Acts

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

All right, well, like I said, good morning. It's good to be here, and I'm excited that you're here on this October Sunday. We've got a team down in Mexico now. We're gonna have a chance to catch up with them a little bit. Connor's gonna tell us a little bit more about what they're doing after the service, but I'm excited about that team. I'm gonna fly down there and join them on Tuesday of this week. But right now, we're gonna focus on the sixth part of our series called Feast. We did it. We made it. We've gone through the other five festivals in the Old Testament. We've arrived at the final one. This one is called the Feast of Weeks, or it's also known as Pentecost. It's the end of the first fruits celebration. Now, the trick here is you're thinking to yourself, why in the world do I care about the Feast of Weeks? This is the first time I've ever shown up for a sermon at a church, and they said, good news, everyone, we're talking about the Feast of Weeks from the Old Testament. So here's the thing. I think that if we learn what's happening here in the Feast of Weeks, if we learn what they're celebrating, then it can impact our life right away. It can impact the way that we understand that God loves us. It can impact the way we go about our days, and it can impact the way that we understand the Bible. If you've spent any time at Grace, you've heard me say that one of the most, not one of the most, the most important habit that anyone can ever develop is to spend time every day in God's Word and to spend time in prayer. The most important habit we can ever develop, eating well, exercising, being mindful, sleeping well, reading, whatever it is, any other habit, I would put this up against that one and say, this is the best one that any person could ever adopt is to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. So if we're going to do that, it's incumbent upon us to understand the Bible. And what we're talking about today, I think, breathes fresh and essential life into our understanding of scriptures. And if we get it, will unlock for us a lot of the meaning of the New Testament. I would argue that the New Testament is not possible to be understood without the principles that we're talking about today. That's why I think the Feast of Weeks is so very important. Now, the Feast of Weeks, we see in Deuteronomy that it originally commemorated, it was a time to remember being in bondage or being in captivity. Over time, they looked at the timing of it and it became a celebration of something else because the Feast of Weeks is locked into the other spring festivals. The other spring festivals, for those who don't know, just so we catch up, is first Passover, and then that's on the Sabbath Friday, and then it starts on Friday night, and then that Sunday is the Feast of First Fruits. There's a timing thing there. It's two, three days after, and then you count 50 days from that period, from that time, and you arrive at the last holiday in the spring calendar, the Feast of Weeks, known as Pentecost. It's 50 days and counting. Penta means 50, and so in the Old Testament, it was known as Pentecost. Now, some of you know your Bible well enough that you're jumping to Pentecost in the New Testament. You know what that is, and Acts, we're not there yet. We'll get there. You're smart. But we're not there yet, okay? This is where we are. And what they realized after some years is that there wasn't a significant event that happened to be timed up perfectly with the Feast of Weeks and Pentecost. And that was the receiving of the law. And so traditionally, the Feast of Weeks has celebrated the reception of the law. You've got notes there in front of you. We handed those out. Obviously, we're not going to put those up this week. We didn't need one more thing to try to not mess up. But I'm going to say enough things that you can fill in your notes if you need to. So Feast of Weeks celebrates the reception of the law. And that timeline that you have at the top of your notes is really important. Now, why was it such a big deal to receive the law? Why did the Jewish people celebrate this every year? Well, one rabbi said that the law is so essential that it's what makes Jews Jewish, that following the law is what makes Jews Jewish. In it, it's their essence. It's who they are. Tradition says that the law was given in all 70 known languages, but the Jewish people were the only people that decided to take on the mantle of the law and begin to try to follow it. So first, the law gave them their identity. That's why it's a big deal. Another reason it's a big deal, I don't know if you guys have ever thought about this. I spend time with the Bible and try to think about stuff like this because I kind of get paid to do it. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer in God before the law, before the scripture, before the Bible? To just be in Egypt and to know that there is a God. I'm pretty sure there's a God. He seems to be pretty tight with Moses. When Moses says stuff that usually comes from God, he encountered a bush one time. And so now he's telling us what to do. And I feel like that's authoritative. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer before the law, before the Bible, before websites had statements of faith, right? Like if you're new to Grace or if you've checked out a church recently, one of the first things other church people do before they go to a church is they go to the website and then they click on statement of faith and they go, do these people agree with most of the things that I think, right? So that when they go to church, they kind of know what they're stepping into. Can you imagine just visiting someplace blindly? Can you imagine going to a church and the pastor's preaching and he doesn't have the Bible? There's no authority. There's nothing to check him on. I'm just telling you what I think is a good idea, what I heard from this guru in the mountains this one time, and now I'm telling you that this is the gospel truth. Can you imagine how murky and how confusing and how difficult that might be to try to follow and please a God that you know exists, but you're not sure how? I think it would feel like I felt at my old job, Greystone Church, one time. When I was at Greystone, I was the small groups pastor, and I was in charge of student ministry. I was in no way talented at graphic design or content creation. Yet, that's what I got assigned to do this one time. My boss, the lead pastor, Jonathan, he came to me and said, Nate, I want you to design a booklet that has all the information that somebody would need to know about Greystone Church. I want you to just put it together, do pictures, summaries, do a picture of Sunday morning worship, tell them what that's about, give them the mission of the church, student ministry, children's ministry. I want you to put this together and make it look nice. We're going to put it on the information table, and then when somebody new visits the church, we'll just be able to hand it to them, and they can know everything need to know about Greystone. And I'm like, all right, great. You got the right man for the job. I'm gonna knock this out of the park. So for the next two weeks, I actually worked and I tried hard at this. And I had my friend come in and they took pictures and I assembled the document. I figured out how to make it the right size, how to make it like a square, I think, is the shape that I went with. And there was pictures, and there was captions, and there was someone dynamically leading worship, and then a paragraph underneath about what worship means to us, and a verse to go along with it, and then the preaching, and then the small groups, and why we do that, and here's our vision for small groups. And it was excellent. And then I had to go print it out. And I realized, I don't know, I don't know if you guys have ever encountered this. I don't know how to make the printer do the thing I need it to do. Like, I don't know. I need it to print out in a square book that's folded. That's what I need. And what it's giving me is eight and a half by 11 that's not folded and not square. I don't know what to do. So we did like 200 of these things all day on the Saturday before because I didn't want to mess it up. It was due Sunday morning. I didn't want to let anybody down. And so I fear failure. That is my main driver. So like if you'll do this, it'd be great. I'll never do it. But if you don't do this, you will fail. I will stay up 48 hours to get it done. So I'm hand stapling each one of these things. I'm measuring them out and hand cutting to eight and a half by 11 and the borders around the whole thing and then folding them myself, like nice and neat. I get it done. I array them on the information table. Look at what Nate did. And then we get there Sunday morning, very proud of what I've just done. And Jonathan gets there. And I go, hey, dude, I finished these. Did you see them? And he takes a look at it. He's like, oh, yeah, that's good. Good job, man. Thanks. And he sets that down. About five minutes later, I look over, and the volunteers that day have been instructed to just sweep those into the trash can. Just throw them all away. These are garbage. And listen, you think that's mean. That was the right choice. Those things were terrible. They were, I knew as I was cutting them, I can't believe this. This looks like an eighth grade art project with someone with no talent. Like this is awful. And I knew it was awful. And really, I was grateful because in the decision to throw those away, he saved me the shame that was going to come from everyone discovering that, oh, isn't that sweet that Nate did these? Like, I didn't need that in my life. So it sounds mean, but he actually did me a favor, right? And then he put Kyle on it. Like three weeks later, there's this, not that Kyle. Kyle's not good at that stuff. Another guy named Kyle who is good at that stuff. Kyle's the student pastor here. He used to work with me at Greystone. But we had a worship pastor there named Kyle, and he was good at that stuff. He put it all together, and it was this nice glossy color pamphlet that unfolded and had minimal words and maximum pictures and looked way better. And Jonathan was like, great job, Kyle. And I think they still have that sitting over there, okay? Here's the thing. I didn't have the direction or the competence to do what I needed to do. I was groping in the dark to try to do a good job at this assignment, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I didn't know what he had in mind and I was ill-equipped to get it done. I did not have the talent to make it happen. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the law. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the Bible. Just this loose idea that we're supposed to obey him, we're supposed to love. I think we should probably love our neighbors. I think we should probably not steal things. This all seems good. But then in the nuances of the day-to-day, how do I please this God? I am ill-equipped and the mission is undefined. I don't know. And so the law brings clarity to a place that was unclear. The law says, okay, you want to be right with me? You want to know what it takes to please me? Here are the rules. There's 10 of them. The law communicates. Now, this is not what God communicated, but this is what they heard. And over time, this is what the law came to communicate. And this is actually in your notes if you want to write it down. The law came to communicate, if you obey me, I will love you. You want some clarity? You want to know what you need to do to please the God that talks to Moses? You want to know what you need to do day in and day out? Then here's the law. Here's what you need to do. If you do this, I will love you. And then the Jewish tradition, the rabbis, what they would do is the law is here. The line is here. Do not cross this line. So what they would do to make extra sure that they never crossed the line and faltered in the law is that they would draw their own line back here. And then somebody else would go, oh, that's not far enough. And then they would keep backing up and keep backing up and keep backing up so that they would stay away from this. And so God continued to add more laws like the fine print undergirding the other laws, like honor your father and mother. Here's the 38 laws that will help you do that. Honor the Sabbath. Here's the 150 laws about the Sabbath. And so over the course of history and in the book of Leviticus, we have over 630 laws that they accrued, and they lived according to the law. And so they celebrated this each year when they celebrated the Feast of Weeks at the conclusion of Pentecost, 50 days after the Feast of Firstfruits, because it gave them clarity. It gave them their heritage. It made Jews Jewish. It showed that God loved them and was communicating with them, and it gave them a clear path to be right with their Creator. The problem with the law is really twofold. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders frustration. Legalism. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders legalism. It engenders legalism because now our spirituality is defined by how well we follow the rules. Some of us have been in environments like this. I can remember growing up in the 90s in evangelical world in high school. For me, I don't know how it was in your high schools, but for me in the context that I grew up in Atlanta, if you're in high school and you don't do things you shouldn't do with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't cuss, and you don't drink, and you don't smoke weed, you don't do those four things, and you do go to church, you're an excellent human. You're the best possible version of Christianity. That was it. And if you did one of those things, then you're kind of okay, but you probably can't be a leader in your youth group. You probably wouldn't be an elder or a deacon one day in your church. That was the rules. I grew up in that legalism. If you don't cuss, you don't do inappropriate things with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't do drugs and you don't drink, then you are a phenomenal Christian. Never mind that you have all these bad habits going on in private. Never mind that you're pompous and you're filled up because you think you're better than everybody who does those things. Never mind all that. That's what the law does. It engenders legalism. And gray area. And then we start asking questions like, is it a sin if I do this? I know that this is wrong, but can I get away with this? Right? More dangerously, it engenders frustration and I think exhaustion. Because the law says, if you want to be right with me, here are the rules. Here's what you have to do. And so you set yourself about doing that, and you fail, usually within a couple of hours. You feel bad about your failure. You go to God in sorrow. You perform a sacrifice. You're forgiven. You're good with God again because the law has made that provision, and now you start over. And you try really hard this time. I'm really gonna honor God. I'm really gonna have the right attitude. I'm really not gonna do that thing. I'm not gonna mess up anymore. And then you mess up. You feel bad. You perform a sacrifice. You start over. Try hard, fail, start over. Try hard, fail, start over. It's the whole cycle of the Old Testament. And we've seen this in our life. We've seen this in our life. And what happens eventually when you try hard and you fail, eventually instead of starting over, you just quit. Instead of starting over, you just go, I'll never be able to do it. I can never be who God wants me to be. I can never be right with him. I can never follow the law well enough. I can never follow all the rules right enough. I can never be the person that I see in my church. I can't be those people. So I'm out. I'm done. And we walk away. I think this is what happens with a lot of kids who grow up in church and then they fall away in college. We know this story. it's very prevalent. It happened with a lot of us. A big part of that is we grew up in some version of faith where we were legalistic and we were told that God accepts us based on our behavior. And then we get off and we have a little bit of freedom and honestly, we're tired of trying. So we just stop. We know this frustration. And if we don't, if we still think one day I can be good enough, one day I can still, it's possible for me to behave in such a way that I will honor God with my behavior day in and day out. I would introduce you to what I call the torment of motives. There's this actually philosophical question. It's been, I mean, the debate's been going on for centuries. Is it possible to do anything that is truly good? Some of you guys may have thought about this before. And basically it states that there's no truly unselfish act. That when you do something good, and you're nice to somebody, you hold the door for someone, and you go, that's a good act, that's positive. And you go, yeah, that's great, why'd you do that? Well, I just want to be courteous. Why do you want to be courteous? Keep asking those questions, you know what you'll get to? I want other people to like me. That's selfish. You didn't hold that door for them, you did it for you. That's tough. There's actually a Friends episode about this. Joey and Phoebe debate this, like through the course of the show. If you don't know Friends, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna give you the context for Friends, but if you do, great. There's two people on a TV show and they're debating back and forth. And finally, Phoebe feels like she thinks of the one thing, the one altruistic act that she can do that's truly good. And so she goes to the park, and she lets a bee sting her. She said, look, I did it. This caused me pain. I got nothing out of this. It was good. And Joey says, well, the bee died, man. That's murder. Even if we think we're good, even if we have a good behavior week, if you get down to the heart of the matter and what motivated that behavior, that's still nasty. It's still muddy. It's still selfish. It's still self-centered. And so when the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, what we find out is that that leads to frustration and it leads to legalism and we end up exhausted. And it's in the middle of that exhaustion. That's not just for us, but the Hebrew people too. They lived that generation after generation. It's in the middle of that exhaustion that the second Pentecost shows up. Second Pentecost we find in Acts chapters one and two. What's going on here is that Jesus has come and he's lived his life. He's died on the cross. And then he ascends into heaven. The disciples gather in an upper room. And then they receive second Pentecost in the book of Acts. It's the you're supposed to do it when you get the gift. So they're just sitting there. The Holy Spirit appears in the form of flaming tongues. They go out on the balcony of this upper room and begin to preach. And gathered all around them are the citizenry of Jerusalem as other people from the surrounding areas in all kinds of languages and all different tongues. And they begin to speak. And these people hear the gospel in their language because they're still in Jerusalem. Because what just happened is 50 days ago, we murdered a guy named Jesus of Nazareth. We put him on the cross and we crucified him. But when he died, the sky turned black and the veil tore in two and some pretty seismic things happened. And then three days later, he wasn't in his tomb anymore. And we got to know what in the world is going on with this Jesus guy and what in the world is happening with these disciples. What did we just do? And so at Pentecost, Peter goes out and he tells them what they did. He said, that man that you crucified, that was the Messiah. And he shows how all the scriptures pointed to Jesus and prepared them for Jesus. And even the festivals prepared them for Jesus. And he helps them see what we've been seeing for the past six weeks. Everything points to Jesus. God's been prepping us for the Messiah. And he was the one and you killed him. And they go, what do we do? You're right. We believe you. What do we do? Peter says at the end of chapter two, repent and be baptized. Repent. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. You thought he was just a man. You thought he was just a teacher. You thought he was just a prophet, and because of that, you killed him. But he is the son of the living God. So repent of who you thought he was. Admit that he is Lord. Put your faith in him and be baptized. And it says that day that 3,000 were added to their number. Do you know what that is? That's the birth of the church. That's where we came from. It worked. We're on another continent 2,000 years later. It's pretty good. I've been on the southern tip of Africa in Cape Town in Masapumaleli, standing outside of a church, looking up at the clouds, listening to them praise God in a language that I don't understand and going, God, your plan worked. Pentecost worked. While I was there, there was a team there from Australia, from the other end of the globe. It worked. That's the birth of the church. And then we get the seminal passage in chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that defines the early church. They gathered in their homes. Two days later, first fruits, Sunday. Then you count 50 days, and it's Pentecost, the receiving of the law. The Holy Spirit speaks, and he gives them the law. After Jesus dies and goes to heaven, on the day of first fruits, they count 50 days later, and what happens? Second Pentecost. You see? Passover. Jesus was celebrating Passover with the disciples. He's arrested and crucified. That's Friday. Two days later on Sunday, he raises from the dead. That's Easter. That's the feast of first fruits. He goes to God. He offers himself as the first fruits of the rest of the harvest that's about to come, that he's just one with his death and his resurrection. He counts 50 days. 50 days later, the disciples are holed up. They're supposed to be celebrating the feast of weeks, but they don't know what to do. They're waiting for a gift. The Holy Spirit speaks to them in the form, comes to them in the form of tongues, and they present the gospel instead of the law. Thousands of years ago, the law was delivered. The Holy Spirit spoke on the day of Pentecost and he delivered to them the law. And the law engenders frustration and exhaustion and legalism. And in the middle of that frustration and exhaustion, God delivers Jesus and it follows the same timeline. And on the feast of weeks at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit speaks again, except this time he speaks with the gospel. And if the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, then the gospel says, I love you, obey me. Totally different. The gospel says, I love you. I don't care what you do. I don't care what you're going to do. I don't care if you don't have your quiet time for the next 50 days. I don't care if you have it for the next 50 days. I love you. There's nothing that you can do to make me love you more. I don't care if you tithe 50% of your income in 2020. I will not love you more at the end of that year than if you tithe nothing. I don't care if you join eight small groups or if you join no small groups. I love you the same. You can go have the best week possible this week and be walking with the Lord and check all the boxes and do all the things you're supposed to do. And guess what? When you get to the end of this week, God will not love you any more than he does right this second because it's impossible because he loves you as much as he possibly can right now. And if you do nothing this week, if your life spirals out of control and all the things in the shadow are thrust into the light and you're a wreck, God will love you just as much at the end of this week as he did at the beginning. The gospel says, I love you. Obey me. I love you. You don't have to earn it. You don't have to perform. I'll clean you up. I'll get you right. Obey me. Do you know what else this does? This purifies our motives. Because now I'm obeying out of the sense of God loves me so much, I'm blown away by his love. I can't believe that he loves me in this way. I just want to go do what he asked me to do. I want other people to know this love. Can I tell you where I see this show up in my life? It's very few places, if I'm honest. But I see this show up in my sermons. When I'm not in a good spot, which is more regularly than you know, I'm not joking. It just is. There's all kinds of mixed motives laced into when I preach. I want you to think I'm good at it. I want you to tell your friends. I want my friends from back home to listen and miss me. I want it to be good. I want all the same ego crud wrapped up in what I do that some of you do. Some of you are pure of heart and you can't relate to this in any way. Jen, my wife Jen's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never done that in my life. But when I'm not totally healthy, my prep is laced with the desire to do good. But when I am healthy, when I'm overwhelmed by how much the Lord loves me in spite of myself, I care less about doing good. When it's really pure, there is this thing in the Bible that you guys have got to know. And I'm going to get up and I'm going to tell you. And I don't care if you think it's good or not. I don't care if I think it's good. I just want you to know this. Those are the good ones. I want to live my life like that. I want you to live your life like that. When someone says, why'd you do that thing? Why'd you give those people that money? Why'd you wait? Why didn't you yell at that person? Why don't you fight more with your children? What's going on? I want your sincere answer to be, God loves me, so I love them. How pure would our lives be? We wouldn't have to try to obey anymore. We would never ask the question, is this sin? Never. We would just walk in this reality that God loves us. Then we don't have to do anything. Do you know the whole point of the law was to get us to a place where we realized our need for that? That's what Paul says in Romans 8. Romans 8 starts out and he says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Okay, so that means that there's no blame. Everybody who's in Christ Jesus, everybody who has faith is right with God. They don't need to perform anymore or try anymore. They're good. He said, for God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. Which means that the law, the point of the law was trying to show us how to be pure and earn our way into heaven. But because we are human, we can't do that. The law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. So God sent his son in the likeness of sin and in flesh, who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Jesus met the standards for the law so that you didn't have to. He broke the cycle of frustration and exhaustion so that you didn't have to. And he freed you up to walk in this freedom of simply being overwhelmed by the fact that God loves you and then loving other people. That's why he says this new command I give you. All 630 laws, this new command I give you. Just go love people as I loved you. Love others as I have loved you, is what Jesus says. That's the whole point of Second Pentecost. And here's the problem with this. We have a constant, nagging drift to the First Pentecost. We are a people of the Second Pentecost. We are a people who are not judged by how we act. We're judged by where we place our faith. We are a people who are not encumbered with required obedience. We get to obey out of love. We are a people of the second Pentecost. The problem is we're more comfortable with the first Pentecost. We're more comfortable drifting back towards law. And this is the tension in the entire Old Testament. I said this tension would help you understand your Bible better. This is the tension, excuse me, in the entire New Testament is the desire for the Hebrew people to go back to being first Pentecost people, to go back to following the law rather than living under grace. All of Acts is about the tension of, wait, wait, wait, wait, we know we have Jesus, but how many of the rules do we have to follow? Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Corinthians, the book of Hebrews, laced throughout all those books is a desire of the audience to go back and be first Pentecost people when the writers of the Bible are trying to go, no, no, no, forget about that. You're second Pentecost people. Walk in love. Walk in forgiveness. Walk in acceptance. Do that. We're people of the second Pentecost, not the first. God doesn't say to us, obey me and I love you. He says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I sent my son for you. Now walk in obedience. We're people of the second Pentecost. And God didn't lay these over one another by mistake. Let's try to walk this week and not forget that. Let's try to do some pure things this week. And when we do the good that we do, and someone were to say, hey, why'd you do that? Let's let the sincere answer be, because God loves me. Let's pray. Father, we love you too. We are not worthy of it. We do not deserve it. We cannot earn it. God, I pray that we would be overwhelmed by it. Thank you for making us people of the second Pentecost. Thank you for seeing us in our frustration and telling us that your yoke is easy and that your burden is light. May we please live in light of the fact that we are loved by you, no matter what. And because of that, go and love other people for you. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

All right, well, like I said, good morning. It's good to be here, and I'm excited that you're here on this October Sunday. We've got a team down in Mexico now. We're gonna have a chance to catch up with them a little bit. Connor's gonna tell us a little bit more about what they're doing after the service, but I'm excited about that team. I'm gonna fly down there and join them on Tuesday of this week. But right now, we're gonna focus on the sixth part of our series called Feast. We did it. We made it. We've gone through the other five festivals in the Old Testament. We've arrived at the final one. This one is called the Feast of Weeks, or it's also known as Pentecost. It's the end of the first fruits celebration. Now, the trick here is you're thinking to yourself, why in the world do I care about the Feast of Weeks? This is the first time I've ever shown up for a sermon at a church, and they said, good news, everyone, we're talking about the Feast of Weeks from the Old Testament. So here's the thing. I think that if we learn what's happening here in the Feast of Weeks, if we learn what they're celebrating, then it can impact our life right away. It can impact the way that we understand that God loves us. It can impact the way we go about our days, and it can impact the way that we understand the Bible. If you've spent any time at Grace, you've heard me say that one of the most, not one of the most, the most important habit that anyone can ever develop is to spend time every day in God's Word and to spend time in prayer. The most important habit we can ever develop, eating well, exercising, being mindful, sleeping well, reading, whatever it is, any other habit, I would put this up against that one and say, this is the best one that any person could ever adopt is to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. So if we're going to do that, it's incumbent upon us to understand the Bible. And what we're talking about today, I think, breathes fresh and essential life into our understanding of scriptures. And if we get it, will unlock for us a lot of the meaning of the New Testament. I would argue that the New Testament is not possible to be understood without the principles that we're talking about today. That's why I think the Feast of Weeks is so very important. Now, the Feast of Weeks, we see in Deuteronomy that it originally commemorated, it was a time to remember being in bondage or being in captivity. Over time, they looked at the timing of it and it became a celebration of something else because the Feast of Weeks is locked into the other spring festivals. The other spring festivals, for those who don't know, just so we catch up, is first Passover, and then that's on the Sabbath Friday, and then it starts on Friday night, and then that Sunday is the Feast of First Fruits. There's a timing thing there. It's two, three days after, and then you count 50 days from that period, from that time, and you arrive at the last holiday in the spring calendar, the Feast of Weeks, known as Pentecost. It's 50 days and counting. Penta means 50, and so in the Old Testament, it was known as Pentecost. Now, some of you know your Bible well enough that you're jumping to Pentecost in the New Testament. You know what that is, and Acts, we're not there yet. We'll get there. You're smart. But we're not there yet, okay? This is where we are. And what they realized after some years is that there wasn't a significant event that happened to be timed up perfectly with the Feast of Weeks and Pentecost. And that was the receiving of the law. And so traditionally, the Feast of Weeks has celebrated the reception of the law. You've got notes there in front of you. We handed those out. Obviously, we're not going to put those up this week. We didn't need one more thing to try to not mess up. But I'm going to say enough things that you can fill in your notes if you need to. So Feast of Weeks celebrates the reception of the law. And that timeline that you have at the top of your notes is really important. Now, why was it such a big deal to receive the law? Why did the Jewish people celebrate this every year? Well, one rabbi said that the law is so essential that it's what makes Jews Jewish, that following the law is what makes Jews Jewish. In it, it's their essence. It's who they are. Tradition says that the law was given in all 70 known languages, but the Jewish people were the only people that decided to take on the mantle of the law and begin to try to follow it. So first, the law gave them their identity. That's why it's a big deal. Another reason it's a big deal, I don't know if you guys have ever thought about this. I spend time with the Bible and try to think about stuff like this because I kind of get paid to do it. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer in God before the law, before the scripture, before the Bible? To just be in Egypt and to know that there is a God. I'm pretty sure there's a God. He seems to be pretty tight with Moses. When Moses says stuff that usually comes from God, he encountered a bush one time. And so now he's telling us what to do. And I feel like that's authoritative. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer before the law, before the Bible, before websites had statements of faith, right? Like if you're new to Grace or if you've checked out a church recently, one of the first things other church people do before they go to a church is they go to the website and then they click on statement of faith and they go, do these people agree with most of the things that I think, right? So that when they go to church, they kind of know what they're stepping into. Can you imagine just visiting someplace blindly? Can you imagine going to a church and the pastor's preaching and he doesn't have the Bible? There's no authority. There's nothing to check him on. I'm just telling you what I think is a good idea, what I heard from this guru in the mountains this one time, and now I'm telling you that this is the gospel truth. Can you imagine how murky and how confusing and how difficult that might be to try to follow and please a God that you know exists, but you're not sure how? I think it would feel like I felt at my old job, Greystone Church, one time. When I was at Greystone, I was the small groups pastor, and I was in charge of student ministry. I was in no way talented at graphic design or content creation. Yet, that's what I got assigned to do this one time. My boss, the lead pastor, Jonathan, he came to me and said, Nate, I want you to design a booklet that has all the information that somebody would need to know about Greystone Church. I want you to just put it together, do pictures, summaries, do a picture of Sunday morning worship, tell them what that's about, give them the mission of the church, student ministry, children's ministry. I want you to put this together and make it look nice. We're going to put it on the information table, and then when somebody new visits the church, we'll just be able to hand it to them, and they can know everything need to know about Greystone. And I'm like, all right, great. You got the right man for the job. I'm gonna knock this out of the park. So for the next two weeks, I actually worked and I tried hard at this. And I had my friend come in and they took pictures and I assembled the document. I figured out how to make it the right size, how to make it like a square, I think, is the shape that I went with. And there was pictures, and there was captions, and there was someone dynamically leading worship, and then a paragraph underneath about what worship means to us, and a verse to go along with it, and then the preaching, and then the small groups, and why we do that, and here's our vision for small groups. And it was excellent. And then I had to go print it out. And I realized, I don't know, I don't know if you guys have ever encountered this. I don't know how to make the printer do the thing I need it to do. Like, I don't know. I need it to print out in a square book that's folded. That's what I need. And what it's giving me is eight and a half by 11 that's not folded and not square. I don't know what to do. So we did like 200 of these things all day on the Saturday before because I didn't want to mess it up. It was due Sunday morning. I didn't want to let anybody down. And so I fear failure. That is my main driver. So like if you'll do this, it'd be great. I'll never do it. But if you don't do this, you will fail. I will stay up 48 hours to get it done. So I'm hand stapling each one of these things. I'm measuring them out and hand cutting to eight and a half by 11 and the borders around the whole thing and then folding them myself, like nice and neat. I get it done. I array them on the information table. Look at what Nate did. And then we get there Sunday morning, very proud of what I've just done. And Jonathan gets there. And I go, hey, dude, I finished these. Did you see them? And he takes a look at it. He's like, oh, yeah, that's good. Good job, man. Thanks. And he sets that down. About five minutes later, I look over, and the volunteers that day have been instructed to just sweep those into the trash can. Just throw them all away. These are garbage. And listen, you think that's mean. That was the right choice. Those things were terrible. They were, I knew as I was cutting them, I can't believe this. This looks like an eighth grade art project with someone with no talent. Like this is awful. And I knew it was awful. And really, I was grateful because in the decision to throw those away, he saved me the shame that was going to come from everyone discovering that, oh, isn't that sweet that Nate did these? Like, I didn't need that in my life. So it sounds mean, but he actually did me a favor, right? And then he put Kyle on it. Like three weeks later, there's this, not that Kyle. Kyle's not good at that stuff. Another guy named Kyle who is good at that stuff. Kyle's the student pastor here. He used to work with me at Greystone. But we had a worship pastor there named Kyle, and he was good at that stuff. He put it all together, and it was this nice glossy color pamphlet that unfolded and had minimal words and maximum pictures and looked way better. And Jonathan was like, great job, Kyle. And I think they still have that sitting over there, okay? Here's the thing. I didn't have the direction or the competence to do what I needed to do. I was groping in the dark to try to do a good job at this assignment, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I didn't know what he had in mind and I was ill-equipped to get it done. I did not have the talent to make it happen. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the law. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the Bible. Just this loose idea that we're supposed to obey him, we're supposed to love. I think we should probably love our neighbors. I think we should probably not steal things. This all seems good. But then in the nuances of the day-to-day, how do I please this God? I am ill-equipped and the mission is undefined. I don't know. And so the law brings clarity to a place that was unclear. The law says, okay, you want to be right with me? You want to know what it takes to please me? Here are the rules. There's 10 of them. The law communicates. Now, this is not what God communicated, but this is what they heard. And over time, this is what the law came to communicate. And this is actually in your notes if you want to write it down. The law came to communicate, if you obey me, I will love you. You want some clarity? You want to know what you need to do to please the God that talks to Moses? You want to know what you need to do day in and day out? Then here's the law. Here's what you need to do. If you do this, I will love you. And then the Jewish tradition, the rabbis, what they would do is the law is here. The line is here. Do not cross this line. So what they would do to make extra sure that they never crossed the line and faltered in the law is that they would draw their own line back here. And then somebody else would go, oh, that's not far enough. And then they would keep backing up and keep backing up and keep backing up so that they would stay away from this. And so God continued to add more laws like the fine print undergirding the other laws, like honor your father and mother. Here's the 38 laws that will help you do that. Honor the Sabbath. Here's the 150 laws about the Sabbath. And so over the course of history and in the book of Leviticus, we have over 630 laws that they accrued, and they lived according to the law. And so they celebrated this each year when they celebrated the Feast of Weeks at the conclusion of Pentecost, 50 days after the Feast of Firstfruits, because it gave them clarity. It gave them their heritage. It made Jews Jewish. It showed that God loved them and was communicating with them, and it gave them a clear path to be right with their Creator. The problem with the law is really twofold. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders frustration. Legalism. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders legalism. It engenders legalism because now our spirituality is defined by how well we follow the rules. Some of us have been in environments like this. I can remember growing up in the 90s in evangelical world in high school. For me, I don't know how it was in your high schools, but for me in the context that I grew up in Atlanta, if you're in high school and you don't do things you shouldn't do with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't cuss, and you don't drink, and you don't smoke weed, you don't do those four things, and you do go to church, you're an excellent human. You're the best possible version of Christianity. That was it. And if you did one of those things, then you're kind of okay, but you probably can't be a leader in your youth group. You probably wouldn't be an elder or a deacon one day in your church. That was the rules. I grew up in that legalism. If you don't cuss, you don't do inappropriate things with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't do drugs and you don't drink, then you are a phenomenal Christian. Never mind that you have all these bad habits going on in private. Never mind that you're pompous and you're filled up because you think you're better than everybody who does those things. Never mind all that. That's what the law does. It engenders legalism. And gray area. And then we start asking questions like, is it a sin if I do this? I know that this is wrong, but can I get away with this? Right? More dangerously, it engenders frustration and I think exhaustion. Because the law says, if you want to be right with me, here are the rules. Here's what you have to do. And so you set yourself about doing that, and you fail, usually within a couple of hours. You feel bad about your failure. You go to God in sorrow. You perform a sacrifice. You're forgiven. You're good with God again because the law has made that provision, and now you start over. And you try really hard this time. I'm really gonna honor God. I'm really gonna have the right attitude. I'm really not gonna do that thing. I'm not gonna mess up anymore. And then you mess up. You feel bad. You perform a sacrifice. You start over. Try hard, fail, start over. Try hard, fail, start over. It's the whole cycle of the Old Testament. And we've seen this in our life. We've seen this in our life. And what happens eventually when you try hard and you fail, eventually instead of starting over, you just quit. Instead of starting over, you just go, I'll never be able to do it. I can never be who God wants me to be. I can never be right with him. I can never follow the law well enough. I can never follow all the rules right enough. I can never be the person that I see in my church. I can't be those people. So I'm out. I'm done. And we walk away. I think this is what happens with a lot of kids who grow up in church and then they fall away in college. We know this story. it's very prevalent. It happened with a lot of us. A big part of that is we grew up in some version of faith where we were legalistic and we were told that God accepts us based on our behavior. And then we get off and we have a little bit of freedom and honestly, we're tired of trying. So we just stop. We know this frustration. And if we don't, if we still think one day I can be good enough, one day I can still, it's possible for me to behave in such a way that I will honor God with my behavior day in and day out. I would introduce you to what I call the torment of motives. There's this actually philosophical question. It's been, I mean, the debate's been going on for centuries. Is it possible to do anything that is truly good? Some of you guys may have thought about this before. And basically it states that there's no truly unselfish act. That when you do something good, and you're nice to somebody, you hold the door for someone, and you go, that's a good act, that's positive. And you go, yeah, that's great, why'd you do that? Well, I just want to be courteous. Why do you want to be courteous? Keep asking those questions, you know what you'll get to? I want other people to like me. That's selfish. You didn't hold that door for them, you did it for you. That's tough. There's actually a Friends episode about this. Joey and Phoebe debate this, like through the course of the show. If you don't know Friends, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna give you the context for Friends, but if you do, great. There's two people on a TV show and they're debating back and forth. And finally, Phoebe feels like she thinks of the one thing, the one altruistic act that she can do that's truly good. And so she goes to the park, and she lets a bee sting her. She said, look, I did it. This caused me pain. I got nothing out of this. It was good. And Joey says, well, the bee died, man. That's murder. Even if we think we're good, even if we have a good behavior week, if you get down to the heart of the matter and what motivated that behavior, that's still nasty. It's still muddy. It's still selfish. It's still self-centered. And so when the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, what we find out is that that leads to frustration and it leads to legalism and we end up exhausted. And it's in the middle of that exhaustion. That's not just for us, but the Hebrew people too. They lived that generation after generation. It's in the middle of that exhaustion that the second Pentecost shows up. Second Pentecost we find in Acts chapters one and two. What's going on here is that Jesus has come and he's lived his life. He's died on the cross. And then he ascends into heaven. The disciples gather in an upper room. And then they receive second Pentecost in the book of Acts. It's the you're supposed to do it when you get the gift. So they're just sitting there. The Holy Spirit appears in the form of flaming tongues. They go out on the balcony of this upper room and begin to preach. And gathered all around them are the citizenry of Jerusalem as other people from the surrounding areas in all kinds of languages and all different tongues. And they begin to speak. And these people hear the gospel in their language because they're still in Jerusalem. Because what just happened is 50 days ago, we murdered a guy named Jesus of Nazareth. We put him on the cross and we crucified him. But when he died, the sky turned black and the veil tore in two and some pretty seismic things happened. And then three days later, he wasn't in his tomb anymore. And we got to know what in the world is going on with this Jesus guy and what in the world is happening with these disciples. What did we just do? And so at Pentecost, Peter goes out and he tells them what they did. He said, that man that you crucified, that was the Messiah. And he shows how all the scriptures pointed to Jesus and prepared them for Jesus. And even the festivals prepared them for Jesus. And he helps them see what we've been seeing for the past six weeks. Everything points to Jesus. God's been prepping us for the Messiah. And he was the one and you killed him. And they go, what do we do? You're right. We believe you. What do we do? Peter says at the end of chapter two, repent and be baptized. Repent. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. You thought he was just a man. You thought he was just a teacher. You thought he was just a prophet, and because of that, you killed him. But he is the son of the living God. So repent of who you thought he was. Admit that he is Lord. Put your faith in him and be baptized. And it says that day that 3,000 were added to their number. Do you know what that is? That's the birth of the church. That's where we came from. It worked. We're on another continent 2,000 years later. It's pretty good. I've been on the southern tip of Africa in Cape Town in Masapumaleli, standing outside of a church, looking up at the clouds, listening to them praise God in a language that I don't understand and going, God, your plan worked. Pentecost worked. While I was there, there was a team there from Australia, from the other end of the globe. It worked. That's the birth of the church. And then we get the seminal passage in chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that defines the early church. They gathered in their homes. Two days later, first fruits, Sunday. Then you count 50 days, and it's Pentecost, the receiving of the law. The Holy Spirit speaks, and he gives them the law. After Jesus dies and goes to heaven, on the day of first fruits, they count 50 days later, and what happens? Second Pentecost. You see? Passover. Jesus was celebrating Passover with the disciples. He's arrested and crucified. That's Friday. Two days later on Sunday, he raises from the dead. That's Easter. That's the feast of first fruits. He goes to God. He offers himself as the first fruits of the rest of the harvest that's about to come, that he's just one with his death and his resurrection. He counts 50 days. 50 days later, the disciples are holed up. They're supposed to be celebrating the feast of weeks, but they don't know what to do. They're waiting for a gift. The Holy Spirit speaks to them in the form, comes to them in the form of tongues, and they present the gospel instead of the law. Thousands of years ago, the law was delivered. The Holy Spirit spoke on the day of Pentecost and he delivered to them the law. And the law engenders frustration and exhaustion and legalism. And in the middle of that frustration and exhaustion, God delivers Jesus and it follows the same timeline. And on the feast of weeks at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit speaks again, except this time he speaks with the gospel. And if the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, then the gospel says, I love you, obey me. Totally different. The gospel says, I love you. I don't care what you do. I don't care what you're going to do. I don't care if you don't have your quiet time for the next 50 days. I don't care if you have it for the next 50 days. I love you. There's nothing that you can do to make me love you more. I don't care if you tithe 50% of your income in 2020. I will not love you more at the end of that year than if you tithe nothing. I don't care if you join eight small groups or if you join no small groups. I love you the same. You can go have the best week possible this week and be walking with the Lord and check all the boxes and do all the things you're supposed to do. And guess what? When you get to the end of this week, God will not love you any more than he does right this second because it's impossible because he loves you as much as he possibly can right now. And if you do nothing this week, if your life spirals out of control and all the things in the shadow are thrust into the light and you're a wreck, God will love you just as much at the end of this week as he did at the beginning. The gospel says, I love you. Obey me. I love you. You don't have to earn it. You don't have to perform. I'll clean you up. I'll get you right. Obey me. Do you know what else this does? This purifies our motives. Because now I'm obeying out of the sense of God loves me so much, I'm blown away by his love. I can't believe that he loves me in this way. I just want to go do what he asked me to do. I want other people to know this love. Can I tell you where I see this show up in my life? It's very few places, if I'm honest. But I see this show up in my sermons. When I'm not in a good spot, which is more regularly than you know, I'm not joking. It just is. There's all kinds of mixed motives laced into when I preach. I want you to think I'm good at it. I want you to tell your friends. I want my friends from back home to listen and miss me. I want it to be good. I want all the same ego crud wrapped up in what I do that some of you do. Some of you are pure of heart and you can't relate to this in any way. Jen, my wife Jen's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never done that in my life. But when I'm not totally healthy, my prep is laced with the desire to do good. But when I am healthy, when I'm overwhelmed by how much the Lord loves me in spite of myself, I care less about doing good. When it's really pure, there is this thing in the Bible that you guys have got to know. And I'm going to get up and I'm going to tell you. And I don't care if you think it's good or not. I don't care if I think it's good. I just want you to know this. Those are the good ones. I want to live my life like that. I want you to live your life like that. When someone says, why'd you do that thing? Why'd you give those people that money? Why'd you wait? Why didn't you yell at that person? Why don't you fight more with your children? What's going on? I want your sincere answer to be, God loves me, so I love them. How pure would our lives be? We wouldn't have to try to obey anymore. We would never ask the question, is this sin? Never. We would just walk in this reality that God loves us. Then we don't have to do anything. Do you know the whole point of the law was to get us to a place where we realized our need for that? That's what Paul says in Romans 8. Romans 8 starts out and he says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Okay, so that means that there's no blame. Everybody who's in Christ Jesus, everybody who has faith is right with God. They don't need to perform anymore or try anymore. They're good. He said, for God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. Which means that the law, the point of the law was trying to show us how to be pure and earn our way into heaven. But because we are human, we can't do that. The law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. So God sent his son in the likeness of sin and in flesh, who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Jesus met the standards for the law so that you didn't have to. He broke the cycle of frustration and exhaustion so that you didn't have to. And he freed you up to walk in this freedom of simply being overwhelmed by the fact that God loves you and then loving other people. That's why he says this new command I give you. All 630 laws, this new command I give you. Just go love people as I loved you. Love others as I have loved you, is what Jesus says. That's the whole point of Second Pentecost. And here's the problem with this. We have a constant, nagging drift to the First Pentecost. We are a people of the Second Pentecost. We are a people who are not judged by how we act. We're judged by where we place our faith. We are a people who are not encumbered with required obedience. We get to obey out of love. We are a people of the second Pentecost. The problem is we're more comfortable with the first Pentecost. We're more comfortable drifting back towards law. And this is the tension in the entire Old Testament. I said this tension would help you understand your Bible better. This is the tension, excuse me, in the entire New Testament is the desire for the Hebrew people to go back to being first Pentecost people, to go back to following the law rather than living under grace. All of Acts is about the tension of, wait, wait, wait, wait, we know we have Jesus, but how many of the rules do we have to follow? Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Corinthians, the book of Hebrews, laced throughout all those books is a desire of the audience to go back and be first Pentecost people when the writers of the Bible are trying to go, no, no, no, forget about that. You're second Pentecost people. Walk in love. Walk in forgiveness. Walk in acceptance. Do that. We're people of the second Pentecost, not the first. God doesn't say to us, obey me and I love you. He says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I sent my son for you. Now walk in obedience. We're people of the second Pentecost. And God didn't lay these over one another by mistake. Let's try to walk this week and not forget that. Let's try to do some pure things this week. And when we do the good that we do, and someone were to say, hey, why'd you do that? Let's let the sincere answer be, because God loves me. Let's pray. Father, we love you too. We are not worthy of it. We do not deserve it. We cannot earn it. God, I pray that we would be overwhelmed by it. Thank you for making us people of the second Pentecost. Thank you for seeing us in our frustration and telling us that your yoke is easy and that your burden is light. May we please live in light of the fact that we are loved by you, no matter what. And because of that, go and love other people for you. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

All right, well, like I said, good morning. It's good to be here, and I'm excited that you're here on this October Sunday. We've got a team down in Mexico now. We're gonna have a chance to catch up with them a little bit. Connor's gonna tell us a little bit more about what they're doing after the service, but I'm excited about that team. I'm gonna fly down there and join them on Tuesday of this week. But right now, we're gonna focus on the sixth part of our series called Feast. We did it. We made it. We've gone through the other five festivals in the Old Testament. We've arrived at the final one. This one is called the Feast of Weeks, or it's also known as Pentecost. It's the end of the first fruits celebration. Now, the trick here is you're thinking to yourself, why in the world do I care about the Feast of Weeks? This is the first time I've ever shown up for a sermon at a church, and they said, good news, everyone, we're talking about the Feast of Weeks from the Old Testament. So here's the thing. I think that if we learn what's happening here in the Feast of Weeks, if we learn what they're celebrating, then it can impact our life right away. It can impact the way that we understand that God loves us. It can impact the way we go about our days, and it can impact the way that we understand the Bible. If you've spent any time at Grace, you've heard me say that one of the most, not one of the most, the most important habit that anyone can ever develop is to spend time every day in God's Word and to spend time in prayer. The most important habit we can ever develop, eating well, exercising, being mindful, sleeping well, reading, whatever it is, any other habit, I would put this up against that one and say, this is the best one that any person could ever adopt is to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. So if we're going to do that, it's incumbent upon us to understand the Bible. And what we're talking about today, I think, breathes fresh and essential life into our understanding of scriptures. And if we get it, will unlock for us a lot of the meaning of the New Testament. I would argue that the New Testament is not possible to be understood without the principles that we're talking about today. That's why I think the Feast of Weeks is so very important. Now, the Feast of Weeks, we see in Deuteronomy that it originally commemorated, it was a time to remember being in bondage or being in captivity. Over time, they looked at the timing of it and it became a celebration of something else because the Feast of Weeks is locked into the other spring festivals. The other spring festivals, for those who don't know, just so we catch up, is first Passover, and then that's on the Sabbath Friday, and then it starts on Friday night, and then that Sunday is the Feast of First Fruits. There's a timing thing there. It's two, three days after, and then you count 50 days from that period, from that time, and you arrive at the last holiday in the spring calendar, the Feast of Weeks, known as Pentecost. It's 50 days and counting. Penta means 50, and so in the Old Testament, it was known as Pentecost. Now, some of you know your Bible well enough that you're jumping to Pentecost in the New Testament. You know what that is, and Acts, we're not there yet. We'll get there. You're smart. But we're not there yet, okay? This is where we are. And what they realized after some years is that there wasn't a significant event that happened to be timed up perfectly with the Feast of Weeks and Pentecost. And that was the receiving of the law. And so traditionally, the Feast of Weeks has celebrated the reception of the law. You've got notes there in front of you. We handed those out. Obviously, we're not going to put those up this week. We didn't need one more thing to try to not mess up. But I'm going to say enough things that you can fill in your notes if you need to. So Feast of Weeks celebrates the reception of the law. And that timeline that you have at the top of your notes is really important. Now, why was it such a big deal to receive the law? Why did the Jewish people celebrate this every year? Well, one rabbi said that the law is so essential that it's what makes Jews Jewish, that following the law is what makes Jews Jewish. In it, it's their essence. It's who they are. Tradition says that the law was given in all 70 known languages, but the Jewish people were the only people that decided to take on the mantle of the law and begin to try to follow it. So first, the law gave them their identity. That's why it's a big deal. Another reason it's a big deal, I don't know if you guys have ever thought about this. I spend time with the Bible and try to think about stuff like this because I kind of get paid to do it. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer in God before the law, before the scripture, before the Bible? To just be in Egypt and to know that there is a God. I'm pretty sure there's a God. He seems to be pretty tight with Moses. When Moses says stuff that usually comes from God, he encountered a bush one time. And so now he's telling us what to do. And I feel like that's authoritative. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer before the law, before the Bible, before websites had statements of faith, right? Like if you're new to Grace or if you've checked out a church recently, one of the first things other church people do before they go to a church is they go to the website and then they click on statement of faith and they go, do these people agree with most of the things that I think, right? So that when they go to church, they kind of know what they're stepping into. Can you imagine just visiting someplace blindly? Can you imagine going to a church and the pastor's preaching and he doesn't have the Bible? There's no authority. There's nothing to check him on. I'm just telling you what I think is a good idea, what I heard from this guru in the mountains this one time, and now I'm telling you that this is the gospel truth. Can you imagine how murky and how confusing and how difficult that might be to try to follow and please a God that you know exists, but you're not sure how? I think it would feel like I felt at my old job, Greystone Church, one time. When I was at Greystone, I was the small groups pastor, and I was in charge of student ministry. I was in no way talented at graphic design or content creation. Yet, that's what I got assigned to do this one time. My boss, the lead pastor, Jonathan, he came to me and said, Nate, I want you to design a booklet that has all the information that somebody would need to know about Greystone Church. I want you to just put it together, do pictures, summaries, do a picture of Sunday morning worship, tell them what that's about, give them the mission of the church, student ministry, children's ministry. I want you to put this together and make it look nice. We're going to put it on the information table, and then when somebody new visits the church, we'll just be able to hand it to them, and they can know everything need to know about Greystone. And I'm like, all right, great. You got the right man for the job. I'm gonna knock this out of the park. So for the next two weeks, I actually worked and I tried hard at this. And I had my friend come in and they took pictures and I assembled the document. I figured out how to make it the right size, how to make it like a square, I think, is the shape that I went with. And there was pictures, and there was captions, and there was someone dynamically leading worship, and then a paragraph underneath about what worship means to us, and a verse to go along with it, and then the preaching, and then the small groups, and why we do that, and here's our vision for small groups. And it was excellent. And then I had to go print it out. And I realized, I don't know, I don't know if you guys have ever encountered this. I don't know how to make the printer do the thing I need it to do. Like, I don't know. I need it to print out in a square book that's folded. That's what I need. And what it's giving me is eight and a half by 11 that's not folded and not square. I don't know what to do. So we did like 200 of these things all day on the Saturday before because I didn't want to mess it up. It was due Sunday morning. I didn't want to let anybody down. And so I fear failure. That is my main driver. So like if you'll do this, it'd be great. I'll never do it. But if you don't do this, you will fail. I will stay up 48 hours to get it done. So I'm hand stapling each one of these things. I'm measuring them out and hand cutting to eight and a half by 11 and the borders around the whole thing and then folding them myself, like nice and neat. I get it done. I array them on the information table. Look at what Nate did. And then we get there Sunday morning, very proud of what I've just done. And Jonathan gets there. And I go, hey, dude, I finished these. Did you see them? And he takes a look at it. He's like, oh, yeah, that's good. Good job, man. Thanks. And he sets that down. About five minutes later, I look over, and the volunteers that day have been instructed to just sweep those into the trash can. Just throw them all away. These are garbage. And listen, you think that's mean. That was the right choice. Those things were terrible. They were, I knew as I was cutting them, I can't believe this. This looks like an eighth grade art project with someone with no talent. Like this is awful. And I knew it was awful. And really, I was grateful because in the decision to throw those away, he saved me the shame that was going to come from everyone discovering that, oh, isn't that sweet that Nate did these? Like, I didn't need that in my life. So it sounds mean, but he actually did me a favor, right? And then he put Kyle on it. Like three weeks later, there's this, not that Kyle. Kyle's not good at that stuff. Another guy named Kyle who is good at that stuff. Kyle's the student pastor here. He used to work with me at Greystone. But we had a worship pastor there named Kyle, and he was good at that stuff. He put it all together, and it was this nice glossy color pamphlet that unfolded and had minimal words and maximum pictures and looked way better. And Jonathan was like, great job, Kyle. And I think they still have that sitting over there, okay? Here's the thing. I didn't have the direction or the competence to do what I needed to do. I was groping in the dark to try to do a good job at this assignment, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I didn't know what he had in mind and I was ill-equipped to get it done. I did not have the talent to make it happen. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the law. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the Bible. Just this loose idea that we're supposed to obey him, we're supposed to love. I think we should probably love our neighbors. I think we should probably not steal things. This all seems good. But then in the nuances of the day-to-day, how do I please this God? I am ill-equipped and the mission is undefined. I don't know. And so the law brings clarity to a place that was unclear. The law says, okay, you want to be right with me? You want to know what it takes to please me? Here are the rules. There's 10 of them. The law communicates. Now, this is not what God communicated, but this is what they heard. And over time, this is what the law came to communicate. And this is actually in your notes if you want to write it down. The law came to communicate, if you obey me, I will love you. You want some clarity? You want to know what you need to do to please the God that talks to Moses? You want to know what you need to do day in and day out? Then here's the law. Here's what you need to do. If you do this, I will love you. And then the Jewish tradition, the rabbis, what they would do is the law is here. The line is here. Do not cross this line. So what they would do to make extra sure that they never crossed the line and faltered in the law is that they would draw their own line back here. And then somebody else would go, oh, that's not far enough. And then they would keep backing up and keep backing up and keep backing up so that they would stay away from this. And so God continued to add more laws like the fine print undergirding the other laws, like honor your father and mother. Here's the 38 laws that will help you do that. Honor the Sabbath. Here's the 150 laws about the Sabbath. And so over the course of history and in the book of Leviticus, we have over 630 laws that they accrued, and they lived according to the law. And so they celebrated this each year when they celebrated the Feast of Weeks at the conclusion of Pentecost, 50 days after the Feast of Firstfruits, because it gave them clarity. It gave them their heritage. It made Jews Jewish. It showed that God loved them and was communicating with them, and it gave them a clear path to be right with their Creator. The problem with the law is really twofold. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders frustration. Legalism. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders legalism. It engenders legalism because now our spirituality is defined by how well we follow the rules. Some of us have been in environments like this. I can remember growing up in the 90s in evangelical world in high school. For me, I don't know how it was in your high schools, but for me in the context that I grew up in Atlanta, if you're in high school and you don't do things you shouldn't do with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't cuss, and you don't drink, and you don't smoke weed, you don't do those four things, and you do go to church, you're an excellent human. You're the best possible version of Christianity. That was it. And if you did one of those things, then you're kind of okay, but you probably can't be a leader in your youth group. You probably wouldn't be an elder or a deacon one day in your church. That was the rules. I grew up in that legalism. If you don't cuss, you don't do inappropriate things with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't do drugs and you don't drink, then you are a phenomenal Christian. Never mind that you have all these bad habits going on in private. Never mind that you're pompous and you're filled up because you think you're better than everybody who does those things. Never mind all that. That's what the law does. It engenders legalism. And gray area. And then we start asking questions like, is it a sin if I do this? I know that this is wrong, but can I get away with this? Right? More dangerously, it engenders frustration and I think exhaustion. Because the law says, if you want to be right with me, here are the rules. Here's what you have to do. And so you set yourself about doing that, and you fail, usually within a couple of hours. You feel bad about your failure. You go to God in sorrow. You perform a sacrifice. You're forgiven. You're good with God again because the law has made that provision, and now you start over. And you try really hard this time. I'm really gonna honor God. I'm really gonna have the right attitude. I'm really not gonna do that thing. I'm not gonna mess up anymore. And then you mess up. You feel bad. You perform a sacrifice. You start over. Try hard, fail, start over. Try hard, fail, start over. It's the whole cycle of the Old Testament. And we've seen this in our life. We've seen this in our life. And what happens eventually when you try hard and you fail, eventually instead of starting over, you just quit. Instead of starting over, you just go, I'll never be able to do it. I can never be who God wants me to be. I can never be right with him. I can never follow the law well enough. I can never follow all the rules right enough. I can never be the person that I see in my church. I can't be those people. So I'm out. I'm done. And we walk away. I think this is what happens with a lot of kids who grow up in church and then they fall away in college. We know this story. it's very prevalent. It happened with a lot of us. A big part of that is we grew up in some version of faith where we were legalistic and we were told that God accepts us based on our behavior. And then we get off and we have a little bit of freedom and honestly, we're tired of trying. So we just stop. We know this frustration. And if we don't, if we still think one day I can be good enough, one day I can still, it's possible for me to behave in such a way that I will honor God with my behavior day in and day out. I would introduce you to what I call the torment of motives. There's this actually philosophical question. It's been, I mean, the debate's been going on for centuries. Is it possible to do anything that is truly good? Some of you guys may have thought about this before. And basically it states that there's no truly unselfish act. That when you do something good, and you're nice to somebody, you hold the door for someone, and you go, that's a good act, that's positive. And you go, yeah, that's great, why'd you do that? Well, I just want to be courteous. Why do you want to be courteous? Keep asking those questions, you know what you'll get to? I want other people to like me. That's selfish. You didn't hold that door for them, you did it for you. That's tough. There's actually a Friends episode about this. Joey and Phoebe debate this, like through the course of the show. If you don't know Friends, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna give you the context for Friends, but if you do, great. There's two people on a TV show and they're debating back and forth. And finally, Phoebe feels like she thinks of the one thing, the one altruistic act that she can do that's truly good. And so she goes to the park, and she lets a bee sting her. She said, look, I did it. This caused me pain. I got nothing out of this. It was good. And Joey says, well, the bee died, man. That's murder. Even if we think we're good, even if we have a good behavior week, if you get down to the heart of the matter and what motivated that behavior, that's still nasty. It's still muddy. It's still selfish. It's still self-centered. And so when the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, what we find out is that that leads to frustration and it leads to legalism and we end up exhausted. And it's in the middle of that exhaustion. That's not just for us, but the Hebrew people too. They lived that generation after generation. It's in the middle of that exhaustion that the second Pentecost shows up. Second Pentecost we find in Acts chapters one and two. What's going on here is that Jesus has come and he's lived his life. He's died on the cross. And then he ascends into heaven. The disciples gather in an upper room. And then they receive second Pentecost in the book of Acts. It's the you're supposed to do it when you get the gift. So they're just sitting there. The Holy Spirit appears in the form of flaming tongues. They go out on the balcony of this upper room and begin to preach. And gathered all around them are the citizenry of Jerusalem as other people from the surrounding areas in all kinds of languages and all different tongues. And they begin to speak. And these people hear the gospel in their language because they're still in Jerusalem. Because what just happened is 50 days ago, we murdered a guy named Jesus of Nazareth. We put him on the cross and we crucified him. But when he died, the sky turned black and the veil tore in two and some pretty seismic things happened. And then three days later, he wasn't in his tomb anymore. And we got to know what in the world is going on with this Jesus guy and what in the world is happening with these disciples. What did we just do? And so at Pentecost, Peter goes out and he tells them what they did. He said, that man that you crucified, that was the Messiah. And he shows how all the scriptures pointed to Jesus and prepared them for Jesus. And even the festivals prepared them for Jesus. And he helps them see what we've been seeing for the past six weeks. Everything points to Jesus. God's been prepping us for the Messiah. And he was the one and you killed him. And they go, what do we do? You're right. We believe you. What do we do? Peter says at the end of chapter two, repent and be baptized. Repent. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. You thought he was just a man. You thought he was just a teacher. You thought he was just a prophet, and because of that, you killed him. But he is the son of the living God. So repent of who you thought he was. Admit that he is Lord. Put your faith in him and be baptized. And it says that day that 3,000 were added to their number. Do you know what that is? That's the birth of the church. That's where we came from. It worked. We're on another continent 2,000 years later. It's pretty good. I've been on the southern tip of Africa in Cape Town in Masapumaleli, standing outside of a church, looking up at the clouds, listening to them praise God in a language that I don't understand and going, God, your plan worked. Pentecost worked. While I was there, there was a team there from Australia, from the other end of the globe. It worked. That's the birth of the church. And then we get the seminal passage in chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that defines the early church. They gathered in their homes. Two days later, first fruits, Sunday. Then you count 50 days, and it's Pentecost, the receiving of the law. The Holy Spirit speaks, and he gives them the law. After Jesus dies and goes to heaven, on the day of first fruits, they count 50 days later, and what happens? Second Pentecost. You see? Passover. Jesus was celebrating Passover with the disciples. He's arrested and crucified. That's Friday. Two days later on Sunday, he raises from the dead. That's Easter. That's the feast of first fruits. He goes to God. He offers himself as the first fruits of the rest of the harvest that's about to come, that he's just one with his death and his resurrection. He counts 50 days. 50 days later, the disciples are holed up. They're supposed to be celebrating the feast of weeks, but they don't know what to do. They're waiting for a gift. The Holy Spirit speaks to them in the form, comes to them in the form of tongues, and they present the gospel instead of the law. Thousands of years ago, the law was delivered. The Holy Spirit spoke on the day of Pentecost and he delivered to them the law. And the law engenders frustration and exhaustion and legalism. And in the middle of that frustration and exhaustion, God delivers Jesus and it follows the same timeline. And on the feast of weeks at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit speaks again, except this time he speaks with the gospel. And if the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, then the gospel says, I love you, obey me. Totally different. The gospel says, I love you. I don't care what you do. I don't care what you're going to do. I don't care if you don't have your quiet time for the next 50 days. I don't care if you have it for the next 50 days. I love you. There's nothing that you can do to make me love you more. I don't care if you tithe 50% of your income in 2020. I will not love you more at the end of that year than if you tithe nothing. I don't care if you join eight small groups or if you join no small groups. I love you the same. You can go have the best week possible this week and be walking with the Lord and check all the boxes and do all the things you're supposed to do. And guess what? When you get to the end of this week, God will not love you any more than he does right this second because it's impossible because he loves you as much as he possibly can right now. And if you do nothing this week, if your life spirals out of control and all the things in the shadow are thrust into the light and you're a wreck, God will love you just as much at the end of this week as he did at the beginning. The gospel says, I love you. Obey me. I love you. You don't have to earn it. You don't have to perform. I'll clean you up. I'll get you right. Obey me. Do you know what else this does? This purifies our motives. Because now I'm obeying out of the sense of God loves me so much, I'm blown away by his love. I can't believe that he loves me in this way. I just want to go do what he asked me to do. I want other people to know this love. Can I tell you where I see this show up in my life? It's very few places, if I'm honest. But I see this show up in my sermons. When I'm not in a good spot, which is more regularly than you know, I'm not joking. It just is. There's all kinds of mixed motives laced into when I preach. I want you to think I'm good at it. I want you to tell your friends. I want my friends from back home to listen and miss me. I want it to be good. I want all the same ego crud wrapped up in what I do that some of you do. Some of you are pure of heart and you can't relate to this in any way. Jen, my wife Jen's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never done that in my life. But when I'm not totally healthy, my prep is laced with the desire to do good. But when I am healthy, when I'm overwhelmed by how much the Lord loves me in spite of myself, I care less about doing good. When it's really pure, there is this thing in the Bible that you guys have got to know. And I'm going to get up and I'm going to tell you. And I don't care if you think it's good or not. I don't care if I think it's good. I just want you to know this. Those are the good ones. I want to live my life like that. I want you to live your life like that. When someone says, why'd you do that thing? Why'd you give those people that money? Why'd you wait? Why didn't you yell at that person? Why don't you fight more with your children? What's going on? I want your sincere answer to be, God loves me, so I love them. How pure would our lives be? We wouldn't have to try to obey anymore. We would never ask the question, is this sin? Never. We would just walk in this reality that God loves us. Then we don't have to do anything. Do you know the whole point of the law was to get us to a place where we realized our need for that? That's what Paul says in Romans 8. Romans 8 starts out and he says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Okay, so that means that there's no blame. Everybody who's in Christ Jesus, everybody who has faith is right with God. They don't need to perform anymore or try anymore. They're good. He said, for God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. Which means that the law, the point of the law was trying to show us how to be pure and earn our way into heaven. But because we are human, we can't do that. The law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. So God sent his son in the likeness of sin and in flesh, who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Jesus met the standards for the law so that you didn't have to. He broke the cycle of frustration and exhaustion so that you didn't have to. And he freed you up to walk in this freedom of simply being overwhelmed by the fact that God loves you and then loving other people. That's why he says this new command I give you. All 630 laws, this new command I give you. Just go love people as I loved you. Love others as I have loved you, is what Jesus says. That's the whole point of Second Pentecost. And here's the problem with this. We have a constant, nagging drift to the First Pentecost. We are a people of the Second Pentecost. We are a people who are not judged by how we act. We're judged by where we place our faith. We are a people who are not encumbered with required obedience. We get to obey out of love. We are a people of the second Pentecost. The problem is we're more comfortable with the first Pentecost. We're more comfortable drifting back towards law. And this is the tension in the entire Old Testament. I said this tension would help you understand your Bible better. This is the tension, excuse me, in the entire New Testament is the desire for the Hebrew people to go back to being first Pentecost people, to go back to following the law rather than living under grace. All of Acts is about the tension of, wait, wait, wait, wait, we know we have Jesus, but how many of the rules do we have to follow? Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Corinthians, the book of Hebrews, laced throughout all those books is a desire of the audience to go back and be first Pentecost people when the writers of the Bible are trying to go, no, no, no, forget about that. You're second Pentecost people. Walk in love. Walk in forgiveness. Walk in acceptance. Do that. We're people of the second Pentecost, not the first. God doesn't say to us, obey me and I love you. He says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I sent my son for you. Now walk in obedience. We're people of the second Pentecost. And God didn't lay these over one another by mistake. Let's try to walk this week and not forget that. Let's try to do some pure things this week. And when we do the good that we do, and someone were to say, hey, why'd you do that? Let's let the sincere answer be, because God loves me. Let's pray. Father, we love you too. We are not worthy of it. We do not deserve it. We cannot earn it. God, I pray that we would be overwhelmed by it. Thank you for making us people of the second Pentecost. Thank you for seeing us in our frustration and telling us that your yoke is easy and that your burden is light. May we please live in light of the fact that we are loved by you, no matter what. And because of that, go and love other people for you. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.