. And what community does is it keeps us tethered to our faith, even in times when we're not necessarily very committed to our faith. I didn't leave that thread because I like my buddies. I wanted to know what they were talking about. I wanted the community there. Even though I wasn't engaged in what they were engaged in, even though I wasn't pursuing what they were pursuing, I didn't want to totally detach myself because I thought maybe one day I will. Plus, I want to know what my friends are talking about. I don't want to have FOMO. So I stayed in there. And then one day, because I was tethered to that group by the community in that group, something caught me right. And I said, yeah, I'm going to make that choice for my health or for my children. Church community does this too. As we're going through a season of wandering, maybe we're not feeling faith right now. Maybe we're not super committed to it. Maybe we're not doing the things in private that we know we ought to be doing, but we keep showing up because we love the people in our small group. We keep showing up because we love to serve on Sunday morning. We keep showing up because that's our community and we don't want to miss out and those are our people. And then one day when you're at church or your small group or you're having a conversation or one day God speaks to you. He shows you something. You have an experience that moves you. Something catches you right. And that's what clicks and you re-engage in your spiritual life and you begin to pursue Jesus again. Our community tethers us to God in a very real way. Don't raise your hand, but I would ask you, those of you who are Christians, has there been a season of your life where if you didn't have Christian brothers and sisters who loved you and who just accepted you, not who came after you and got onto you and tried to convict you for the decisions that you were making, but who simply loved you, have you had seasons in your life that if it weren't for your Christian community tethering you to your faith, that you would have walked away from it entirely? Yeah. Or you're not being honest. God places us in community because he knows there will be times when we wander, and when we do, he's tethering us about this wandering at the end of his book. he writes this, my brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Not only do we have brothers and sisters who love us as we begin to wander and tether us to our faith and kind of draw us back to God as God works on our souls to soften them back to himself. But we also have the opportunity in Christian community, in church community, to be the one that pulls back a wandering brother or sister. To be the one who just consistently loves, who just consistently shows up for, who just consistently says, I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to love you. I'm here to enjoy you. Not a project friendship, deep, meaningful friendship. When we express that with one another, when we express the kind of community that I've seen at Grace, we are used by God to tether people to their faith and draw them back towards him. You are a tool in his hand used to draw back a wondering brother or sister by simply maintaining community with people even if it feels like they're wandering. So those of you who have wandering friends, which, has there ever been an easier time than now to wander away from the church? Continue to love them. Continue to be that tether that lets them know anytime you want to come back, we're here, we love you. And you can be a brother or a sister that is blessed according to James as we do that. The community here is absolutely a huge way that God keeps us tethered to him and to our faith. Community is also an enormous tool in the hands of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit as they seek to comfort us. We're told in Psalms that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, that he saves those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we're at our lowest, God is at his closest. I've preached from stage many times, John 11, 35, the miracle of that verse. It's the shortest verse in the Bible that says that Jesus wept when he met Mary in her sorrow at the loss of her brother Lazarus. Jesus' response was to weep with her. And we get to preach and we get to claim and we get to know that we have a Jesus who weeps with us. And that's wonderful. But have you ever thought about how he does that? Have you ever thought about how God brings himself close to the brokenhearted? Will he bring his presence and his spirit close to the brokenhearted? Yes, absolutely he will. And he will speak into difficult times. Just yesterday, I was sitting on my porch swing and we've had a difficult couple of days and I felt pretty stressed. And I was just sitting there in the rain because that's what I love to do. And it was a good storm yesterday. And there was just this moment where God spoke some encouragement into my life. And it instantly gave me a peace. And so God will absolutely do that and comfort us in that way. But have you ever considered that the church community itself is also how God wraps his arms around us? Have you ever considered that our church community crying with us is also how Jesus weeps with us? Have you ever considered that that might be why Paul tells us to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn? Because that is the expression of the very body of Christ hurting with those who hurt. Jen told me as I was talking through this sermon with her, she said, you got to tell the Lisa story. And I'm actually glad she's not here. Jen's not here this morning, because we'd be a sobbing mess. But if you've been going here since the end of last year, at least, then you likely know that in December of 2020, December 29th of 2020, just to cap off a real humdinger of a year, we lost Jen's dad, John, to pancreatic cancer. That's who our son is named after. And so in the months prior, Jen had been down there a lot. They're located in Athens. Jen had been down there back and forth a lot. And at some point she came home. After Thanksgiving, she came back with me and we were home. And John has a brother-in-law named Edwin who's a doctor. And Edwin and Mary stayed with John. And Edwin told me, Nate, go back home, take your family. We don't really know what's going on with John. But when you need to be here, when it's time for family to be around him, we'll call you. I said, all right. So we came back. We were back for about a week. No, it was just a couple days. It wasn't even a week. And it was the Sunday of December 6th. And at the time, we weren't meeting in person because we'd had a COVID flare up, and so we were just chilling out for a little bit. And so I had to come that morning on December 6th, and we did a live service. So we had worship worship and then I was to preach, right? And five minutes before the service started, my phone rings and it's Edwin. And he says, you need to get down here. So I said, all right. So I called Jen. So we need to get down there. I'm going to go ahead and preach this sermon. And then we'll hop in the car and we'll go home. Let me tell you something. I have no idea what I preached December 6th. I have never been less present for a sermon in my whole life. If you watched it and got something out of it, the Holy Spirit is good, okay? Because my mind was not on that sermon. And I got done and things felt so urgent that I literally, and I never do this, I just pulled off my mic and everything. I set it down. I got right in my car and I drove away. Steve was still playing. The band was still going. Folks were still here. I just got in my car and I left. And when I got in my car, I texted Steve and Kyle because they were both here that morning. And I said, hey, I'm so sorry for leaving so quickly. Here's what's going on. We got to head home. And I go home. I get Jen and we're scrambling to get out the door. We scrambled to get out the door so quickly that to pack for this trip, I just opened up the biggest suitcase I have and dumped all my dirty clothes in it and then grabbed clean clothes and threw them in there, zipped it up, and we headed out the door. I can do laundry where I'm going. I don't know how long I'm going to be there. But that's the kind of urgency that we were trying to get out the door with. In the middle of that, somebody rings our doorbell. And we're like, who's ringing our doorbell on a Sunday morning? And we look, and it's Lisa Goldberg, Steve's wife. And she's at our door, and clearly Steve had called her or texted her and told her what was going on. And see, Lisa's mom passed away of pancreatic cancer a few years prior. Actually, right before, right as Steve and Lisa were moving here to become a part of Grace. And she knew the road that Jen was about to walk. So Jen goes and answers the door. And Lisa has a little gift bag prepared for her and hands it to her and just gives her a hug and starts crying. And Jen was telling me about it this week, and she said she can't even remember Lisa saying any words. Maybe I'm sorry. They just hugged for a really long time. And then we got in the car and we left. And that hug and those tears meant more to Jen in the following weeks than they did in the moment. Because in the moment, she didn't know the hell that she was about to walk through. But Lisa did because she had walked it. And so that provided her with comfort as she walked through that period. You can't tell me that that morning wasn't Jesus coming to our door and wrapping his arms around my wife. He did. That's how he weeps with us. That's how he comforts us. That's why he tells us to weep together. Because when we do those things, we're the hands and feet of God. We're the hands and feet of Jesus wrapping ourselves around people who are hurting. That's how God expresses his love to us. That's how we express ourselves as the body of Christ. He places us in community so that our community can comfort us when we need it. So that he can be close to the brokenhearted. So that we can experience having a God that weeps with us. That's what community does. And it also sustains us. And this is my favorite. Community sustains us. There's this great picture in Exodus. Exodus chapter 17. I'm just going to tell you the synopsis of it, but the story is in verses 8 through 16. I'm going to be a mess. David, can you go get me a tissue? Do you mind doing that? Thank you, sir. Oh, Wes is on it. Thanks, Wes. That's why Wes is an elder, because he does things like that. Oh. That's why Cindy's a resting elder. Thank you. All right, give me a second. I'm sorry. Especially if you're watching online. You're just going to watch me turn my back. All right. Does anybody else need some of these? I saw a couple of tears out there. In Exodus 17, there's a guy named Amalek who's brought his armies against Israel. Moses is the head of the nation at this point. Joshua is his general. Moses is too old to lead people into battle. And so Moses tells Joshua, you go down into the select some men, go down into this valley and you fight Amalek. And as you fight him, I will be up here and I will have my hands raised to God. And as long as my hands are raised to God, then you will win the day. And Joshua says, okay. So he goes down and he begins to fight Amalek. And as he's fighting Amalek, Moses is on the top of the mountain with his hands raised. And as his hands are raised, then what he said comes true. And God is with Joshua and Joshua is winning the battle. But battles are long and Moses is old. And I guarantee you, he had lived a life of shepherding for 40 years. If you wanted to have a hold your hands over your head contest, he would crush everybody in this room. But at one point or another, no matter how strong you are, you'd get fatigued. And he needed to take a rest and let the blood get back in his shoulders. And when he would rest, the army would begin to be defeated and the battle would go towards Amalek. And so he's in this struggle of trying to hold his hands up, but not having enough strength to do it. And they're losing the battle if he can't hold his hands up. So what happens? Well, his brother Aaron and his friend named Hur, H-U-R, are next to him and they find a rock and they put a rock behind him and they tell him to sit on it and then they stand. I love this picture. They stand next to him and they hold his hands up so that he doesn't have to anymore. That's the best picture of community in the Bible. Because each of you, your husband, your wife, your friend, your Christian, your son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, if you're a woman in this church who's married and you have children, you've got a marriage that you're holding up, that you're offering to God. You've got children that you're trusting to God. You've got concerns in your own life. You've got your own faith that you need to carry. You've got your own stresses and your own anxieties and your own worries, and you're facing those battles. And life is long, and I don't care how strong you are. At some point or another, your hands get tired. At some point or another, you think, I don't know if I can do it with this marriage. I don't know if I have the energy it takes to make this thing go. I just don't know if I can pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can continue to love these kids the way they need to be loved. I don't know what to do. I can't pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can walk in faith. I just can't see it. I have so many questions. God's disappointed me in these ways. I just don't know if I can keep doing this anymore. And when you're on your own, you're right, you can't. This is why we're placed in community, for our friends to come up beside us and grab our hands and say, hey, buddy, I got you right now. I will fight for your marriage right now. I will hold your hands up and fight for your faith right now. I will stand beside you and hold your hands up for your children and for your business and for your health and for your love of Christ right now. I will stand in this gap for you, and I will be the strength that you don't have. That's what community does for us. Our friends come alongside us, and they hold our hands up, and they give us the energy and the strength for the battle that we can't fight right now. And that's what community offers to others. This is why I think that community, this side of heaven, is the most powerful and effective tool that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit use to tether us to him, to comfort us, and to sustain us in our faith and the commitments that he's led us to making. And I'll end with this because I think this is important. Community is a choice. It's a choice. That kind of community, that kind of community where someone shows up at your door just to wrap their arms around you because they know what you're about to walk through, that kind of community that grabs your hand and holds you up when you can't do it, that kind of community that loves you when you're wandering and keeps you tethered to your faith so that you can wander back. That kind of community, that doesn't happen by default, man. We don't just stumble into that. That kind of community we show up for. Sometimes in small groups, I'll talk about it in a second, we sign up for. And then we let the Lord do his work in bringing us together and knitting lives together. We have to choose that community. Just last night, some friends of ours had a birthday party. And our childcare fell through, and so we had to figure out what to do. And so we decided that Jen was going to go to dinner, and they were going to go to drinks afterwards. Jen was going to go to dinner, and then when she got home, I was going to go and have a drink or two with our friends and then come back. That's what we decided we were going to do. Well, Jen stayed at dinner until like 9.15. I needed her to be back at like 6.15. Do you think, listen, I don't know how well you guys all know me. You think I wanted to go anywhere at 9.30 on Saturday night? No, I was in my gym shorts with paint on them and a big baggy t-shirt and Crocs and I was unshowered. I didn't want to go anywhere. But I also knew that I couldn't get up here today and preach about community if I wasn't going to prioritize my own. So they got Saturday night and ate and I showed up just how I was dressed. And we had ourselves a grand old time over at, I think, Tonic in Wake Forest. We have to choose community. It's not always convenient. You're not always going to want to go to small group. You're not always going to want to prioritize it. Parents of elementary and middle school age kids, you'll never be in a busier season in your whole life. It's so hard right now to prioritize small group. Do it. Community is a choice. It's an essential tool that God has placed in our life to bring us closer to him, to experience his love of us. In a minute, I'm going to talk more about small groups. But I want to encourage you here at the end of the sermon to sign up for them. If you're not in one, join one. Step into this community and let's begin to pursue it together and let's let God use this place to further connect us to him. Let's pray. God, thank you for you. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for who you are. God, thank you for our friends. Thank you for the people who love us, who we get to share life with. Thank you for our brothers and sisters who draw us back in our wandering. Thank you for the ones who comfort us. Thank you for the ones who sustain us and hold up our hands when we are too weak to do it. God, give us the desire and the conviction to choose community. To choose to live our faith with those around us. Remove any obstacles that we might have, whether fabricated or real, and knit us together, God, as a church family, that we might love one another well, that we might express your love for one another well. That we might support and sustain one another well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else? And what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day they're not nearly as big of a deal? What are our big rocks And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Isn't it cute in that video how I assumed that we were just charging right back into normal? And then here we are in masks again. Boy, the naivety as we roll into each wave of this is pretty funny, especially to think back. I can remember back in March of 2020 having conversations. Joe, the moderator of our board, called me in between the 8th and the 15th of March, and he said, hey, I think maybe we need to take a break. Maybe we can't meet in person this Sunday. And I was like, Joe, this is a big decision. I don't know if we should do this. And he goes, no, man, I really think we need to. And I'm like, Joe, listen to me. This is not going to be like a two-week thing. This could go well into April. So who the heck knows? But it's good to see everybody. Thank you for doing your part. And this is the last part of our series called Big Rocks, which if you've been here all four weeks or you've watched online all four weeks and you've watched that intro video of me four times in a row, good for you. That's serious partner of the year stuff right there. This week, as we talk about our priorities in life and approaching this fall, we're going to talk about the idea and the topic of community. And if you've been in church for any amount of time, you've heard a sermon on community. If you've been here, you've probably heard me talk about the importance of community. In our mission statement, we emphasize community by saying that grace exists to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. So you might be tempted when I say that the sermon this week is on community, you might be tempted to kind of glaze over and go, yep, got it. Christian community is important. I'm going to do it. Good. And then start thinking about whatever you've got going on the rest of the day, lunch plans, or if you're me trying to get the grass cut before the thunderstorm start, whatever it is you've got going on, you might be tempted to take your head there when I say that the sermon is going to be on community because we might feel like we kind of get it. But if that's you, I want to encourage you to lean in this morning. Because I hope that what we'll do is I'll leave here or I'll turn off our TVs, wherever we might be consuming this, that we will finish this experience this morning or whenever you're listening, thinking differently about the power and efficacy of community than when we started. I hope that we will be inspired to pursue it as if our lives depended on it. I think the idea of community is incredibly important. And if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the Gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament and you pay attention, what you'll find is a lot of we's and ours and collective you. Like when Paul writes in the letters that he says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And he says, I pray for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. That's not you as an individual. That's a collective you as the church in Rome or Philippi or Ephesus. The Gospels are written to an audience, are written to a church, are written to a group of people. You find in the New Testament very few personal, singular pronouns. You find very you singular yous. You should do this, you should do that, God did this, whatever it is for just you. You don't find those in the New Testament. What you find in the New Testament is collective we and are. The New Testament assumes that your faith will be communal. It assumes that you have other Christians around you walking in the same direction you are pursuing, the same Jesus that you are pursuing. As a matter of fact, if you go to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that's not in your notes, so you can write that down if you want to. You can turn there if you get bored at some point in the sermon, which is likely to happen. Turn to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, and make sure that I'm not making this stuff up. That is the quintessential church passage. There is no pastor who has preached more than two sermons on community and has not based one of the sermons in that passage. It is a quintessential church passage. It describes what the church looked like and did in its very infancy. As soon as Christ ascends and we have Pentecost and Peter and the disciples share the gospel, we see 3,000 people come to faith that day. That's the birth of the church. And then Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47 describes what the church did and how it behaved in its infancy. It is the barometer by which all church for the rest of time is measured. And if you read those verses, what you find is collective wheeze. It's communal. The church did this and they committed themselves to the apostle teaching. They devoted themselves to prayer. They met in one another's homes day by day. They were together all the time pursuing teaching, sharing meals, praying together, learning together, pursuing Jesus together. It is a communal activity. Your faith, if you have it, is quintessentially communal, which is why there's a little bit of an issue in evangelical churches with this phrase that we like to use sometimes. Raise your hand if you've ever heard the phrase that Christianity is about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Have you ever heard that? Now listen. Christianity is about a personal faith. It's about a personal belief that God is the creator and author of the universe, that to reconcile his creation to himself, namely you, he sent his son to die in your place, and we place our faith in Jesus' death on the cross, and we place our hope in his resurrection on Easter, that one day we will be united with our God and reunited with those who also have faith in our Jesus, and we have a hope that will not put us to shame. To be a Christian, you need to individually believe that and have faith in that, and one of the remarkable things about Christianity is that our God does offer us a personal relationship with him. But listen to me closely. We must have an individual faith, but your faith is not about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ because your relationship with Jesus Christ is not personal. It is communal. We see it over and over again in Scripture. It is a communal faith. It is not just your business. It is our business as a church. We don't see that phrase, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, pop up in the Bible. We see a necessity for an individually claimed faith. But make no mistake about it, your faith is quintessentially communal. It is, I would argue, it is impossible to grow close to Jesus and have a vibrant walk with him totally by yourself. To take your Bible and a prayer book and to wander off in the desert like these mystical people who have existed before us that we somehow, we look at and we think that they were the ones who had nailed faith. And I don't think any of those existed, but the people who just go off by themselves and just totally ensconced in God's word and in prayer, and it's just them and God. you can't have a vibrant walk with Jesus doing that because loving Jesus requires you to love others. If your love from Jesus does not cause you to pour out love onto other people, then you are not expressing the love that Jesus has lavished on you. You are bottling that up. You are keeping that to yourself. To live a non-communal faith is fundamentally self-centered. And we miss out on who Jesus is by not lavishing his love on others in the same way that he loves us. John tells us in his letters at the end of the Bible that if we love Jesus, then we will love others. The Christian faith was not designed to live alone. I think that there are parts of Jesus that you find in loving other people. We cannot come to know Christ in the way that he wants to be known if we are trying to do it void of loving others and serving others and doing his work. This is why the mission statement at Grace is connecting people to Jesus first, but also connecting people to people. Because your walk with God will not be as vibrant and as healthy as it can be if it is void of community as you share your faith. So community and our faiths is vitally important. It's why I think that community is God's primary tool for tethering, comforting, and sustaining his children. Community is God's primary tool for tethering his children to him, for comforting his children in their time of need and for sustaining them in their walks and in the commitments that he's led you to make. Now, I would offer you a caveat here. I need to, if you have notes, if you're a note taker, please write this in your notes. Community is God's primary tool dash outside of heaven. It's God's primary tool this side of heaven to tether us and to sustain us and to comfort us. Because he tethers us with his son. He sustains us with his spirit. He comforts us with Jesus as he weeps with us. But these things, this community I'm going to show you is the way that God gives himself time to work in your life to bring you to a place where you're walking with him. It's the way that God the Father throws his arms around you in times of trouble. It's the way that God comes beside you and sustains you when your faith and your commitments are faltering. So I do not at any point want to replace the work that the Holy Spirit and God the Father and Jesus are doing in our lives and moving in us, but I do want us to see that community is often the tool that they use to work powerfully and effectively in our lives. I say that it's the primary tool for tethering, for kind of keeping us attached to the faith, even at times when we might be wandering off. With that in mind, I'm going to share something with you that I really am not sure that I'm all the way ready to share, because if I share it and then I don't do it, I'm a failure and a quitter. But last week, I committed with some friends of mine to run a half marathon at the end of February. I committed to do this because I'm fat now, and I need to. Somebody asked me before the service, why is your shirt tucked down? Like, are you being serious today? I'm like, no, no, I'm fat. I need to be able to blouse a little bit for the camera, you know? But I'm sharing that with you because if you know me well, you know that I've got a group of really good buddies. One guy I've been best friends with since I was five years old, so we've been friends for 35 years. And then there's eight of us total. We've been friends together, all of us, for at least 20 years. And we talk on this app called Marco Polo. It's probably for high school girls, but we love it and we use it to talk back and forth. We talk every day. And so there's eight of us and we legit, we talk every day. Whatever's going on in the world, whatever's happening in sports, whatever's happening in our lives, we talk about it. Just this morning, I was watching my friend, he dropped his daughter off at college yesterday and was telling us how emotional he got about it. And I'm in my office getting emotional about Lily starting kindergarten tomorrow. And if I talk about it for too long, I'm gonna get emotional in front of you. So we talk about stuff all the time. And then we have different threads for different topics. You know, different things that some of us may wanna talk about, but not everybody does. Anyways, we've got one for exercising. I can't tell you the name of it. There's a cuss word in it, but we've got one for exercising. And I started it. I started it back in January. I was like, guys, I'm fat now. I think I want to start eating well. I think I want to start exercising. Is anybody with me? And seven of them were like, yeah, let's do it. My one buddy, Tim, God bless him. He does not care. And I wish I could be more like Tim. But the rest of us were in there. And so we're encouraging each other every day, right? But eventually, I just stopped caring. I kind of fell off the wagon. Having a nine-month-old or an eight-month-pregnant wife will do that to you. And then so will having an infant and a three-month-old. It kind of takes you out of your regular rhythm. So it's been more difficult, and I kind of just lost my desire to do it, and to the point where they were daily talking about their workouts and the stuff that they're doing and yada, yada, yada. And I would just skip. Like, I wouldn't even listen. I would just fast-forward to the last one, hit play, skip to the end of that one, and so that those didn't show up as new, because I don't know. You people that just leave notifications on your phone, I don't know how you live with yourself. So I would have to go and just skip all the way through it, right? Ignoring it. And then I even became the devil on the shoulder of the people. They would share sometimes when I would listen, like, I didn't do anything today. I've been eating like crud lately. I just don't feel good about myself. And then I'd go out there and be like, come on over. It's great over here. There's barbecue and sweet tea. This is wonderful. Just buy larger fishing shirts and you're good. Like you can just let it all hang out. It's really, really great. It's good over here. But somewhere in that week and a half ago, my buddy got on there and he said, hey, I found a half marathon in Greenville and I think it would be fun if we would train for it together and try to run it together. And something about it, I don't know what it was. I don't know. I had some weakness that day and I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Like it caught me on a good day. And I said, let's do this. Let's do it. And they were all very surprised that I was into it. But now I think there's five or six of us who are going to do it. And I'm only a week and a half in and I'm just a slow lumbering mess. As a matter of fact, if you live in my neighborhood, Falls River and then Bedford or whatever, and you see me running, can you just do me a favor and avert your eyes? And we'll just both pretend like that never happened. Do not honk at me or wave. I do not want to know that you saw me. I'd just like to live in this world where no one can see me lumbering down the road. But it's been fun to get back to it and to begin to train and begin to exercise and share that with my buddies. And I feel more inspired now to do this than I have in a long time. And I really think it might stick. So barring injury, which is more of a factor than it's ever been in my life, Lord willing, I'll run that thing in February and I'm looking forward to doing that. I share that story because I believe that this is what Christian community does with us for the church. To be a Christian for any amount of time is to go through a season of wandering. It's to go through a season where I was once committed, I once cared very much about my spiritual health, I was once very consistent in going to church and going to small group and reading my Bible and praying on my own, and I can remember seasons of vibrancy in my life, but now I'm just, whatever you want to call it, I'm in a rut, I'm wandering off, I don't feel it right now, I just am not, I'm going through some things and I just not sure that I can really connect with God. I'm not really sure that's a thing that I want. To be a Christian is to have gone through a season of wandering and probably not just one. And what community does is it keeps us tethered to our faith, even in times when we're not necessarily very committed to our faith. I didn't leave that thread because I like my buddies. I wanted to know what they were talking about. I wanted the community there. Even though I wasn't engaged in what they were engaged in, even though I wasn't pursuing what they were pursuing, I didn't want to totally detach myself because I thought maybe one day I will. Plus, I want to know what my friends are talking about. I don't want to have FOMO. So I stayed in there. And then one day, because I was tethered to that group by the community in that group, something caught me right. And I said, yeah, I'm going to make that choice for my health or for my children. Church community does this too. As we're going through a season of wandering, maybe we're not feeling faith right now. Maybe we're not super committed to it. Maybe we're not doing the things in private that we know we ought to be doing, but we keep showing up because we love the people in our small group. We keep showing up because we love to serve on Sunday morning. We keep showing up because that's our community and we don't want to miss out and those are our people. And then one day when you're at church or your small group or you're having a conversation or one day God speaks to you. He shows you something. You have an experience that moves you. Something catches you right. And that's what clicks and you re-engage in your spiritual life and you begin to pursue Jesus again. Our community tethers us to God in a very real way. Don't raise your hand, but I would ask you, those of you who are Christians, has there been a season of your life where if you didn't have Christian brothers and sisters who loved you and who just accepted you, not who came after you and got onto you and tried to convict you for the decisions that you were making, but who simply loved you, have you had seasons in your life that if it weren't for your Christian community tethering you to your faith, that you would have walked away from it entirely? Yeah. Or you're not being honest. God places us in community because he knows there will be times when we wander, and when we do, he's tethering us about this wandering at the end of his book. he writes this, my brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Not only do we have brothers and sisters who love us as we begin to wander and tether us to our faith and kind of draw us back to God as God works on our souls to soften them back to himself. But we also have the opportunity in Christian community, in church community, to be the one that pulls back a wandering brother or sister. To be the one who just consistently loves, who just consistently shows up for, who just consistently says, I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to love you. I'm here to enjoy you. Not a project friendship, deep, meaningful friendship. When we express that with one another, when we express the kind of community that I've seen at Grace, we are used by God to tether people to their faith and draw them back towards him. You are a tool in his hand used to draw back a wondering brother or sister by simply maintaining community with people even if it feels like they're wandering. So those of you who have wandering friends, which, has there ever been an easier time than now to wander away from the church? Continue to love them. Continue to be that tether that lets them know anytime you want to come back, we're here, we love you. And you can be a brother or a sister that is blessed according to James as we do that. The community here is absolutely a huge way that God keeps us tethered to him and to our faith. Community is also an enormous tool in the hands of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit as they seek to comfort us. We're told in Psalms that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, that he saves those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we're at our lowest, God is at his closest. I've preached from stage many times, John 11, 35, the miracle of that verse. It's the shortest verse in the Bible that says that Jesus wept when he met Mary in her sorrow at the loss of her brother Lazarus. Jesus' response was to weep with her. And we get to preach and we get to claim and we get to know that we have a Jesus who weeps with us. And that's wonderful. But have you ever thought about how he does that? Have you ever thought about how God brings himself close to the brokenhearted? Will he bring his presence and his spirit close to the brokenhearted? Yes, absolutely he will. And he will speak into difficult times. Just yesterday, I was sitting on my porch swing and we've had a difficult couple of days and I felt pretty stressed. And I was just sitting there in the rain because that's what I love to do. And it was a good storm yesterday. And there was just this moment where God spoke some encouragement into my life. And it instantly gave me a peace. And so God will absolutely do that and comfort us in that way. But have you ever considered that the church community itself is also how God wraps his arms around us? Have you ever considered that our church community crying with us is also how Jesus weeps with us? Have you ever considered that that might be why Paul tells us to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn? Because that is the expression of the very body of Christ hurting with those who hurt. Jen told me as I was talking through this sermon with her, she said, you got to tell the Lisa story. And I'm actually glad she's not here. Jen's not here this morning, because we'd be a sobbing mess. But if you've been going here since the end of last year, at least, then you likely know that in December of 2020, December 29th of 2020, just to cap off a real humdinger of a year, we lost Jen's dad, John, to pancreatic cancer. That's who our son is named after. And so in the months prior, Jen had been down there a lot. They're located in Athens. Jen had been down there back and forth a lot. And at some point she came home. After Thanksgiving, she came back with me and we were home. And John has a brother-in-law named Edwin who's a doctor. And Edwin and Mary stayed with John. And Edwin told me, Nate, go back home, take your family. We don't really know what's going on with John. But when you need to be here, when it's time for family to be around him, we'll call you. I said, all right. So we came back. We were back for about a week. No, it was just a couple days. It wasn't even a week. And it was the Sunday of December 6th. And at the time, we weren't meeting in person because we'd had a COVID flare up, and so we were just chilling out for a little bit. And so I had to come that morning on December 6th, and we did a live service. So we had worship worship and then I was to preach, right? And five minutes before the service started, my phone rings and it's Edwin. And he says, you need to get down here. So I said, all right. So I called Jen. So we need to get down there. I'm going to go ahead and preach this sermon. And then we'll hop in the car and we'll go home. Let me tell you something. I have no idea what I preached December 6th. I have never been less present for a sermon in my whole life. If you watched it and got something out of it, the Holy Spirit is good, okay? Because my mind was not on that sermon. And I got done and things felt so urgent that I literally, and I never do this, I just pulled off my mic and everything. I set it down. I got right in my car and I drove away. Steve was still playing. The band was still going. Folks were still here. I just got in my car and I left. And when I got in my car, I texted Steve and Kyle because they were both here that morning. And I said, hey, I'm so sorry for leaving so quickly. Here's what's going on. We got to head home. And I go home. I get Jen and we're scrambling to get out the door. We scrambled to get out the door so quickly that to pack for this trip, I just opened up the biggest suitcase I have and dumped all my dirty clothes in it and then grabbed clean clothes and threw them in there, zipped it up, and we headed out the door. I can do laundry where I'm going. I don't know how long I'm going to be there. But that's the kind of urgency that we were trying to get out the door with. In the middle of that, somebody rings our doorbell. And we're like, who's ringing our doorbell on a Sunday morning? And we look, and it's Lisa Goldberg, Steve's wife. And she's at our door, and clearly Steve had called her or texted her and told her what was going on. And see, Lisa's mom passed away of pancreatic cancer a few years prior. Actually, right before, right as Steve and Lisa were moving here to become a part of Grace. And she knew the road that Jen was about to walk. So Jen goes and answers the door. And Lisa has a little gift bag prepared for her and hands it to her and just gives her a hug and starts crying. And Jen was telling me about it this week, and she said she can't even remember Lisa saying any words. Maybe I'm sorry. They just hugged for a really long time. And then we got in the car and we left. And that hug and those tears meant more to Jen in the following weeks than they did in the moment. Because in the moment, she didn't know the hell that she was about to walk through. But Lisa did because she had walked it. And so that provided her with comfort as she walked through that period. You can't tell me that that morning wasn't Jesus coming to our door and wrapping his arms around my wife. He did. That's how he weeps with us. That's how he comforts us. That's why he tells us to weep together. Because when we do those things, we're the hands and feet of God. We're the hands and feet of Jesus wrapping ourselves around people who are hurting. That's how God expresses his love to us. That's how we express ourselves as the body of Christ. He places us in community so that our community can comfort us when we need it. So that he can be close to the brokenhearted. So that we can experience having a God that weeps with us. That's what community does. And it also sustains us. And this is my favorite. Community sustains us. There's this great picture in Exodus. Exodus chapter 17. I'm just going to tell you the synopsis of it, but the story is in verses 8 through 16. I'm going to be a mess. David, can you go get me a tissue? Do you mind doing that? Thank you, sir. Oh, Wes is on it. Thanks, Wes. That's why Wes is an elder, because he does things like that. Oh. That's why Cindy's a resting elder. Thank you. All right, give me a second. I'm sorry. Especially if you're watching online. You're just going to watch me turn my back. All right. Does anybody else need some of these? I saw a couple of tears out there. In Exodus 17, there's a guy named Amalek who's brought his armies against Israel. Moses is the head of the nation at this point. Joshua is his general. Moses is too old to lead people into battle. And so Moses tells Joshua, you go down into the select some men, go down into this valley and you fight Amalek. And as you fight him, I will be up here and I will have my hands raised to God. And as long as my hands are raised to God, then you will win the day. And Joshua says, okay. So he goes down and he begins to fight Amalek. And as he's fighting Amalek, Moses is on the top of the mountain with his hands raised. And as his hands are raised, then what he said comes true. And God is with Joshua and Joshua is winning the battle. But battles are long and Moses is old. And I guarantee you, he had lived a life of shepherding for 40 years. If you wanted to have a hold your hands over your head contest, he would crush everybody in this room. But at one point or another, no matter how strong you are, you'd get fatigued. And he needed to take a rest and let the blood get back in his shoulders. And when he would rest, the army would begin to be defeated and the battle would go towards Amalek. And so he's in this struggle of trying to hold his hands up, but not having enough strength to do it. And they're losing the battle if he can't hold his hands up. So what happens? Well, his brother Aaron and his friend named Hur, H-U-R, are next to him and they find a rock and they put a rock behind him and they tell him to sit on it and then they stand. I love this picture. They stand next to him and they hold his hands up so that he doesn't have to anymore. That's the best picture of community in the Bible. Because each of you, your husband, your wife, your friend, your Christian, your son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, if you're a woman in this church who's married and you have children, you've got a marriage that you're holding up, that you're offering to God. You've got children that you're trusting to God. You've got concerns in your own life. You've got your own faith that you need to carry. You've got your own stresses and your own anxieties and your own worries, and you're facing those battles. And life is long, and I don't care how strong you are. At some point or another, your hands get tired. At some point or another, you think, I don't know if I can do it with this marriage. I don't know if I have the energy it takes to make this thing go. I just don't know if I can pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can continue to love these kids the way they need to be loved. I don't know what to do. I can't pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can walk in faith. I just can't see it. I have so many questions. God's disappointed me in these ways. I just don't know if I can keep doing this anymore. And when you're on your own, you're right, you can't. This is why we're placed in community, for our friends to come up beside us and grab our hands and say, hey, buddy, I got you right now. I will fight for your marriage right now. I will hold your hands up and fight for your faith right now. I will stand beside you and hold your hands up for your children and for your business and for your health and for your love of Christ right now. I will stand in this gap for you, and I will be the strength that you don't have. That's what community does for us. Our friends come alongside us, and they hold our hands up, and they give us the energy and the strength for the battle that we can't fight right now. And that's what community offers to others. This is why I think that community, this side of heaven, is the most powerful and effective tool that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit use to tether us to him, to comfort us, and to sustain us in our faith and the commitments that he's led us to making. And I'll end with this because I think this is important. Community is a choice. It's a choice. That kind of community, that kind of community where someone shows up at your door just to wrap their arms around you because they know what you're about to walk through, that kind of community that grabs your hand and holds you up when you can't do it, that kind of community that loves you when you're wandering and keeps you tethered to your faith so that you can wander back. That kind of community, that doesn't happen by default, man. We don't just stumble into that. That kind of community we show up for. Sometimes in small groups, I'll talk about it in a second, we sign up for. And then we let the Lord do his work in bringing us together and knitting lives together. We have to choose that community. Just last night, some friends of ours had a birthday party. And our childcare fell through, and so we had to figure out what to do. And so we decided that Jen was going to go to dinner, and they were going to go to drinks afterwards. Jen was going to go to dinner, and then when she got home, I was going to go and have a drink or two with our friends and then come back. That's what we decided we were going to do. Well, Jen stayed at dinner until like 9.15. I needed her to be back at like 6.15. Do you think, listen, I don't know how well you guys all know me. You think I wanted to go anywhere at 9.30 on Saturday night? No, I was in my gym shorts with paint on them and a big baggy t-shirt and Crocs and I was unshowered. I didn't want to go anywhere. But I also knew that I couldn't get up here today and preach about community if I wasn't going to prioritize my own. So they got Saturday night and ate and I showed up just how I was dressed. And we had ourselves a grand old time over at, I think, Tonic in Wake Forest. We have to choose community. It's not always convenient. You're not always going to want to go to small group. You're not always going to want to prioritize it. Parents of elementary and middle school age kids, you'll never be in a busier season in your whole life. It's so hard right now to prioritize small group. Do it. Community is a choice. It's an essential tool that God has placed in our life to bring us closer to him, to experience his love of us. In a minute, I'm going to talk more about small groups. But I want to encourage you here at the end of the sermon to sign up for them. If you're not in one, join one. Step into this community and let's begin to pursue it together and let's let God use this place to further connect us to him. Let's pray. God, thank you for you. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for who you are. God, thank you for our friends. Thank you for the people who love us, who we get to share life with. Thank you for our brothers and sisters who draw us back in our wandering. Thank you for the ones who comfort us. Thank you for the ones who sustain us and hold up our hands when we are too weak to do it. God, give us the desire and the conviction to choose community. To choose to live our faith with those around us. Remove any obstacles that we might have, whether fabricated or real, and knit us together, God, as a church family, that we might love one another well, that we might express your love for one another well. That we might support and sustain one another well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
