Colossians 1

It's good to see everybody. Thank you for being here on this February Sunday. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. And we are in the second part of our series going through the book of Colossians. It is creatively titled Colossians. This week, we're going to look at a passage. And when I outlined the series, I had intended to talk about the idea of a suffering apostle, that to be a Christian, that to be all in, as we kind of put it in front of ourselves a few weeks ago, to really be pursuing God and serving the Lord and building his kingdom, means at times and ways to suffer, and I had planned on talking about that. But one of my favorite parts of being a pastor that gets to teach week to week to a church is, as we go through a book like Colossians, I know that we're not going to cover everything in the book of Colossians. I know another pastor recently did a series in Colossians, and he spent 12 weeks in the book. I could probably spend 16 weeks in the book and there would be enough there to generate sermons. I don't know that you'd want to hear all 16 of them, but there's enough there, right? So I know that when we do a four-part series in the book of Colossians that we are not going to cover everything. So my job as the pastor is to read a portion of scripture and ask, God, what do you have for grace here? What seems most relevant here? What do our people need to hear from your word? And so as I began to review the passage for this week, there was something else, not suffering that jumped off the page to me, but something else entirely that I wanted to put in front of you this morning because I found it most appropriate for grace and who we are. To get there, I want to talk about this idea. The idea of the American mythology of the cowboy. As Americans, we love a good cowboy. Now, I't mean the Dallas Cowboys, because as the rest of America, we hate them, okay? That's just standard policy. It's a good thing to do. If you love them, you love them. If you don't, you really don't. But I'm talking about like old school cowboys, John Wayne cowboys. We are a nation of cowboys. We love that mythology, the idea that one person could pick themselves up by their bootstraps, can make things happen, could pursue the American dream by hard work, by sweat, and by dedication, with no one's help, with no hand-me-downs, doing the best that they can with what they were given. They figure out a way to accomplish the American dream for their life, right? We love cowboy heroes. This week, Tom Brady just retired. If you don't know who Tom Brady is, God bless you. If you do know who he is, he's literally, he's easily, and this is hard for me to admit, I'm a Peyton Manning guy. He's the greatest quarterback that's ever lived. He's probably the greatest American professional athlete that's ever lived. And we love the mythology of the great quarterback, the guy that gets up early. He's at the facility before everybody. He leaves after everybody else. He's going through drills in the offseason. He's taking his health and his care and his strategy uniquely different than everybody else. It's kind of this lone ranger of look at this guy go and how he's achieved all of this greatness. We like the cowboy mythology and our business people. We love the stories of Bezos and of Gates and of Steve Jobs. These guys that in their basement built up this thing. They did it by themselves, by their bootstraps, on their own, no help from anybody, and now they are titans of industry. We love it in our politicians. Our last president, part of the mythology that made the people love him, love him even more, was this idea that he came up, he got a loan from his dad, and that was it, and it was small, and then he comes up and he builds his empire, and this is why, one of the reasons why those those that love him love him. In America, we love the mythology of a good cowboy, right? And I would argue, I would argue that cowboys, they build great countries. We did good. America, you could stack us up with any of the empires of history's past. I've told you before, I'm kind of a, I wouldn't call myself a student of history. That feels self-aggrandizing. I have an interest in it, and I know some things that sometimes show up on trivia night. That's about it. But I do like history, and if you wanted to make a Mount Rushmore of worldwide empires, America would absolutely be on there, and part of the reason, I believe this is this cowboy ethos and ethics. So I'm not here to demonize it. However, I would also say that cowboys build great countries, but terrible churches. Cowboys build great countries. That ethic works for building countries and for building success and for building businesses and for taking personal responsibility and the mythology of the individual and the hardworking person that outworks everyone else and that figures it out without any hand-me-downs, without any help, just totally independently. They did it. That ethic works in a lot of things, but it does not work in church. That ethic builds terrible churches, and it builds insecure and immature Christians. And I bring this up because I think as believers, I'm talking about big C church. I'm talking about Christian culture, I'm not talking about grace specifically yet. But I think as believers, we allow that American cowboy mentality to seep into the way that we understand spirituality and spiritual maturity in our relationship with Jesus. That this is a pick ourselves up by our bootstraps ordeal. This is an individual thing. This is my task is to accomplish spiritual maturity without anybody's help, without any hand-me-downs, without anybody else getting all up in my business. I'll handle my thing. My politics and my faith are private. I don't talk about those with other people. My spirituality is between me and God, and your spirituality is between you and God. I'm not going to get into that. I'm not going to address it with them. I'm not going to ask them about that. That's not my business. That's their business. And somebody tries to address that with you. That's not your business. This is my business. And we put up walls. I've seen this happen over the decades in church, where our American cowboy mentality begins to creep into the way that we understand faith and spiritual maturity, which is a terrible thing since it runs so very contrary to what we find in Scripture. This cowboy mentality of spirituality runs so very contrary to what we find in Scripture, and I could go down myriad examples, and I'll give you some more later, but that's the reason that I'm talking about this this morning, is that as I read the passage for this week, it leapt off the page to me and I thought, it's grace, man, we've got to talk about this. Because you will not find anywhere in scripture a John Wayne Christian. You will not find anywhere in scripture an encouragement to go it alone. You will not find any phrases like pick yourself up by your bootstraps, do not seek help out from others, do not seek hand-me-downs. You will not find that in Scripture. What you will find in Scripture is the assumption that our faith is always communal and conjoined. Here's what I mean. If you have a Bible, you can turn with me to Colossians chapter 1. I'm going to begin to read in verse 24 for a bit of context and simply to honor the text without just plucking verses out of it. But you'll given to me for you to make the word of God fully known. The mystery hidden for all ages and generations, but now revealed to the saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of his mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. So if we pause right there, last week, we looked at the soaring picture that Paul painted of Christ. This week, we see where he continues the thought by talking about this mystery of the gospel. And the mystery of the gospel is that that Jesus that we described last week, that is the apex of all of human history and the apex of all of human hope, is actually offered not just to the Jewish people, as we see in the Old Testament, but to all the world, to the Jew and Gentile alike, that God's grace is available to everyone energy that he powerfully works within me. As I read this week, approaching it with the idea of suffering in mind, I couldn't get past this verse. How Paul writes that we are warning everyone and teaching everyone that we, meaning me and you, the church, Paul and the church in Colossae, me and first part of it, I'll say because it's worth saying and then I'll move on. This is not the point of the sermon, but I do want to point this out. I've been a part of churches before, and I've been a part of ministries before, where it was the goal of the church to bring people to the point of salvation. And that salvation was somehow this finish line. That we go out into the community, we find the people who don't know Jesus, we talk to our non-believing co-workers, our non-believing family members and friends, we witness to them, we evangelize them, we share Christ with them, and then one day, gloriously, miraculously, they accept Christ. And that is a good and wonderful thing, and we ought to celebrate that. And I am ardently praying that in 2022, as ministry begins back anew and we start to move church again and things hopefully start to feel back to normal, that we see more salvations happening through the ministry of grace and through what God is doing at grace. I want to see more people come to faith. But when someone comes to faith, that's not a finish line, that's a starting gate. And then we continue to walk with them to maturity. So that one day in eternity, when we die and when they die, when we pass on and they pass on, we present them to Christ as a brother and sister, and they are mature in Christ. They have matured in their walk with Christ. And so Paul says the goal isn't just conversion, it's maturation. Another word, Bible word for it is sanctification, meaning becoming more like Christ in character. But the thing that I really want to draw out of there is how he says that we may present everyone. Not me, not I, not the leader of the church, but that we might be invested in everyone's spiritual growth, in everyone's maturation, that we might press into that together, that we might take ownership of the spiritual growth of those around us. And this, again, runs incredibly contrary to our American ethic. It just does. I kind of thought of it this way this week. America says, I am not my brother's keeper. And God says, it's a loose paraphrase, the heck you're not. That's kind of the Nate version of scripture. I don't know how God talks to you. That's how he talks to me. America says, I'm not my brother's keeper. America says that's their business. I see them sliding away from church. I see them disengaging in small group. I see them prioritizing things differently in their life. I see them developing him or her developing habits that are not healthy. I see them depending on substances more than I think is good. I see them kind of retreating into their hobbies more than I think is healthy for their marriage. I don't see them talking about spiritual things very much at all. And our American ethic and our sensibilities say that's their issue, that's their thing, and that's not my problem. I'll let them deal with it. And then when we get really fancy about it, here's what we say. I'll pray for them. I hope that in your prayers, God spurs you to talk to them. Or we say this, this is another fancy way of saying, not my problem, that's not my place. I'm not my brother's keeper. If someone wants to fall away from engagement in spiritual things, that's their issue, that's not my issue. And God says, the heck, it's not your issue. Paul's desire is that we may present everyone as spiritually mature. James actually writes about this too. I was reminded of this verse this week in weep and mourn with those who mourn. He writes that we are to share our burdens with one another. He writes that we are to carry each other's hardships for one another, that we are to celebrate with one another. Nowhere in the Bible will you find the ethic of, that's not my place, that's not my problem, that's not my role. But in the Bible, what you will find is Christian brothers and sisters taking ownership of the spiritual growth of those around them. I think of it this way, more pointedly. If you know me well, then you know that one of the things I value most highly in my life is friendship. I love my friends. And I have been blessed with wonderful friends from childhood that I still talk to on a daily basis. And God in his goodness has blessed me with people in this church that I consider true, true friends. And I know, I know that I seem prickly and grumpy and curmudgeonly. I am those things. That's not an act. I'm not playing around. Those things are true of me. But if I love you, I love you. And it wouldn't take me too long to start talking about my friends and the blessings that they are for me to be brought to tears at how much I love them and how deeply grateful I am for them. But my ethic of friendship is this. If you're my friend, then your marriage and the health of your marriage is my responsibility too. If you're my friend, then the quality of your fatherhood is my responsibility too. If you're my friend, then how well you disciple your children and show them Jesus, that's my responsibility too. If you're my friend, then I want deeply for your children to grow up in a home that loves Jesus and sees him at the center. I want deeply for you to be a good father. I want deeply for you to be a good mother. I want deeply for you to be a good spouse. I want deeply for you to walk with God. If you are my friend, then it is my divine directive to take ownership of the things in your life that matter most. If I don't speak into those things, if I don't take ownership of your marriage and of your spiritual health and of your parenting and of the things that God cares about in your life, then I don't love you. And it is a dereliction of my duty. And I just, to have friends in our life that we watch slide into things that are not good for them, that are not healthy for them, that we don't go and rescue them from, that we don't go save a brother or sister in wandering, that we just watch them slide and we quietly pray or we quietly hope. To do that isn't respectful of them. It's not kind of them. It's not respecting them. To do that, to watch a slide like that is cowardly and irresponsible. It is not loving. We are called to take ownership of the spiritual health of the people that God places in our life. We are called to care deeply about that and to prize the success of their spiritual health with the success of our spiritual health, to see them walk hand in hand. It is sad to me that the ethic, this cowboy ethic is so prevalent in our culture that we allow it to infuse the way we think about the spirituality of those that are closest to us. And I'm putting this in front of you as grace this morning because one of the things I've loved since the beginning of being here is the fact that grace is a church of deep friendships. Grace is a church of good and deep connections. That's what makes us us. That's what makes us special. In a world, literally, in a world, in a church culture where big box churches are taking over the world and little churches exist less and less, that's what keeps us here. It's not the worship and it's not the preaching. It's the relationships. It's the friendships. It's the relational foundation that this church is built upon. And I want to put in front of you this morning as a church full of deep and rich friendships, that within those friendships that you have, you bear a divine responsibility for the spiritual health of those around you. It is not your deal. It is not their deal and your deal. It is not between them and God and between you and God. It is between us and God to speak into the spiritual health of our friends. And so I want to lean into that this morning, this idea that we press together so that we might present everyone as spiritually mature. Sometimes, just to be honest with you, those things get relegated to the pastor. You know, this is going on in so-and-so's life. Pastor should probably talk to them about that. Why don't you talk to them about it? You've got a better relationship with them than I do. Don't be a chicken. The spiritual maturity of our children is not Aaron's responsibility. It is her responsibility to work in concert with our parents who are working in concert with their small groups and their friends. We all bear the burden of the spiritual maturity of our children. The spiritual maturity of your teenagers does not rest on Kyle, nor does the spiritual maturity of the church in general rest on Nate. No, it is a burden that we all share. I'm not preaching to you as a responsibility of a pastor this morning. I'm preaching to you the responsibilities of Christian brothers and sisters in genuine friendship. That the spiritual maturity of those around us is something that we ought to take ownership of. And here's the thing. When we do that, when we take ownership of others, they take ownership of us. When we begin to speak into the spiritual health of others, they feel a license, a good and healthy and right and righteous license to begin to take ownership in us. When I sit with a friend and I say, how are things with your wife? They feel that it's okay to return the question, how are things with Jen? How's your patience with your kids? They ask me that in return. When we begin to take ownership of those around us, they begin to take ownership of us as well. And that is a good and healthy thing. And in that way, we all help one another keep life between the ditches and pursuing God the way that we should. But I don't want to belabor that point because I really want to get to these last two because this is where the rubber meets the road. If you're with me and you're willing to accept the biblical responsibility that the spiritual health and maturity of those around us is our divine responsibility, that we ought to want to present everyone as spiritually mature before Christ, if you're willing to accept that mantle with me, then the question becomes, okay, I'm with you. How do we do that at grace? What does it practically look like to begin to step into my friend's life in this way? So I would share two things with you. The first would be this. Through prayerful, loving, friendly, empathetic, humble confrontation. I included all those words on purpose. I left them blank on your notes on purpose. I want you to go through the tedium of writing them. They're all important. It's not through confrontation. That's for jerks. All right? And some of you, some of you are like my sweet wife, Jen, and you're like, I don't want anything to do with any confrontation at all. I'd like everyone just to do what they're supposed to so that I don't have to do that because that makes me super uncomfortable. And I get that. Some of you are like me. And you're like, oh, this is great. I'm making a list. I'm having so-and-so to lunch, and this person, Nate gave me permission. I'm going to tell them they are screwed up. Some of you are going to come up to me and be like, listen, I can't think of any of my friends that need help, but if you'll point me in the direction of some people in the church, I'd love to. Which I got some things you could say to Kyle. That guy's been off the rails lately. We do this through loving, prayerful, humble, friendly, empathetic confrontation. If there are things happening in the lives of the people around you that are not good for them, then we check all those boxes before we march in there and we say something. So that when we say it, it's said in the right spirit. When this is done well, it can change a friendship, it can change a dynamic, and it can change a life. This happened to me recently. I have a good buddy at the church who's much, much older than me and only a little bit wiser, which is, you know, that's on him. And we hang out and we get beers and we do whatever and, you know, we talk about church stuff sometime and one afternoon he invited me out to beers. I'm like, you know, all right, that sounds good. And we're sitting there talking and he hits me with this. He says, Nate, you know, I've seen in you, you have this tact towards anger. You get frustrated pretty easily. And you can kind of flare up. And I don't know where he's coming from. I don't deal with that. That's not true at all. He was dead right. And he just said, listen, man, I do too. You don't want to go down that path. Your kids are going to remember that. My kids are grown. They remember it. You don't want your kids having those memories. That he saw me, that he loved me, and that he called me out. And because we're friends, because he loves me, because he wants my marriage to be the best that can, because he wants me to be the best father that I can, because he's rooting for me in my role, I didn't for one second feel a tone of accusation or condescension. I felt empathy and love and support. And it changed the way that I want to be a husband. It changed the way that I want to be a father. It was prayerful and empathetic and friendly and kind, and it mattered. And we need to have more of those conversations. And sometimes when I say prayerful, I mean prayerful. I have, and still am, I have prayed for as long as a year and a half or two for an opening to address something with a friend of mine. God, I see this in them. God, I know this is not good. God, I know it's not good for their marriage. Will you, with your spirit, please provide an opportunity to talk about this, and I will. Give me your patience to not need it, as we call it in my house, and just storm in there and make stuff happen. Give me your patience to see it. And then give me your grace and your empathy to address it when you've prepared their heart to hear it. So sometimes these conversations happen after years of prayer and patience and sensitivity and God working in their heart what he needs to work. But we need to have more of these conversations. And when we do, it joins us together the way that Ecclesiastes talks about how a three-fold cord cannot be quickly broken. It weaves and binds our lives together when we have conversations like this. So we need to have more of those. And we need to invite more of those. Which brings me to the next thing that we do in response to this. We obey this, we respond to this by encouraging and taking next steps. By taking and encouraging next steps. Now here's what I mean. One of the things that I'm going to very intentionally try to put in front of us more regularly as a church is the idea of next steps. Every church wants to make disciples. Every church talks about discipleship. The way that we define it is at grace, a disciple of God, is to identify and take your next step of obedience. We believe that this is how Jesus discipled the disciples, that he simply told them the next thing he wanted them to do. Go here and teach. Go here and cast out. Go here and pray. Sit with me and listen. He just told them the next thing he wanted them to do to be obedient to God and thus furthering their spiritual maturity and education. And so at Grace, we define discipleship as people, a disciple of Christ is someone who is actively identifying and taking their next step of obedience. And so if you want to be a disciple of Christ here, the thing that I would ask you is, what's your next step of obedience? What has God placed in front of you? Is it having a quiet time? We always say that there's no greater habit than anyone in their life could develop than that of waking up every morning and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. Is that your next step of obedience? Is your next step of obedience to stop staying up so late so that you can get up early? Is your next step of obedience to run? Is your next step of obedience to be prayerful about being more gentle with the people around you? Is it to take steps to remove stress from your life so that you can be more present and peaceful with your family? Is it to have a hard conversation that you know you need to have? What is God putting in front of you as your next step of obedience? And then to make disciples is to simply come alongside someone and help them identify and take their step of obedience. And that way we can all disciple each other. We don't have to be a guru on a hill that people come sit at our feet and we dispense our life wisdom onto them. We can simply help those around us, our friends, that's where we begin, identify and take their next steps of obedience. So one of the things that I want to be true of everyone who calls grace home is this, and this is a thing that I want to intentionally weave into what we do on a very regular basis. If you call grace home, I want this to be true of you. That there is someone in your life who is not your spouse, that's important, who knows and has permission to encourage you to take your next step of obedience. I want there to be someone in your life, someone, you pick who, who knows what your next step of obedience is and has your permission to encourage you to take it. It's simple as that. It could be in your small group. Small group leaders, if this makes sense to implement in your small group, do it. In my Tuesday morning group, that's one of the things that we do. It's a men's group. We go around every week. We go, what's your next step? How's it going? And then we get into Bible study. So maybe it happens in small group. Maybe your small group is big and you can pull over a couple of friends that are close and you say, hey, will you be my person who knows my thing? Can I be your person who knows your step of obedience? But I wanted to put this in front of us this morning because I believe that God gives us these life-giving friendships and he gives them specifically here at Grace. Not just for the purpose of joyful weekends and fun times and laughter and making joy better and making sadness more muted. Those are good reasons that we have friendships, but he also gives them to us because as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Your role in your friendships is to see your friends presented to Christ as mature believers. And if we are not actively engaged in that part of our role, then we are short shrifting our friends, the people who we love so much. And I wanted to put in front of Grace that you have those friendships because God wants you to spur one another on towards Him. And if it's not a part of your friendships, it needs to be. And the way that we can do this is through prayerful, humble, empathetic, considerate, thoughtful confrontation and through having someone in all of our lives who knows our next step and has permission to encourage us to take it. If we will do those things, I think that we can be a church that doesn't just exist as a group of friends, but exists as a group of people who collectively take on the responsibility to present one another mature to Christ in eternity. Let's pray that God would make that a reality here. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for how you love us and for expressing that love through the friendships that you give us. God, I pray that we would all have good and true friends that we can trust with things. If there's anyone here who lacks for that, God, I pray that you would provide it. I pray that you would show them a path. God, if there are folks here who are not connected, I pray that they would have the courage to get connected and to begin to experience these life-giving relationships. God, for those of us who have been blessed with those, may we use those as tools to point us towards you. Make us responsible, loving friends who take ownership of the spiritual health of those around us. God, make grace a church that takes very seriously Paul's example of desiring to present everyone to you as mature believers. Give us the courage to take whatever next step we need to take as a result of this morning and bless the conversations that flow out of it. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. How you guys doing? Everybody good? If you are new or if you are visiting, my name is Aaron. I am so honored to get to serve as one of your pastors. And can we just take a second? Like, that was incredible, right? Can we just take a second and thank our worship team? Like, a lot of times, we see what happens on Sunday morning, but we don't see all of the prep that goes into, like, making sure that we set a good environment for worship on Sunday morning. And they knock it out of the park every time. And matter of fact, I'm really nervous about my job at this point because I'm not needed anymore, right? So I'm excited to be sharing with you today. I do want to clear the air about something. This is the first time I've really gotten to talk to you since the new setup. And if you remember a couple of weeks ago, our loving pastor blamed, if you do not like this, it was my idea, right? You remember that? And truth, it was my idea. But if you do not like it, it's because I was gone and his execution of my idea was terrible. So no, truthfully, the reason this became an idea is because I got tired of every single week leaving my coffee cup underneath my chair. And so I was like, hey, if we have something to set it on, we'll be good to go there, right? Hey guys, again, I'm really excited about today. We're continuing our series 27. It's a journey through the New Testament. It's just a broad overview of a lot of the books. And the heartbeat behind it is to honestly just create some hunger to go and check it out, go and read it. And today, we're talking about Colossians, which has easily become one of my favorite books. And to get our minds going in the right direction, I'll tell you a story of several years ago. I was serving at a church, and I had never taught. I had never preached on Sunday morning. At this point in time, I was just the pretty face on staff, and I was there to make the staff pictures better. It's similar to today, right? But no, so I was never somebody who taught, right? Except there was this one time they figured, hey, maybe he's more than a pretty face, and they let me teach. And so what happened after that, there's a part of the responsibilities, whoever teaches that Sunday, to call and follow up with anyone who responds to the gospel. At the end of the message, we would give a gospel presentation, and so my responsibility was to call people the next week. And I can remember a phone call that I had the very next day. I knew that I was unprepared for the phone call, but I had no clue how much of a bumbling idiot I really was until I got on that phone call. Because the goal was to just kind of tell her, okay, here's some next steps. Here's what your life should look like. Here's what the Christian life looks like. And I'm going to be honest, like I have no flipping clue what I said to that girl, right? Like I remember, like at some point I talked about Genesis and I may have talked about dinosaurs. I have no, I'm pretty certain that I am the only pastor to ever talk someone out of following Jesus. Like that's what happened. But really the whole goal was to just say, hey, here's what your life should look like. Here's the decision you made, and here's how it impacts and affects your life. But as you think about that, isn't that a great question? Have you ever wondered that? Like if you were sitting down having a cup of coffee with somebody, and you were trying to tell them, hey, here's what your life should look like as a Christian. How do you answer that question? Because we're told throughout all the New Testament, right? Like from this point forward, go and impact the world. Make a difference in the world around you. And yes, we do know and we've heard these things that say, read your Bible, pray about what it says, and then live it out. But can we just be honest? There's been a lot of times that I read this and I have no clue what to do with what it says. And then what KT talked about last week, right? It was just reflecting the love of Jesus. And that's great, man. That's an incredible, incredible thing that we need to remember. We need to let resonate. But there's a lot of times that I wonder, what does that look like? Like in today's world, what does it look like to love myself and simultaneously love someone else? Have you ever thought about that? Because if we can be honest, church today, Christian world today, it kind of has the same vibe as, like it's a-life version of telephone. You remember that game that you played as kids? Like, your teacher would get all the students up, and you'd stand them in a long, single-file line, and then she would whisper a phrase or a sentence to the very first kid, and then he would whisper it to the next, and they would whisper it to the next, and they would go all the way down the line until the very last person, they repeated what it is that they heard. And everybody's like, no, that's not what I said, except the teacher. It's like, wait, how in the world did you get there? It feels like that's kind of where we're at today with Christianity. Like generation after generation, person to person, these things have been kind of added to. And a lot of it is based on what the world needs at a particular moment. A lot of it is based on maybe an understanding or misunderstanding of scripture. But we put into the gospel, we put into Christianity, this is what Christianity looks like. This is what your life is supposed to look like to the point where we stand here like, well, who's right? Because that's the one thing everyone has in common. They're all right, but somehow all different. Like we're all convinced that this is the thing. And Paul's heartbeat behind his letter to the church in Colossae was, here's the life I want you to live. His heartbeat early on in chapter one, he says, hey guys, here's my prayer for you. My prayer is that you would live a life worthy of the Lord, that you would be knowledgeable of God's will, and that you would live a life that produces fruit. You would live a life that creates change in the world around you. That's his heartbeat. That's the purpose of Colossians. But what's amazing to me is that he doesn't start his letter with the do's and don'ts, which is what you may expect, right? He doesn't start his letter with, hey, all right, so now that you're a Christian, you gotta stop doing this because that's not very Christ-like. Now that you're a Christian, you definitely gotta quit doing that. Can you imagine if someone sees? He doesn't start with modifications to our behavior. Where Paul starts is with your belief. In this letter that he wrote from prison, he's writing to them to instruct them, to give them the Christian blueprint for life. And he doesn't start with what they do, but he starts with what they believe. I would recommend go and read through 1st Colossians, right? Like I'm from Kentucky, so it took me about 15 minutes., you'll do it in one, right? But read it nice and slow because it is probably the fullest expression of Jesus and his deity and supremacy. He goes through and he just talks about it. He articulates beautifully how Jesus is the son of God. He was there at the beginning. He was through him, all things are created. And for him, all things are created. I was really hoping. I was really hoping that that's where the rest of this book was gonna go. Because like that's, man, that comes from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount where he says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness because then you'll be filled. What he's saying is, hey, you're hungry. Like you're chasing all of these, and you're hoping for fulfillment. You're hoping for joy. You're hoping for a full life, but you weren't created for those things, and that's why you keep coming up. That's a great message, but that's not where Paul goes. He talks not just about Jesus and him being God, his deity, not just about Jesus being ruler over all rulers, ruler over all authorities. He's the Lord of lords and the King of kings, but he also talks about Jesus and his sufficiency. This is what he says in Colossians 1, verse 21. He says, once you were alienated and hostile in your minds, expressed in your evil actions, that's what we would call non-Christian, right? This is what he's defining right now. You were alienated and hostile in your minds, expressed in your evil actions, but now he has reconciled you by his physical body through his death to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him. If indeed you remain grounded and steadfast in the faith and are not shifted away from the hope of the gospel that you heard. Paul, in a book where he is trying to tell them what life to live, he says, first, you have to understand the gospel. He defines a clarity and the simplicity of the gospel. What Paul just told them, he says, it's his body, it's his death, it's his resurrection, and it's his presentation of you. All you do, it is your faith. In a book that is designed to tell them how to live, he says the key to all of this, the key to the life that you're hoping for is not in the life that you live, but first in the hope and faith that you have. What Paul just said was you became a Christian. You became a Christian when you put your faith in Jesus and his actions. See, what was happening at Colossae at this point in time before Christianity came to the scene, like all of the religions and all of the ideologies and everything that existed before, Christianity came in and it started to merge and blend with. People were saying, it's not just Jesus, but it's Jesus and this. For them, it was this thing called asceticism, right? Like it would be severe depravity, right? Like you would deprive yourself of something or you would even cause physical harm to your body to make up for the evil actions. It was Jesus and that. It was Jesus and this idea of philosophies built on elements not built on Christ. It was the elements of the world. It was Jesus and Jewish tradition. Jesus and, and it was this and thing, and it began to muddy the waters. And what Paul is saying to these guys, hey, listen, if you want to live this life that you're asking about, if you want to live this life that you have been called to do, you first have to understand the clarity and simplicity of the gospel, because a convoluted gospel confuses direction. Anytime that we add to the gospel, it just confuses where to go from there. It confuses what to do from there. We cannot live the life that we've been asked and called to live. The way this plays itself out today is you have this word repentance, right? Like if you've been in and around the church very long, you've heard this term before. What tends to happen? I believe wholeheartedly that reading throughout the scriptures, you see two different types of repentance. Paul just talked about one. He said, you were alienated from Christ because of what? Your thinking. And your thinking influenced your actions. Your actions expressed what you think. You have Peter, just after Christ, burial, resurrection, and then ascension. Peter stands in front of the masses and he says, you killed Jesus. It was what you did this, so repent. He wasn't saying, you can't go back and undo that. What he was saying and what Paul is saying, a repentance that defines Christianity is what you believe to be true about Jesus. What Paul says to these guys, the life that you live, first has to be a repentance of what you believe to be true about Christ. Do you believe him to be who he said he is? Do what he said he did, and we'll do what he said he would do. The other repentance happens from that. The other repentance is a lifelong journey. It's what we call sanctification. It's the tugging and pulling and molding of the Holy Spirit working on creating you, morphing your desires, pulling you from the life that you left and towards the life that Christ is calling you to. What we tend to do, both of those are necessary. One is necessary for Christianity, belief, faith. And what we have a tendency to do is take the two repentance and we just blend them together. And so it's not just Christianity is not just a faith in Jesus. It's a faith in Jesus and this. It's a faith in Jesus and this belief. And honestly, most of the time, those beliefs are, they're proximity related. Like where you grew up, they scatter all over the states. Where you grew up, it's plausibility structuring. Like what you believe is possible is largely based off what you've been exposed to. And what happens is we elevate the non-essentials to the status of gospel. And Paul says you will never live the life you've been designed to live if we do that. Because it has you working from the wrong position. If we don't understand the gospel for what the gospel is, it has you working for a position with Christ instead of from a position with Christ. It has you working with the effort to earn Jesus instead of walking in life in Christ. Paul actually uses a word that he says, it holds you captive. Let me read for you in chapter two. I'm going to start in verse four, and then we'll pick it up on screen in verse six. I'm saying this so that no one will deceive you with arguments that sound reasonable. For I may be absent in body, but I'm with you in spirit, rejoicing to see how well ordered you are and the strength of your faith in Christ. So then, just as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live in him, being rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught and overflowing with gratitude. Here's the warning. Be careful that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit based on human tradition, based on elements of the world rather than Christ. This word captive is a strong word. It's saying there's a restriction from where you want to be. Like we have the desire to move and live and go and do this, except absorbing these beliefs, lifting things up, trying to earn what has been freely given. It holds you captive. You know this, like nothing, nothing good is gonna come from captivity. Nothing good is going to come from presenting non-essentials as gospel. Like we could all sit down, right? We could have a cup of coffee and we've all probably got our story. Maybe you yourself or you know someone who has been involved and hurt by legalism. Because what happens with these beliefs is if you don't adhere to them, if we don't fall into them, it's, you're wayward. You've lost, he's kind of lost sight of what's good. He's not quite where he needs to be. And suddenly, because of not something that Jesus defined, it's just these ideas that have blended. And you're not good enough anymore. Some of you know this. I grew up in the church. My father was a pastor. And I can remember one week in particular. I don't quite remember how old I was. Maybe 10, 11 years old, something like that. But it was after worship, we were all sitting down, and after my dad had got up to preach, maybe two minutes within his message, he looked right back at me. I remember I was sitting, it was to his left. It would have been like you, right there. That's where I was sitting. I remember it, because he said, hey, Aaron, I need you to stand up and go home. Now, I got in trouble when I was a kid. I never knew I got in that much trouble. He stopped church to say, hey, listen, you got a whooping coming. That's what was going through my mind. I got whoopings as a kid. That's how I'm such a productive member of society. But I remember I was sitting in church and he stopped the service and said, Aaron, I need you to stand up and I need you to go home. And the entire trip, I'm like, oh, no. And you start cycling through all the things. Like, what'd I do? Well, I did that. Did he know that I did that? Like all of these things start happening, right? But what I came to find out later, he sheltered and guarded me well from that. What I come to find out, what I can remember now is as I stood up, there was another guy who was standing up before me. And what he was doing is he was parroting and mocking my father. Every sentence, he would echo it like a toddler who's spoiled and not getting what they want. He was standing in church. My dad knew something was about to happen. And what he came to tell me later, it was shortly after that, there was a family, probably about four to five families, that circled around my father, almost like a schoolyard fight. And they were trying to push him out of the church, trying to remove him from any type of leadership. They're claiming just heretic, claiming non-Christian, claiming all of these different things, simply because he was going to allow someone who had been divorced and remarried to become members of the church. We've all experienced where you know somebody, maybe you yourself. Like we don't, people don't walk away from the church because of what they see in Jesus. People walk away from the church because of what they see in people who claim Jesus. And it creates confusion. It creates hostility. It creates an uphill battle of worthiness that we will never, ever reach. And Paul says, don't let somebody take you captive. Don't let someone convince you that Jesus isn't enough. You will and you should. I'm gonna say this again. Please hear me. You will and you should live a different life. After receiving Christ, you will and you should live differently than you did before, but it's in response to Jesus, not to earn Jesus. And if we do not understand that, if we live with an effort, you can't focus on what Jesus has asked us to focus on because I'm trying to be good enough. I'm trying to earn. I'm trying all of this other stuff. And listen, Grace, I got to tell you, that is not something I've seen with you. Just to be very honest and very transparent, our last year here for my wife and myself has been such a breath of fresh air, of people who love because they love. They love because of what Jesus has done in their world. There's no expectation of anything. I mean, don't be a jerk, but like still, but even like grace, I do not think, I do not think that Paul would look at you and say, hey, stop. I don't think he would do that. But I do think he would look at you and say, hey, you don't have to earn anything. You are God's child. You are holy and dearly loved. You are worthy, not because of your actions, but because of your faith in Jesus' actions. So live in the freedom and joy that Jesus offers. Live in light of the gospel you have put your faith in. Live a life that Jesus has asked you to live without the weight of earning. That's the place where you can walk into who God has asked us to be. It's fascinating to me. It's fascinating that over half of his letter, like he didn't put numbers like chapters and stuff like that, but it's sectioned out into four different chapters, two chapters. In a letter where he's trying to tell you how to live your life, he says, first, understand your belief. And then he says, now go and do this. Chapter three. Therefore, as God's chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion. I don't know if you are reading through your Bible or like you're thumbing through or whatever, but if you are, underline that word put on, right? If you're not just writing on the person's neck in front of you, like you need to remember that. Like put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another. If anyone has a grievance against another, just as the Lord has forgiven you. And I'll read verse 14. I don't think it's up there. Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity, and let the peace of Christ to which you were called in one body rule your hearts. I love that word put on. Paul talks about this often in multiple letters. He says it in Romans. He says it in Corinthians a couple of times. He says it to the church at Ephesus. He uses this phrase, put on, which put on simply means to clothe yourselves. I love that. When that happened, it changed everything. When I realized he was saying clothe yourselves, because that's something we all understand, right? The intentionality that goes into deciding what it it is you're gonna wear. Some of us clearly think about it more than others, but like the intentionality, every day we wake up and we what? We clothe ourselves. There's laws that make you do this, right? Like we clothe ourselves. You go and you decide this. This is what I want to be wearing when people see me in the world. And he says, clothe yourselves with compassion, gentleness, humility, patience, and kindness. This is what Paul says. He says, live a life that reflects the life you placed your faith in. This is what he just described. This sounds remarkably close to what Jesus said, right? He says, it's this way that people are gonna know that you're my disciples. Hey, when you live this life, people are gonna identify you with me by the way you love one another. In a world where commandments mean everything, in a world and in a season of life where they needed the step-by-step direction, Jesus said, hey, I give you one, one command, one thing to do. This is what I want you to do. This is how I want you to follow me. Love others. What Paul tells us is that in order to love others the way that Jesus has called us to love people, you first have to understand fully how loved you are and that you have nothing to earn. And living a life of that love, it changes things. It creates and produces fruit. I have seen the church. Legalism hurt people. I have seen the effects of terrible theology. My entire family split from the church. My parents got divorced when I was maybe 15, 16 years old. And of course, how can you go back to the very place that tried to get you removed from the very thing you just did? Everyone. Gone. I have also seen, you have also seen, a lot of you are here today and consistently coming back to grace because you have seen what a life in a church that reflects the love of a Savior does to a person's heart. It pulls you in. It was the love of our Savior that drew you in. And Jesus said, hey guys, here's what I need you to do. Do you want to change the world? Draw them in with love. And this, you guys are all smart people, but I know for me, this made such a difference. Just the context of which Paul is talking about right now. He says, clothe yourselves with compassion. Compassion is not just seeing someone and having a sadness about their lot in life, but it's seeing someone and you feel such a hurt, like your insides turn and you're not okay with it. So you feel this and it moves you into action. Compassion. Clothe yourselves with kindness. Kindness is simply lending someone else your strength. You see someone dealing with something, I lend them a part of me to aid them. Humility. Humility doesn't necessarily mean thinking less of yourself. I think in this context, it means thinking more of others, not in terms of value, not in terms of how awesome they are at stuff. Maybe we can say it like this, thinking of yourself less. Like we don't see helping someone and being there for someone as beneath us. We think more of them and we move to help. We move to serve. We move to love. And then gentleness. Gentleness is the difference of catching a softball and a bubble. It's like you have the grip and you have the strength and you have the capacity to catch a softball. You can grip it and it won't fall, but you understand that in some situations, the gentleness of catching a bubble is what's needed for people. Patience is the tricky one. Because patience kind of, the way we think about it, the way I think about patience is I'm sitting there, okay, come on, let's go. Just don't cuss. Just don't cuss. That's not patience. Patience means moving at someone else's pace. And not sitting and waiting. Hey, come on, let's go. Walking with. Jesus. Paul. Jesus said, do you want to change the world around you? Clothe yourselves. How different would your world look? How different would your day-to-day look if every day you got up, you went in your closet, you got dressed, and maybe you have to do what me and Jeff do, right? Like you go and check with your wife if you match, and you just go back and put on whatever they tell you to, right? Like so maybe you go through all of that. You intentionally decide what you wear. You get ready to walk out your door, and you stop at your mirror right before you walk out the front. You look at it, and you say, okay, today, when people see me, they're going to see compassion. They're going to see someone who's not okay with seeing someone hurt. When they see me, they're going to see someone who's not above stepping in and helping out. When they see me, they're going to see someone who is not angry at consistently waiting, but walking along with. Listen, please, how different would your world look if every day you picked one and you clothed yourself? When people see you, they identify you as compassionate. Jot it down, right? Like, whatever it may, put your Bible, jot it down somewhere. Put it on something you have to look at every single day. Gentleness, kindness, compassion, patience. What is it that would change? How different, let's just not, let's take it beyond us right now. How different would the world perceive Christianity if people who claim Jesus reflected him? How different would your world look? How different could our world look if we live the life that Jesus has asked us to live? And intentionally, wear compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience, and humility. Let's pray. God, thank you. Thank you so much, Lord, for your, well, compassion, gentleness, kindness, humility, and patience with us. God, I thank you for the writing of Paul that just, it frees us and allows us to step into the joy and freedom that we have in you, Jesus. And I ask, Lord, that you would just guard and protect our hearts and that you would help us to daily choose to wear something about who you are. That we would be intentional, Lord, about living a life that is a reflection of you. God, I think this is what it means when it says to trust you with our souls, but also trust you with our life. We're choosing to live a life that we are rested secure in because of who you are and asking you to do the same thing in the world around us, God. Help us to be a reflection of the life you have created us to live. Help us to be a reflection of the life that you lived because we do not just trust what you can give us. We trust who you are, Lord, to the point of we will put all of our faith in you and we will adopt your lifestyle as our own. Thank you, in Jesus' name. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.

Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.

Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.

Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.

Well, good morning. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Man, that was good. I tell you what, I tell you what, I love you guys. I love this place. I love this church. It is so special. God's doing something here, y'all. He's doing something in me. He's doing something in y'all. And I fully, fully believe that the brightest days of grace are ahead, that he has a lot for us to do in us and through us. And I'm excited about those. This morning, we are starting a new series. And I got to say this too. I expected for this morning to be terrible. Can I just tell you that? I expected it to be dead in here, for there to be sporadic attendance, and for it to just be a lame Sunday. I'm coming back from South Africa. I don't know what day it is. I feel like eating lunch right now. I have no clue what's going on around me or where I am. We have a team coming back from Mexico that represents a lot of our core folks. Did you guys just clap for yourself? Is that what just happened? Good job, everyone. Yes, we are the best. We got students coming back from Metta. They're all ready to fall asleep. Yeah, this is great. And then it's the middle of October, and if you don't know anything about Grace in October, it's like July 2.0. Everybody goes to the mountains to see leaves, I guess. I don't know. They don't come here to see me, and so it's just kind of sparse here. And I thought this Sunday is going to be dead. And then I'm sitting here worshiping and I'm like, holy cow, God, this is amazing. That was some of the best, most energetic, enthusiastic, sincere worship I've heard come from us. And I'm just fired up, especially about what I get to share with you this morning as we start our new series called Great Prayers. So what we're going to do for six weeks is just open the Bible and look at some of the more impactful prayers that we see in Scripture. And hopefully by looking at these great prayers, we can become greater prayers, but we're not going to talk about how to pray. We're not going to talk about having devotions and that prayer time needs to be a part of our life. And here's why. We're simply going to look at some of the most impactful prayers and meaningful prayers in scripture and kind of ask the question, what can we learn about them for our prayers? And so the one that we're kicking off with is very near and dear to my heart. It's very special to me. This is my prayer over grace. It's what Rachel Gentile just read. As she got up here to read, I leaned over to Jen, and I said, she's just the best. And Jen has tears in her eyes because she loves Rachel. And she's like, I know. Maybe I'm just jet lagged. I don't know. And I don't love Rachel that much. Maybe I'm just fatigued. You're not a big deal, Rachel. It's whatever. We're glad you're here. But this prayer, it's the one that I pray over grace. My office at home, I've got it sitting in the corner now. I need to get it framed and then hang it up. But I've got this prayer written out on a big piece of paper in calligraphy that we had a friend of ours do for us. When I come and pray over children who are born at grace, this is what I pray over them. When I pray for grace, it's what I pray for grace. When I pray for my children, it's what I pray for them. When I pray for you, it's what I pray for you. And so for me, it's perfect that this prayer sermon is coming right on the heels of traits of grace, where we're saying this is what makes grace, grace, and this is who we are. And so now right on the heels of that, we say this is to me the prayer of grace. And I think it's safe to call it the prayer of grace because the greatest church planner of all time, one of the most influential Christians who ever lived, Paul, the apostle, is the author of this prayer. And what I think is cool about it is that it's really mirrored throughout the rest of the Pauline epistles, the other letters that Paul wrote to the churches. So for those of you who may not know exactly what Paul did, you just know he's kind of a name of one of the saints that we talk about in church sometimes. Paul wrote a third of the New, or two-thirds of the New Testament, as far as the books that are attributed to him. Paul planted seven to ten churches right after Jesus died. He's responsible really for the early church movement throughout Asia Minor. And once he was converted on the road to Tarsus, Paul spent the rest of his life traveling around these cities on the Mediterranean coast, planning churches and encouraging the church leaders and the people within those churches, and then writing letters back to those churches as he was going on his four different missionary journeys. If you count the journey on the slave ship that shipwrecks at Malta and then eventually makes it to Rome, then there's four journeys. And so all through those journeys, he's visiting the churches and then he's writing letters back to the churches that he's already visited or that he longs to visit. And in most of those letters, he has a prayer. There'll be a preface and it'll say something like, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And that's what we see in Philippians. And sometimes it says, whenever I think of you, I pray for you and here's what I pray. But if you'll read Paul's letters carefully, what you'll see in these prayers when he prays for those churches is that they're remarkably similar and that he essentially prays for the same thing for all the churches. And so it's interesting to me to look, what does Paul pray for the churches? What's the singular thing that he wants? What does he always pray for no matter what else is going on? But before we look at and examine what he prays for, I thought I would ask you what you think you would pray for. Put yourself in the shoes of Paul. You spent your life planting these churches, investing in these people. You want to see them grow. You want to see them flourish. You want to see the communities evangelized and reached. You're hopeful for these churches. Not only that, a lot of these churches exist in cities and in empires that are under persecution and oppression, where it might even be illegal to be a Christian and to be in these churches and definitely to be leading these churches. So if you were to write a letter to these churches and you were to include in that letter a prayer, here's what I hope for you. Think with me sincerely, what would you pray? What would you hope for them? What would you want for them? Would you pray for safety? I would. Would you pray for relief from persecution? Would you pray in a day and age when a life expectancy isn't long? Would you pray for health? Certainly you would know some people there who were ailing. Would you pray for the success of the church? May you reach the community. May your love abound so that others come to know Jesus. Would you pray for the health of the church, for the wisdom of the leaders? If you were Paul, what would you pray for? And then think about it in terms of the people that you do pray for. Hopefully, hopefully you pray for the people in your life. If you have kids, hopefully you pray for them regularly, if not daily. If you don't, that's okay. Maybe you have an eight-year-old and you're thinking, gosh, I have not really prayed for that kid very often the first eight years of their life. Okay. Well, they don't have to go any more years without you praying for them daily. So start doing that now. Hopefully you pray for your spouse. Hopefully you pray for them daily. If you don't, that's okay. They've gone however long they've gone without you praying for them daily. But start now and don't make them live that life anymore. Pray for them daily. Hopefully you pray for the people that you love. Hopefully you lift them up to God and you ask for what's best for them. And when you do, what kinds of things do you pray for them? If we pray daily, maybe there's daily prayers, but I think a lot of us probably relegate prayers for others to when there's something urgent going on in their life, right? When there's a tricky relationship, when they've reached a difficult season, when they're awaiting news for a diagnosis or they've received it and now they're undergoing treatment, when there's a difficult situation at work, when there's a difficult situation with their family, with their kids, or with their marriage, then we lift them up. And so when we do, it's often a petition, right? God, save their marriage. God, help them here. God, help me here. Help them do that. God, I just pray for protection for my children. We've got one girl in the youth group who recently turned 16. I'm very certain that her parents are praying prayers of safety on the road and for the other drivers who are around this particular young lady. Those are the kinds of things we pray for, like circumstantial help in this situation. And listen, those are good prayers. They're good prayers. And we see those throughout the Bible. We see David say that God is his fortress and his strength and he prays for protection. We see Paul at different places pray for healing. We see Paul pray urgently and petition God that communities would be reached and that the gospel would be expounded. So we see all of those prayers in scripture. But when we look at Paul's prayer, to me, as we read it, and I'll read it again here in a second, to me it speaks just as loudly what he doesn't pray for as what he does. And I think that we have a lot to learn from that. So let's look again at the prayer that Paul prays, and let's ask together, what is it that he's asking on behalf of the church. Verse 14 in Ephesians chapter 3. So here's what Paul prays. the triune God, that you would be strengthened by the Spirit, that you would be indwelled by the Christ, and that you would be filled with the fullness of the Father, resulting in knowing God along with the saints. So when we say knowing God this morning, we mean the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So Paul's prayer is that we would know God. That's the prayer, that you would know God. Not for safety, not that everything would be okay, not that the people would be healed, not even for success and growth of the church, not for anything circumstantial, but a singular prayer for them is that they would know God, that they would know him deeply and so commune with the other saints that know him. And it is my prayer for you that everything in life would push us to this place where we know God more deeply. It was the apex value for Paul. Again, do we see in other places him praying for those things? For safety and for protection and for growth and for the expounding of the gospel? Yes, absolutely, he prays for those things. But it's not the first thing he prays. It's not the apex value. It's not what's most important to him. To help us think about this idea of like this apex value, this thing that's so valuable to me, I'm going to pursue it above and beyond anything else. I'm going to tell you a snippet of the story of me getting home from South Africa, which is a heck of a story. But our flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg kept getting delayed. And we had to catch a flight in Johannesburg from Johannesburg to Atlanta. And that margin of time between when we were going to land and when we needed to be at our gate kept shrinking. And I'm looking at my buddy that I'm traveling with, and it kind of dawns on both of us, because he's a more experienced international traveler than I am, and he didn't do me the favor of advising that I not check a bag. So this is really his fault, and he owes me money. But I didn't know not to check a bag, so I had a small bag, and I checked it, figuring it's an international flight. We're going to be there for six days. It seems like the time you check something. Anyways, I checked it. So we're looking at each other going, and he's like, dude, you ain't going to get that bag. You do not have time to go to baggage claim, go to check-in, go through security, and get to the gate. You've got to choose. Do you want what's in that bag, or do you want to get on that flight? Do you want that stuff, which, in that bag, or my Crocs, guys? I know. I know. Oh, man. That's great. If you're watching online and you don't know what just happened, I'm not going to explain it to you. You just got to be here. You just got to be here. So sad. But I know I want to get home. I want to see my family. I want to see my church. I don't want to spend more money on another ticket that's going to cost more than the content of my bag. So even though I really want that stuff and I like some of that stuff, it's just my apex value in this situation, my biggest value, my biggest priority is to go home. So even though it hurts a little bit, I'm going to make a choice to pursue the thing that I need the most. It was the apex value. My value is to go home, see my family, to be in my house. Paul's value for us is that our souls would go home, is that our souls would find rest. And if on occasion we have to leave a bag behind to get closer to the Father, so be it. If on occasion the sickness is what's acting in our life to actually conspire to bring us closer to God and drive us to a deeper knowledge of Him that we would be filled with his fullness, then so be it. Paul prays that our souls would go home, that our souls would find rest in God, that they would go there first and foremost, and that that's what we would want to sacrifice anything else for the sake of knowing God. Maybe this is why Paul writes in Philippians 3.8 that he considers everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. So if we want our prayers to mirror the ethic of Paul, then when we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, we pray that our souls would go home. We pray that our souls would find their rest in God, no matter what else we have to go through. So if we have a child who's wondering and they don't know about their faith and we see them making decisions that we might not make, the prayer to pray for that child is, God, would everything in their life that they're experiencing somehow conspire to push them closer to you so that they might go home? When someone is sick, sure, we pray for them to heal, but we layer that prayer at the end with kind of a tip of the cap to Jesus' prayer, to the Lord's prayer where it says, not my will, but your will be done. Yes, Father, I pray that they'd be healed. Yes, Father, I pray that they would be okay. Yes, Father, I pray that you would bring relief in this situation. But more than anything, I trust you and I trust your sovereignty. And I'm praying that you would use everything in that situation, use all the circumstances in their life. I pray that they would conspire so that they might simply know you more so that their souls could go home and find rest in you. That's what we pray. And when you ask me to pray for you, when someone's sick or someone's's marriage is struggling, or someone's child is wandering, or things are hard, I always pray the thing that you ask me to pray. But I always follow it with, but God, whatever you choose to do here, would the circumstances conspire to push them closer to you, that they might be filled with your fullness, that they would be indwelled by your Spirit, that they would be strengthened by your Spirit, indwelled by your Son, that they may be filled with the fullness of the wisdom of the Father, that they might know you. So I want to encourage you too, parents, as you pray for your children, pray this prayer over them. We can't possibly see all of the winding roads that may eventually lead them to a greater depth of faith. I can tell you in my own life, there's been two times in my life when I thought, I'm going to have to walk away from this. I can't believe this anymore. This is untenable to me. And one is way more recently than you think it was. But that when I walked through it, and when I got honest about the God that I was pursuing, and when I started pursuing answers to the questions that I had, God opened my eyes to a greater faith and a greater depth of desire for Him. And I feel like as I walk through those points of inflection in my life that God used them to bring me closer to Him so that I might desire Him more. We never know how God is weaving lives to bring us closer to Himself. So sometimes we don't pray away the circumstances that He has brought about to work in. Sometimes we simply trust Him. All the time we simply trust Him. And we say, God, not my will, but Your will be done. We say, Father, I just want to echo Ephesians 3 and pray that everything that happens in the life of this person would conspire to push them closer to you, that they might know you more, that they might know what it is to walk in your peace. That's our prayer for others. That's our prayer for Grace, that God, whatever you do here, if we languish in the small room with the pole in it for the next six years, who cares? God, with all the events that Grace conspire, that we might know you more and do greater things in your name so that other people might come to know you more through us. Who cares where we meet? If we move into a big fancy new building and we do it in a year and a half because God just decided that's what we need to do and hundreds more people come, who cares? God, with the events of these people coming, conspire so that they might know you more and be pushed closer to you. It's our only prayer. And if you were to ask me, Nate, why is this Paul's apex value? Why is this the thing that he feels is most important? Well, the first answer and the most important answer is this is exactly what we were created for. This is why God made us, so that he could share Himself with us so that we would know Him. That's what heaven is. I think we mess up. I think we make a mistake when we make heaven about our personal salvation. Am I in or am I out? Am I going to burn or am I going to be in there for forever? That's kind of silly. The purpose of heaven is that we would be reunited with our creator God and experience eternity in harmony with him forever. The purpose of heaven is that we fulfill our ultimate purpose of just knowing him. And so every inch we move closer to knowing God, every bit of depth that we gain in our knowledge of him, every bit of closeness that we experience in our relationship with him is a way to bring heaven down here on earth. And so not only we experience heaven, but those around us get a little glimpse of what heaven's going to be like with every inch that we move closer to the Father, with every embrace that he uses to pull us in as this small reflection of what heaven will be one day. That's why Paul prays that we would know him. But as I was thinking about it this week, writing this sermon on various flights at who knows what time of day it was, depending on the time zone, this thought occurred to me that, you know, we are at our most gracious and most peaceful when we are experiencing the most closeness to God. Another way to say it is, the closer we get to God, the more grace and peace that we walk in. The closer I get to God, the more I pursue Him, the more I know Him, the more I love Him, the more I experience Him, and I feel his goodness in my life, the more gracious I am with myself and others, the less annoyed I get in traffic, the less annoyed I get with my kids, the less obnoxious I think someone is, and the more I realize they're just a hurt person who's hurting other people, and they need God's goodness just like I do. Isn't it true? In the times in your life, when you look back and you would say, or maybe it's right now, and you would say, I'm as close to God as I've ever been, or in that season I was as close to God as I've ever been, weren't you also your most gracious with yourselves and with others? And isn't it a good indicator that we're not walking with God when we begin to lack grace for ourselves and we begin to get really hard on others and we become harsher versions of ourselves? And isn't it true that the closer we get to God, the more peace we experience? And the more we know him, the more certain we are that he'll take care of us. I did not know. I did not know if I was going to be home today. Catching that flight was, I don't think you can cut it closer. I really didn't know if I was going to be here. But I also really didn't pray about it that much. My only prayer while I was sitting there wondering if I was going to make it was, God, if you want me home, I'll be home. If you want me to preach, I'll preach. If you don't, I won't. And I'll get to keep my crocs. So Lord, your will be done. There was an upside to both, you know? But my only prayer was, Father, do what you want. I trust you. Whatever, if you want me to get home, we'll get home. It's kind of like, it's one of the things that raising the money for the building taught me. We did the campaign really, really dumb and it was just kind of like, well, you know, God, if you want us to have the money to buy the land, then we'll have it. If you don't, then we won't. Now we need to raise more money to get into the building. And you know what? If God wants us to have the money, you're gonna give it. And if he doesn't, you won't. Okay. The closer you get to God, the more peace you experience in life. And so I think it's, and honestly, the times in our life when we're drifting from God are sometimes the times when we get most honest and we try to seize the most things and we worry about the most things that we can't control. And then the closer we drift to God, the more of his peace that we feel. And so I think it's very true that the more we know God, the more gracious and peaceful we are. And as I was thinking about that, I was also reminded of the fact that Paul signs off almost all of his letters, grace and peace. He almost always says grace and peace to you, to the saints and wherever. And I've always paid attention to that. And I've always wondered why that is, especially if you juxtapose it or you compare it with the passage in Corinthians, where it says these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. Like why doesn't he ask for faith, hope, and love to you and all the saints? He doesn't do that. He asks for grace. He wishes them grace and peace. I've always wondered why. And maybe, just maybe, it's because Paul knows that grace and peace are byproducts of knowing God. Paul knows that if God answers his prayer in Ephesians 3, 14 through 19, and then Colossians 1 and in other places, that the people in the churches will know him. And if they know him, they will be people who are filled and who will walk in grace and peace. And so by blessing them and wishing upon them grace and peace, what Paul is really doing in his Pauline way is saying, I hope you know God. I hope you grow closer to him. And so I'm praying grace and peace unto you this morning as well. If you are a praying person, I hope that this great prayer can influence the way that you pray for others. Sure. Pray for the circumstances. Pray for protection and pray for health and pray for success and pray for reconciliation and pray for forgiveness and pray for all the things. But layer over them this apex value from Paul, that the person you're praying for, that the body that you're praying for, the family or the church or the people that you are praying for, would simply know God. That even in the circumstances that you're praying for, that all of them would conspire in some miraculous and unknown way to draw people closer to the Father, that He would use those circumstances to pull people near to Him, that they might experience the grace and peace of their soul going home with God. If you're not someone who prays for the people in your life regularly. Okay. You don't have to be that. If your children have not had the benefit of a praying parent, they can now just start. If your spouse hasn't had the benefit of a praying spouse, if your friend hasn't had the benefit of praying friends, if your co-workers haven't had the benefit of a praying co-worker, okay, they can. Anytime you want. So I hope you'll be people who pray for people. And when you do, I hope that you'll pray according to the ethics of Paul as he prays. That whatever happens, whatever they experience, whatever highs and lows they walk through, that if there's success in their life, celebrate that success, but pray fervently and ardently that it would bring them to a deeper knowledge of God. If there's struggle in their life, pray for a relief of that struggle, but pray first and foremost that that struggle would bring them to a deeper knowledge of their God that they might walk in grace and peace. As I encourage you to pray that for others, let me pray that over you as we wrap up. Father, we love you. We thank you for what you're doing in this place. I thank you for what you're doing in me. There's so many things to pray for. In this room, God, there are struggles that no one knows about. There are hurts and hangups that have not been articulated or that have. Our mind goes to places of stress and of urgency. And so, God, I pray that your hand would be in all those. In this room, God, there's also seasons of celebration, of goodness, of sweetness, of joy and blessing. Whether it's in the highs or in the lows, God, may we not forget that you are the author of those things. And may everything happening within them conspire to push us closer to you. God, I pray for grace. I pray that you would work in the lives of the people who are here and who are at home. And that all the circumstances that are working in their life right now would conspire to bring them closer to you. That they would be strengthened by your spirit. That they would be indwelled by your son. That they would be filled with the fullness of the father. Help our souls to find their rest in you, to go home to you, and so walk in the grace and peace that you offer us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Man, that was good. I tell you what, I tell you what, I love you guys. I love this place. I love this church. It is so special. God's doing something here, y'all. He's doing something in me. He's doing something in y'all. And I fully, fully believe that the brightest days of grace are ahead, that he has a lot for us to do in us and through us. And I'm excited about those. This morning, we are starting a new series. And I got to say this too. I expected for this morning to be terrible. Can I just tell you that? I expected it to be dead in here, for there to be sporadic attendance, and for it to just be a lame Sunday. I'm coming back from South Africa. I don't know what day it is. I feel like eating lunch right now. I have no clue what's going on around me or where I am. We have a team coming back from Mexico that represents a lot of our core folks. Did you guys just clap for yourself? Is that what just happened? Good job, everyone. Yes, we are the best. We got students coming back from Metta. They're all ready to fall asleep. Yeah, this is great. And then it's the middle of October, and if you don't know anything about Grace in October, it's like July 2.0. Everybody goes to the mountains to see leaves, I guess. I don't know. They don't come here to see me, and so it's just kind of sparse here. And I thought this Sunday is going to be dead. And then I'm sitting here worshiping and I'm like, holy cow, God, this is amazing. That was some of the best, most energetic, enthusiastic, sincere worship I've heard come from us. And I'm just fired up, especially about what I get to share with you this morning as we start our new series called Great Prayers. So what we're going to do for six weeks is just open the Bible and look at some of the more impactful prayers that we see in Scripture. And hopefully by looking at these great prayers, we can become greater prayers, but we're not going to talk about how to pray. We're not going to talk about having devotions and that prayer time needs to be a part of our life. And here's why. We're simply going to look at some of the most impactful prayers and meaningful prayers in scripture and kind of ask the question, what can we learn about them for our prayers? And so the one that we're kicking off with is very near and dear to my heart. It's very special to me. This is my prayer over grace. It's what Rachel Gentile just read. As she got up here to read, I leaned over to Jen, and I said, she's just the best. And Jen has tears in her eyes because she loves Rachel. And she's like, I know. Maybe I'm just jet lagged. I don't know. And I don't love Rachel that much. Maybe I'm just fatigued. You're not a big deal, Rachel. It's whatever. We're glad you're here. But this prayer, it's the one that I pray over grace. My office at home, I've got it sitting in the corner now. I need to get it framed and then hang it up. But I've got this prayer written out on a big piece of paper in calligraphy that we had a friend of ours do for us. When I come and pray over children who are born at grace, this is what I pray over them. When I pray for grace, it's what I pray for grace. When I pray for my children, it's what I pray for them. When I pray for you, it's what I pray for you. And so for me, it's perfect that this prayer sermon is coming right on the heels of traits of grace, where we're saying this is what makes grace, grace, and this is who we are. And so now right on the heels of that, we say this is to me the prayer of grace. And I think it's safe to call it the prayer of grace because the greatest church planner of all time, one of the most influential Christians who ever lived, Paul, the apostle, is the author of this prayer. And what I think is cool about it is that it's really mirrored throughout the rest of the Pauline epistles, the other letters that Paul wrote to the churches. So for those of you who may not know exactly what Paul did, you just know he's kind of a name of one of the saints that we talk about in church sometimes. Paul wrote a third of the New, or two-thirds of the New Testament, as far as the books that are attributed to him. Paul planted seven to ten churches right after Jesus died. He's responsible really for the early church movement throughout Asia Minor. And once he was converted on the road to Tarsus, Paul spent the rest of his life traveling around these cities on the Mediterranean coast, planning churches and encouraging the church leaders and the people within those churches, and then writing letters back to those churches as he was going on his four different missionary journeys. If you count the journey on the slave ship that shipwrecks at Malta and then eventually makes it to Rome, then there's four journeys. And so all through those journeys, he's visiting the churches and then he's writing letters back to the churches that he's already visited or that he longs to visit. And in most of those letters, he has a prayer. There'll be a preface and it'll say something like, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And that's what we see in Philippians. And sometimes it says, whenever I think of you, I pray for you and here's what I pray. But if you'll read Paul's letters carefully, what you'll see in these prayers when he prays for those churches is that they're remarkably similar and that he essentially prays for the same thing for all the churches. And so it's interesting to me to look, what does Paul pray for the churches? What's the singular thing that he wants? What does he always pray for no matter what else is going on? But before we look at and examine what he prays for, I thought I would ask you what you think you would pray for. Put yourself in the shoes of Paul. You spent your life planting these churches, investing in these people. You want to see them grow. You want to see them flourish. You want to see the communities evangelized and reached. You're hopeful for these churches. Not only that, a lot of these churches exist in cities and in empires that are under persecution and oppression, where it might even be illegal to be a Christian and to be in these churches and definitely to be leading these churches. So if you were to write a letter to these churches and you were to include in that letter a prayer, here's what I hope for you. Think with me sincerely, what would you pray? What would you hope for them? What would you want for them? Would you pray for safety? I would. Would you pray for relief from persecution? Would you pray in a day and age when a life expectancy isn't long? Would you pray for health? Certainly you would know some people there who were ailing. Would you pray for the success of the church? May you reach the community. May your love abound so that others come to know Jesus. Would you pray for the health of the church, for the wisdom of the leaders? If you were Paul, what would you pray for? And then think about it in terms of the people that you do pray for. Hopefully, hopefully you pray for the people in your life. If you have kids, hopefully you pray for them regularly, if not daily. If you don't, that's okay. Maybe you have an eight-year-old and you're thinking, gosh, I have not really prayed for that kid very often the first eight years of their life. Okay. Well, they don't have to go any more years without you praying for them daily. So start doing that now. Hopefully you pray for your spouse. Hopefully you pray for them daily. If you don't, that's okay. They've gone however long they've gone without you praying for them daily. But start now and don't make them live that life anymore. Pray for them daily. Hopefully you pray for the people that you love. Hopefully you lift them up to God and you ask for what's best for them. And when you do, what kinds of things do you pray for them? If we pray daily, maybe there's daily prayers, but I think a lot of us probably relegate prayers for others to when there's something urgent going on in their life, right? When there's a tricky relationship, when they've reached a difficult season, when they're awaiting news for a diagnosis or they've received it and now they're undergoing treatment, when there's a difficult situation at work, when there's a difficult situation with their family, with their kids, or with their marriage, then we lift them up. And so when we do, it's often a petition, right? God, save their marriage. God, help them here. God, help me here. Help them do that. God, I just pray for protection for my children. We've got one girl in the youth group who recently turned 16. I'm very certain that her parents are praying prayers of safety on the road and for the other drivers who are around this particular young lady. Those are the kinds of things we pray for, like circumstantial help in this situation. And listen, those are good prayers. They're good prayers. And we see those throughout the Bible. We see David say that God is his fortress and his strength and he prays for protection. We see Paul at different places pray for healing. We see Paul pray urgently and petition God that communities would be reached and that the gospel would be expounded. So we see all of those prayers in scripture. But when we look at Paul's prayer, to me, as we read it, and I'll read it again here in a second, to me it speaks just as loudly what he doesn't pray for as what he does. And I think that we have a lot to learn from that. So let's look again at the prayer that Paul prays, and let's ask together, what is it that he's asking on behalf of the church. Verse 14 in Ephesians chapter 3. So here's what Paul prays. the triune God, that you would be strengthened by the Spirit, that you would be indwelled by the Christ, and that you would be filled with the fullness of the Father, resulting in knowing God along with the saints. So when we say knowing God this morning, we mean the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So Paul's prayer is that we would know God. That's the prayer, that you would know God. Not for safety, not that everything would be okay, not that the people would be healed, not even for success and growth of the church, not for anything circumstantial, but a singular prayer for them is that they would know God, that they would know him deeply and so commune with the other saints that know him. And it is my prayer for you that everything in life would push us to this place where we know God more deeply. It was the apex value for Paul. Again, do we see in other places him praying for those things? For safety and for protection and for growth and for the expounding of the gospel? Yes, absolutely, he prays for those things. But it's not the first thing he prays. It's not the apex value. It's not what's most important to him. To help us think about this idea of like this apex value, this thing that's so valuable to me, I'm going to pursue it above and beyond anything else. I'm going to tell you a snippet of the story of me getting home from South Africa, which is a heck of a story. But our flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg kept getting delayed. And we had to catch a flight in Johannesburg from Johannesburg to Atlanta. And that margin of time between when we were going to land and when we needed to be at our gate kept shrinking. And I'm looking at my buddy that I'm traveling with, and it kind of dawns on both of us, because he's a more experienced international traveler than I am, and he didn't do me the favor of advising that I not check a bag. So this is really his fault, and he owes me money. But I didn't know not to check a bag, so I had a small bag, and I checked it, figuring it's an international flight. We're going to be there for six days. It seems like the time you check something. Anyways, I checked it. So we're looking at each other going, and he's like, dude, you ain't going to get that bag. You do not have time to go to baggage claim, go to check-in, go through security, and get to the gate. You've got to choose. Do you want what's in that bag, or do you want to get on that flight? Do you want that stuff, which, in that bag, or my Crocs, guys? I know. I know. Oh, man. That's great. If you're watching online and you don't know what just happened, I'm not going to explain it to you. You just got to be here. You just got to be here. So sad. But I know I want to get home. I want to see my family. I want to see my church. I don't want to spend more money on another ticket that's going to cost more than the content of my bag. So even though I really want that stuff and I like some of that stuff, it's just my apex value in this situation, my biggest value, my biggest priority is to go home. So even though it hurts a little bit, I'm going to make a choice to pursue the thing that I need the most. It was the apex value. My value is to go home, see my family, to be in my house. Paul's value for us is that our souls would go home, is that our souls would find rest. And if on occasion we have to leave a bag behind to get closer to the Father, so be it. If on occasion the sickness is what's acting in our life to actually conspire to bring us closer to God and drive us to a deeper knowledge of Him that we would be filled with his fullness, then so be it. Paul prays that our souls would go home, that our souls would find rest in God, that they would go there first and foremost, and that that's what we would want to sacrifice anything else for the sake of knowing God. Maybe this is why Paul writes in Philippians 3.8 that he considers everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. So if we want our prayers to mirror the ethic of Paul, then when we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, we pray that our souls would go home. We pray that our souls would find their rest in God, no matter what else we have to go through. So if we have a child who's wondering and they don't know about their faith and we see them making decisions that we might not make, the prayer to pray for that child is, God, would everything in their life that they're experiencing somehow conspire to push them closer to you so that they might go home? When someone is sick, sure, we pray for them to heal, but we layer that prayer at the end with kind of a tip of the cap to Jesus' prayer, to the Lord's prayer where it says, not my will, but your will be done. Yes, Father, I pray that they'd be healed. Yes, Father, I pray that they would be okay. Yes, Father, I pray that you would bring relief in this situation. But more than anything, I trust you and I trust your sovereignty. And I'm praying that you would use everything in that situation, use all the circumstances in their life. I pray that they would conspire so that they might simply know you more so that their souls could go home and find rest in you. That's what we pray. And when you ask me to pray for you, when someone's sick or someone's's marriage is struggling, or someone's child is wandering, or things are hard, I always pray the thing that you ask me to pray. But I always follow it with, but God, whatever you choose to do here, would the circumstances conspire to push them closer to you, that they might be filled with your fullness, that they would be indwelled by your Spirit, that they would be strengthened by your Spirit, indwelled by your Son, that they may be filled with the fullness of the wisdom of the Father, that they might know you. So I want to encourage you too, parents, as you pray for your children, pray this prayer over them. We can't possibly see all of the winding roads that may eventually lead them to a greater depth of faith. I can tell you in my own life, there's been two times in my life when I thought, I'm going to have to walk away from this. I can't believe this anymore. This is untenable to me. And one is way more recently than you think it was. But that when I walked through it, and when I got honest about the God that I was pursuing, and when I started pursuing answers to the questions that I had, God opened my eyes to a greater faith and a greater depth of desire for Him. And I feel like as I walk through those points of inflection in my life that God used them to bring me closer to Him so that I might desire Him more. We never know how God is weaving lives to bring us closer to Himself. So sometimes we don't pray away the circumstances that He has brought about to work in. Sometimes we simply trust Him. All the time we simply trust Him. And we say, God, not my will, but Your will be done. We say, Father, I just want to echo Ephesians 3 and pray that everything that happens in the life of this person would conspire to push them closer to you, that they might know you more, that they might know what it is to walk in your peace. That's our prayer for others. That's our prayer for Grace, that God, whatever you do here, if we languish in the small room with the pole in it for the next six years, who cares? God, with all the events that Grace conspire, that we might know you more and do greater things in your name so that other people might come to know you more through us. Who cares where we meet? If we move into a big fancy new building and we do it in a year and a half because God just decided that's what we need to do and hundreds more people come, who cares? God, with the events of these people coming, conspire so that they might know you more and be pushed closer to you. It's our only prayer. And if you were to ask me, Nate, why is this Paul's apex value? Why is this the thing that he feels is most important? Well, the first answer and the most important answer is this is exactly what we were created for. This is why God made us, so that he could share Himself with us so that we would know Him. That's what heaven is. I think we mess up. I think we make a mistake when we make heaven about our personal salvation. Am I in or am I out? Am I going to burn or am I going to be in there for forever? That's kind of silly. The purpose of heaven is that we would be reunited with our creator God and experience eternity in harmony with him forever. The purpose of heaven is that we fulfill our ultimate purpose of just knowing him. And so every inch we move closer to knowing God, every bit of depth that we gain in our knowledge of him, every bit of closeness that we experience in our relationship with him is a way to bring heaven down here on earth. And so not only we experience heaven, but those around us get a little glimpse of what heaven's going to be like with every inch that we move closer to the Father, with every embrace that he uses to pull us in as this small reflection of what heaven will be one day. That's why Paul prays that we would know him. But as I was thinking about it this week, writing this sermon on various flights at who knows what time of day it was, depending on the time zone, this thought occurred to me that, you know, we are at our most gracious and most peaceful when we are experiencing the most closeness to God. Another way to say it is, the closer we get to God, the more grace and peace that we walk in. The closer I get to God, the more I pursue Him, the more I know Him, the more I love Him, the more I experience Him, and I feel his goodness in my life, the more gracious I am with myself and others, the less annoyed I get in traffic, the less annoyed I get with my kids, the less obnoxious I think someone is, and the more I realize they're just a hurt person who's hurting other people, and they need God's goodness just like I do. Isn't it true? In the times in your life, when you look back and you would say, or maybe it's right now, and you would say, I'm as close to God as I've ever been, or in that season I was as close to God as I've ever been, weren't you also your most gracious with yourselves and with others? And isn't it a good indicator that we're not walking with God when we begin to lack grace for ourselves and we begin to get really hard on others and we become harsher versions of ourselves? And isn't it true that the closer we get to God, the more peace we experience? And the more we know him, the more certain we are that he'll take care of us. I did not know. I did not know if I was going to be home today. Catching that flight was, I don't think you can cut it closer. I really didn't know if I was going to be here. But I also really didn't pray about it that much. My only prayer while I was sitting there wondering if I was going to make it was, God, if you want me home, I'll be home. If you want me to preach, I'll preach. If you don't, I won't. And I'll get to keep my crocs. So Lord, your will be done. There was an upside to both, you know? But my only prayer was, Father, do what you want. I trust you. Whatever, if you want me to get home, we'll get home. It's kind of like, it's one of the things that raising the money for the building taught me. We did the campaign really, really dumb and it was just kind of like, well, you know, God, if you want us to have the money to buy the land, then we'll have it. If you don't, then we won't. Now we need to raise more money to get into the building. And you know what? If God wants us to have the money, you're gonna give it. And if he doesn't, you won't. Okay. The closer you get to God, the more peace you experience in life. And so I think it's, and honestly, the times in our life when we're drifting from God are sometimes the times when we get most honest and we try to seize the most things and we worry about the most things that we can't control. And then the closer we drift to God, the more of his peace that we feel. And so I think it's very true that the more we know God, the more gracious and peaceful we are. And as I was thinking about that, I was also reminded of the fact that Paul signs off almost all of his letters, grace and peace. He almost always says grace and peace to you, to the saints and wherever. And I've always paid attention to that. And I've always wondered why that is, especially if you juxtapose it or you compare it with the passage in Corinthians, where it says these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. Like why doesn't he ask for faith, hope, and love to you and all the saints? He doesn't do that. He asks for grace. He wishes them grace and peace. I've always wondered why. And maybe, just maybe, it's because Paul knows that grace and peace are byproducts of knowing God. Paul knows that if God answers his prayer in Ephesians 3, 14 through 19, and then Colossians 1 and in other places, that the people in the churches will know him. And if they know him, they will be people who are filled and who will walk in grace and peace. And so by blessing them and wishing upon them grace and peace, what Paul is really doing in his Pauline way is saying, I hope you know God. I hope you grow closer to him. And so I'm praying grace and peace unto you this morning as well. If you are a praying person, I hope that this great prayer can influence the way that you pray for others. Sure. Pray for the circumstances. Pray for protection and pray for health and pray for success and pray for reconciliation and pray for forgiveness and pray for all the things. But layer over them this apex value from Paul, that the person you're praying for, that the body that you're praying for, the family or the church or the people that you are praying for, would simply know God. That even in the circumstances that you're praying for, that all of them would conspire in some miraculous and unknown way to draw people closer to the Father, that He would use those circumstances to pull people near to Him, that they might experience the grace and peace of their soul going home with God. If you're not someone who prays for the people in your life regularly. Okay. You don't have to be that. If your children have not had the benefit of a praying parent, they can now just start. If your spouse hasn't had the benefit of a praying spouse, if your friend hasn't had the benefit of praying friends, if your co-workers haven't had the benefit of a praying co-worker, okay, they can. Anytime you want. So I hope you'll be people who pray for people. And when you do, I hope that you'll pray according to the ethics of Paul as he prays. That whatever happens, whatever they experience, whatever highs and lows they walk through, that if there's success in their life, celebrate that success, but pray fervently and ardently that it would bring them to a deeper knowledge of God. If there's struggle in their life, pray for a relief of that struggle, but pray first and foremost that that struggle would bring them to a deeper knowledge of their God that they might walk in grace and peace. As I encourage you to pray that for others, let me pray that over you as we wrap up. Father, we love you. We thank you for what you're doing in this place. I thank you for what you're doing in me. There's so many things to pray for. In this room, God, there are struggles that no one knows about. There are hurts and hangups that have not been articulated or that have. Our mind goes to places of stress and of urgency. And so, God, I pray that your hand would be in all those. In this room, God, there's also seasons of celebration, of goodness, of sweetness, of joy and blessing. Whether it's in the highs or in the lows, God, may we not forget that you are the author of those things. And may everything happening within them conspire to push us closer to you. God, I pray for grace. I pray that you would work in the lives of the people who are here and who are at home. And that all the circumstances that are working in their life right now would conspire to bring them closer to you. That they would be strengthened by your spirit. That they would be indwelled by your son. That they would be filled with the fullness of the father. Help our souls to find their rest in you, to go home to you, and so walk in the grace and peace that you offer us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Man, that was good. I tell you what, I tell you what, I love you guys. I love this place. I love this church. It is so special. God's doing something here, y'all. He's doing something in me. He's doing something in y'all. And I fully, fully believe that the brightest days of grace are ahead, that he has a lot for us to do in us and through us. And I'm excited about those. This morning, we are starting a new series. And I got to say this too. I expected for this morning to be terrible. Can I just tell you that? I expected it to be dead in here, for there to be sporadic attendance, and for it to just be a lame Sunday. I'm coming back from South Africa. I don't know what day it is. I feel like eating lunch right now. I have no clue what's going on around me or where I am. We have a team coming back from Mexico that represents a lot of our core folks. Did you guys just clap for yourself? Is that what just happened? Good job, everyone. Yes, we are the best. We got students coming back from Metta. They're all ready to fall asleep. Yeah, this is great. And then it's the middle of October, and if you don't know anything about Grace in October, it's like July 2.0. Everybody goes to the mountains to see leaves, I guess. I don't know. They don't come here to see me, and so it's just kind of sparse here. And I thought this Sunday is going to be dead. And then I'm sitting here worshiping and I'm like, holy cow, God, this is amazing. That was some of the best, most energetic, enthusiastic, sincere worship I've heard come from us. And I'm just fired up, especially about what I get to share with you this morning as we start our new series called Great Prayers. So what we're going to do for six weeks is just open the Bible and look at some of the more impactful prayers that we see in Scripture. And hopefully by looking at these great prayers, we can become greater prayers, but we're not going to talk about how to pray. We're not going to talk about having devotions and that prayer time needs to be a part of our life. And here's why. We're simply going to look at some of the most impactful prayers and meaningful prayers in scripture and kind of ask the question, what can we learn about them for our prayers? And so the one that we're kicking off with is very near and dear to my heart. It's very special to me. This is my prayer over grace. It's what Rachel Gentile just read. As she got up here to read, I leaned over to Jen, and I said, she's just the best. And Jen has tears in her eyes because she loves Rachel. And she's like, I know. Maybe I'm just jet lagged. I don't know. And I don't love Rachel that much. Maybe I'm just fatigued. You're not a big deal, Rachel. It's whatever. We're glad you're here. But this prayer, it's the one that I pray over grace. My office at home, I've got it sitting in the corner now. I need to get it framed and then hang it up. But I've got this prayer written out on a big piece of paper in calligraphy that we had a friend of ours do for us. When I come and pray over children who are born at grace, this is what I pray over them. When I pray for grace, it's what I pray for grace. When I pray for my children, it's what I pray for them. When I pray for you, it's what I pray for you. And so for me, it's perfect that this prayer sermon is coming right on the heels of traits of grace, where we're saying this is what makes grace, grace, and this is who we are. And so now right on the heels of that, we say this is to me the prayer of grace. And I think it's safe to call it the prayer of grace because the greatest church planner of all time, one of the most influential Christians who ever lived, Paul, the apostle, is the author of this prayer. And what I think is cool about it is that it's really mirrored throughout the rest of the Pauline epistles, the other letters that Paul wrote to the churches. So for those of you who may not know exactly what Paul did, you just know he's kind of a name of one of the saints that we talk about in church sometimes. Paul wrote a third of the New, or two-thirds of the New Testament, as far as the books that are attributed to him. Paul planted seven to ten churches right after Jesus died. He's responsible really for the early church movement throughout Asia Minor. And once he was converted on the road to Tarsus, Paul spent the rest of his life traveling around these cities on the Mediterranean coast, planning churches and encouraging the church leaders and the people within those churches, and then writing letters back to those churches as he was going on his four different missionary journeys. If you count the journey on the slave ship that shipwrecks at Malta and then eventually makes it to Rome, then there's four journeys. And so all through those journeys, he's visiting the churches and then he's writing letters back to the churches that he's already visited or that he longs to visit. And in most of those letters, he has a prayer. There'll be a preface and it'll say something like, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And that's what we see in Philippians. And sometimes it says, whenever I think of you, I pray for you and here's what I pray. But if you'll read Paul's letters carefully, what you'll see in these prayers when he prays for those churches is that they're remarkably similar and that he essentially prays for the same thing for all the churches. And so it's interesting to me to look, what does Paul pray for the churches? What's the singular thing that he wants? What does he always pray for no matter what else is going on? But before we look at and examine what he prays for, I thought I would ask you what you think you would pray for. Put yourself in the shoes of Paul. You spent your life planting these churches, investing in these people. You want to see them grow. You want to see them flourish. You want to see the communities evangelized and reached. You're hopeful for these churches. Not only that, a lot of these churches exist in cities and in empires that are under persecution and oppression, where it might even be illegal to be a Christian and to be in these churches and definitely to be leading these churches. So if you were to write a letter to these churches and you were to include in that letter a prayer, here's what I hope for you. Think with me sincerely, what would you pray? What would you hope for them? What would you want for them? Would you pray for safety? I would. Would you pray for relief from persecution? Would you pray in a day and age when a life expectancy isn't long? Would you pray for health? Certainly you would know some people there who were ailing. Would you pray for the success of the church? May you reach the community. May your love abound so that others come to know Jesus. Would you pray for the health of the church, for the wisdom of the leaders? If you were Paul, what would you pray for? And then think about it in terms of the people that you do pray for. Hopefully, hopefully you pray for the people in your life. If you have kids, hopefully you pray for them regularly, if not daily. If you don't, that's okay. Maybe you have an eight-year-old and you're thinking, gosh, I have not really prayed for that kid very often the first eight years of their life. Okay. Well, they don't have to go any more years without you praying for them daily. So start doing that now. Hopefully you pray for your spouse. Hopefully you pray for them daily. If you don't, that's okay. They've gone however long they've gone without you praying for them daily. But start now and don't make them live that life anymore. Pray for them daily. Hopefully you pray for the people that you love. Hopefully you lift them up to God and you ask for what's best for them. And when you do, what kinds of things do you pray for them? If we pray daily, maybe there's daily prayers, but I think a lot of us probably relegate prayers for others to when there's something urgent going on in their life, right? When there's a tricky relationship, when they've reached a difficult season, when they're awaiting news for a diagnosis or they've received it and now they're undergoing treatment, when there's a difficult situation at work, when there's a difficult situation with their family, with their kids, or with their marriage, then we lift them up. And so when we do, it's often a petition, right? God, save their marriage. God, help them here. God, help me here. Help them do that. God, I just pray for protection for my children. We've got one girl in the youth group who recently turned 16. I'm very certain that her parents are praying prayers of safety on the road and for the other drivers who are around this particular young lady. Those are the kinds of things we pray for, like circumstantial help in this situation. And listen, those are good prayers. They're good prayers. And we see those throughout the Bible. We see David say that God is his fortress and his strength and he prays for protection. We see Paul at different places pray for healing. We see Paul pray urgently and petition God that communities would be reached and that the gospel would be expounded. So we see all of those prayers in scripture. But when we look at Paul's prayer, to me, as we read it, and I'll read it again here in a second, to me it speaks just as loudly what he doesn't pray for as what he does. And I think that we have a lot to learn from that. So let's look again at the prayer that Paul prays, and let's ask together, what is it that he's asking on behalf of the church. Verse 14 in Ephesians chapter 3. So here's what Paul prays. the triune God, that you would be strengthened by the Spirit, that you would be indwelled by the Christ, and that you would be filled with the fullness of the Father, resulting in knowing God along with the saints. So when we say knowing God this morning, we mean the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So Paul's prayer is that we would know God. That's the prayer, that you would know God. Not for safety, not that everything would be okay, not that the people would be healed, not even for success and growth of the church, not for anything circumstantial, but a singular prayer for them is that they would know God, that they would know him deeply and so commune with the other saints that know him. And it is my prayer for you that everything in life would push us to this place where we know God more deeply. It was the apex value for Paul. Again, do we see in other places him praying for those things? For safety and for protection and for growth and for the expounding of the gospel? Yes, absolutely, he prays for those things. But it's not the first thing he prays. It's not the apex value. It's not what's most important to him. To help us think about this idea of like this apex value, this thing that's so valuable to me, I'm going to pursue it above and beyond anything else. I'm going to tell you a snippet of the story of me getting home from South Africa, which is a heck of a story. But our flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg kept getting delayed. And we had to catch a flight in Johannesburg from Johannesburg to Atlanta. And that margin of time between when we were going to land and when we needed to be at our gate kept shrinking. And I'm looking at my buddy that I'm traveling with, and it kind of dawns on both of us, because he's a more experienced international traveler than I am, and he didn't do me the favor of advising that I not check a bag. So this is really his fault, and he owes me money. But I didn't know not to check a bag, so I had a small bag, and I checked it, figuring it's an international flight. We're going to be there for six days. It seems like the time you check something. Anyways, I checked it. So we're looking at each other going, and he's like, dude, you ain't going to get that bag. You do not have time to go to baggage claim, go to check-in, go through security, and get to the gate. You've got to choose. Do you want what's in that bag, or do you want to get on that flight? Do you want that stuff, which, in that bag, or my Crocs, guys? I know. I know. Oh, man. That's great. If you're watching online and you don't know what just happened, I'm not going to explain it to you. You just got to be here. You just got to be here. So sad. But I know I want to get home. I want to see my family. I want to see my church. I don't want to spend more money on another ticket that's going to cost more than the content of my bag. So even though I really want that stuff and I like some of that stuff, it's just my apex value in this situation, my biggest value, my biggest priority is to go home. So even though it hurts a little bit, I'm going to make a choice to pursue the thing that I need the most. It was the apex value. My value is to go home, see my family, to be in my house. Paul's value for us is that our souls would go home, is that our souls would find rest. And if on occasion we have to leave a bag behind to get closer to the Father, so be it. If on occasion the sickness is what's acting in our life to actually conspire to bring us closer to God and drive us to a deeper knowledge of Him that we would be filled with his fullness, then so be it. Paul prays that our souls would go home, that our souls would find rest in God, that they would go there first and foremost, and that that's what we would want to sacrifice anything else for the sake of knowing God. Maybe this is why Paul writes in Philippians 3.8 that he considers everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. So if we want our prayers to mirror the ethic of Paul, then when we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, we pray that our souls would go home. We pray that our souls would find their rest in God, no matter what else we have to go through. So if we have a child who's wondering and they don't know about their faith and we see them making decisions that we might not make, the prayer to pray for that child is, God, would everything in their life that they're experiencing somehow conspire to push them closer to you so that they might go home? When someone is sick, sure, we pray for them to heal, but we layer that prayer at the end with kind of a tip of the cap to Jesus' prayer, to the Lord's prayer where it says, not my will, but your will be done. Yes, Father, I pray that they'd be healed. Yes, Father, I pray that they would be okay. Yes, Father, I pray that you would bring relief in this situation. But more than anything, I trust you and I trust your sovereignty. And I'm praying that you would use everything in that situation, use all the circumstances in their life. I pray that they would conspire so that they might simply know you more so that their souls could go home and find rest in you. That's what we pray. And when you ask me to pray for you, when someone's sick or someone's's marriage is struggling, or someone's child is wandering, or things are hard, I always pray the thing that you ask me to pray. But I always follow it with, but God, whatever you choose to do here, would the circumstances conspire to push them closer to you, that they might be filled with your fullness, that they would be indwelled by your Spirit, that they would be strengthened by your Spirit, indwelled by your Son, that they may be filled with the fullness of the wisdom of the Father, that they might know you. So I want to encourage you too, parents, as you pray for your children, pray this prayer over them. We can't possibly see all of the winding roads that may eventually lead them to a greater depth of faith. I can tell you in my own life, there's been two times in my life when I thought, I'm going to have to walk away from this. I can't believe this anymore. This is untenable to me. And one is way more recently than you think it was. But that when I walked through it, and when I got honest about the God that I was pursuing, and when I started pursuing answers to the questions that I had, God opened my eyes to a greater faith and a greater depth of desire for Him. And I feel like as I walk through those points of inflection in my life that God used them to bring me closer to Him so that I might desire Him more. We never know how God is weaving lives to bring us closer to Himself. So sometimes we don't pray away the circumstances that He has brought about to work in. Sometimes we simply trust Him. All the time we simply trust Him. And we say, God, not my will, but Your will be done. We say, Father, I just want to echo Ephesians 3 and pray that everything that happens in the life of this person would conspire to push them closer to you, that they might know you more, that they might know what it is to walk in your peace. That's our prayer for others. That's our prayer for Grace, that God, whatever you do here, if we languish in the small room with the pole in it for the next six years, who cares? God, with all the events that Grace conspire, that we might know you more and do greater things in your name so that other people might come to know you more through us. Who cares where we meet? If we move into a big fancy new building and we do it in a year and a half because God just decided that's what we need to do and hundreds more people come, who cares? God, with the events of these people coming, conspire so that they might know you more and be pushed closer to you. It's our only prayer. And if you were to ask me, Nate, why is this Paul's apex value? Why is this the thing that he feels is most important? Well, the first answer and the most important answer is this is exactly what we were created for. This is why God made us, so that he could share Himself with us so that we would know Him. That's what heaven is. I think we mess up. I think we make a mistake when we make heaven about our personal salvation. Am I in or am I out? Am I going to burn or am I going to be in there for forever? That's kind of silly. The purpose of heaven is that we would be reunited with our creator God and experience eternity in harmony with him forever. The purpose of heaven is that we fulfill our ultimate purpose of just knowing him. And so every inch we move closer to knowing God, every bit of depth that we gain in our knowledge of him, every bit of closeness that we experience in our relationship with him is a way to bring heaven down here on earth. And so not only we experience heaven, but those around us get a little glimpse of what heaven's going to be like with every inch that we move closer to the Father, with every embrace that he uses to pull us in as this small reflection of what heaven will be one day. That's why Paul prays that we would know him. But as I was thinking about it this week, writing this sermon on various flights at who knows what time of day it was, depending on the time zone, this thought occurred to me that, you know, we are at our most gracious and most peaceful when we are experiencing the most closeness to God. Another way to say it is, the closer we get to God, the more grace and peace that we walk in. The closer I get to God, the more I pursue Him, the more I know Him, the more I love Him, the more I experience Him, and I feel his goodness in my life, the more gracious I am with myself and others, the less annoyed I get in traffic, the less annoyed I get with my kids, the less obnoxious I think someone is, and the more I realize they're just a hurt person who's hurting other people, and they need God's goodness just like I do. Isn't it true? In the times in your life, when you look back and you would say, or maybe it's right now, and you would say, I'm as close to God as I've ever been, or in that season I was as close to God as I've ever been, weren't you also your most gracious with yourselves and with others? And isn't it a good indicator that we're not walking with God when we begin to lack grace for ourselves and we begin to get really hard on others and we become harsher versions of ourselves? And isn't it true that the closer we get to God, the more peace we experience? And the more we know him, the more certain we are that he'll take care of us. I did not know. I did not know if I was going to be home today. Catching that flight was, I don't think you can cut it closer. I really didn't know if I was going to be here. But I also really didn't pray about it that much. My only prayer while I was sitting there wondering if I was going to make it was, God, if you want me home, I'll be home. If you want me to preach, I'll preach. If you don't, I won't. And I'll get to keep my crocs. So Lord, your will be done. There was an upside to both, you know? But my only prayer was, Father, do what you want. I trust you. Whatever, if you want me to get home, we'll get home. It's kind of like, it's one of the things that raising the money for the building taught me. We did the campaign really, really dumb and it was just kind of like, well, you know, God, if you want us to have the money to buy the land, then we'll have it. If you don't, then we won't. Now we need to raise more money to get into the building. And you know what? If God wants us to have the money, you're gonna give it. And if he doesn't, you won't. Okay. The closer you get to God, the more peace you experience in life. And so I think it's, and honestly, the times in our life when we're drifting from God are sometimes the times when we get most honest and we try to seize the most things and we worry about the most things that we can't control. And then the closer we drift to God, the more of his peace that we feel. And so I think it's very true that the more we know God, the more gracious and peaceful we are. And as I was thinking about that, I was also reminded of the fact that Paul signs off almost all of his letters, grace and peace. He almost always says grace and peace to you, to the saints and wherever. And I've always paid attention to that. And I've always wondered why that is, especially if you juxtapose it or you compare it with the passage in Corinthians, where it says these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. Like why doesn't he ask for faith, hope, and love to you and all the saints? He doesn't do that. He asks for grace. He wishes them grace and peace. I've always wondered why. And maybe, just maybe, it's because Paul knows that grace and peace are byproducts of knowing God. Paul knows that if God answers his prayer in Ephesians 3, 14 through 19, and then Colossians 1 and in other places, that the people in the churches will know him. And if they know him, they will be people who are filled and who will walk in grace and peace. And so by blessing them and wishing upon them grace and peace, what Paul is really doing in his Pauline way is saying, I hope you know God. I hope you grow closer to him. And so I'm praying grace and peace unto you this morning as well. If you are a praying person, I hope that this great prayer can influence the way that you pray for others. Sure. Pray for the circumstances. Pray for protection and pray for health and pray for success and pray for reconciliation and pray for forgiveness and pray for all the things. But layer over them this apex value from Paul, that the person you're praying for, that the body that you're praying for, the family or the church or the people that you are praying for, would simply know God. That even in the circumstances that you're praying for, that all of them would conspire in some miraculous and unknown way to draw people closer to the Father, that He would use those circumstances to pull people near to Him, that they might experience the grace and peace of their soul going home with God. If you're not someone who prays for the people in your life regularly. Okay. You don't have to be that. If your children have not had the benefit of a praying parent, they can now just start. If your spouse hasn't had the benefit of a praying spouse, if your friend hasn't had the benefit of praying friends, if your co-workers haven't had the benefit of a praying co-worker, okay, they can. Anytime you want. So I hope you'll be people who pray for people. And when you do, I hope that you'll pray according to the ethics of Paul as he prays. That whatever happens, whatever they experience, whatever highs and lows they walk through, that if there's success in their life, celebrate that success, but pray fervently and ardently that it would bring them to a deeper knowledge of God. If there's struggle in their life, pray for a relief of that struggle, but pray first and foremost that that struggle would bring them to a deeper knowledge of their God that they might walk in grace and peace. As I encourage you to pray that for others, let me pray that over you as we wrap up. Father, we love you. We thank you for what you're doing in this place. I thank you for what you're doing in me. There's so many things to pray for. In this room, God, there are struggles that no one knows about. There are hurts and hangups that have not been articulated or that have. Our mind goes to places of stress and of urgency. And so, God, I pray that your hand would be in all those. In this room, God, there's also seasons of celebration, of goodness, of sweetness, of joy and blessing. Whether it's in the highs or in the lows, God, may we not forget that you are the author of those things. And may everything happening within them conspire to push us closer to you. God, I pray for grace. I pray that you would work in the lives of the people who are here and who are at home. And that all the circumstances that are working in their life right now would conspire to bring them closer to you. That they would be strengthened by your spirit. That they would be indwelled by your son. That they would be filled with the fullness of the father. Help our souls to find their rest in you, to go home to you, and so walk in the grace and peace that you offer us. In Jesus' name, amen.

It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This feels like a danged reunion after not seeing you guys for three full weeks. Three weeks ago, I showed up and I said, hey church, let's kind of get our button gear about church a little bit. And then God gave us two weeks off just to see if we would really mean it. So here you are. These are the ones. This is great. I have been so thrilled to get to preach to you guys again this week. I'll mention it later, but I got sick in the middle of the week and thought I had COVID. I do not. Three COVID tests later, I'm certain of it. But I had to call Kyle on Thursday and be like, I don't think God wants me to preach in 2022 like at all, because you might have to go this week. But I got lucky. It was just strep. So here I am. Before I dive into it, it's just strep. You take antibiotics, you're good the next day, nobody cares. And what do you want it about a sore throat for? So it's just strep. It's great. Before I dive into that, I wanted to remind you guys after the service today is Discover Grace. It's a class with me, which, who could turn that down, for about an extra hour where I just tell you more about who Grace is, who we are, what makes us tick, why we do the things that we do. If you want to join the church, become a partner, we have partners here, not members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. And we're looking for folks to contribute to what God is doing here as we band together and build God's kingdom through Grace Raleigh. So if you'd like to participate in that, just stay in this room. It'll be immediately following the service, which means if you're here and you're not going to be a part of Discover Grace, get the heck out of here, man. We've got things to do. No, congregate in the lobby or outside if you can stand it, but we're going to try to get started in here so that those folks who participate with kids can get their kids and get them home for lunch. The other thing is that I've been touting now for three weeks. I don't even know if it's worth the wait. It's a special announcement that I have for you guys. Just something I wanted to share with the church. Two years ago, February of 2020, when we were naive babies and didn't know what pandemics were, we did a campaign series called Grace is Going Home. And I kind of put in front of you as the church that at that time for 20 years, now for 22 years, Grace has never had its own permanent home. We were founded in 2000 and have always rented our space and kind of moved from space to space. And we've kind of been a church of wanderers and wonderers, wondering when we would find our home. And we believed in 2020, at the beginning of it, that God was moving us to find and step out in faith and pledge towards a permanent home. And you guys as a church pledged $1.5 million, which I was blown away by. And at no point did I expect that to actually come in, but it was a very nice gesture that we made there at the beginning of the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit and remember the bottom fell out and everything's the worst and nobody knows if we're going to have any money or we're just going to be trading Bitcoin for the rest of our lives. And it was a little perilous there. And so we just made a decision as a notary board, we're not going to mention it. We're not going to ask people for it. We're not going to send out letters and say, hey, here's what you owe. Here's what you pledged. If you could kind of honor that, like we didn't do any of that stuff. We just kind of mentioned it a little bit. And then at the end of years, we would say, hey, if you want to give more, because sometimes people do that at the end of years, you can give towards the campaign. And so the announcement is that as of the end of 2021, the end of December 2021, we have $1.5 million available to us right now to go get whatever land or building we need to get. I never, never thought that was possible. I can remember being in elder meetings and we said, how much should the campaign be? And I said, I think our goal should be 1.25. That felt high. I was expecting about a million to come in because that's what experts say will happen. But I'm the one that has to drive the train on this thing or so I thought like a dummy.'s the Holy Spirit doing all the work, and he didn't really have to do anything except get out of the way. And the elders were like, let's do 1.5. And I'm like, you're stupid. You're dumb. It's easy for you to say that because you don't have to stand up here and ask people for it. Why don't we just do 2 million? Let's see what happens. We should have. We should have done that. But we did 1.5. I never thought it would come in. Then we hit the pandemic. Never thought it would come in. Our campaign is not even supposed to be done until the end of February. We have two more months. Well, one more month on this now. But I told the elders going into the end of 2021, listen, whatever we get at the end of 2021, let's just take that from God. That's what we need. He's going to provide for us what we need to build where and when he wants us to build. And so after 2021, we're done talking about it. We're done asking for it. There's still some pledges out there that are lingering that I'm sure will come in. I have heard, and I know that there are some of you who will give, but you're waiting until we identify the land or the property. That's okay. I understand that. So I expect more to come in to that end once we find where we're going to go. But guys, we're done. We did it. Campaign's over. We got what we need. Now we just wait for God's direction on land and where to go. And that could be a minute, just being honest with you. That probably won't be this year. Okay. We've had a team of good, sharp people, the best people in the church at this particular thing, looking for commercial real estate for us. They have not stopped looking for the duration of the pandemic and all the stuff, all the office buildings and churches and stuff that we thought was going to come available because of the pandemic, that ain't happening. Ain't nothing out there. So we're looking and we'll see, but we're happy to wait until God makes it clear that we're supposed to move. But the thing I'm most proud of about this is this. We did this the right way. We raised this money as a church with, listen to me, no discernible strategy at all. We didn't have a dumb thermometer in the lobby. We didn't send out trinkets in the mail. We didn't keep you guys updated on, hey, we're at third base now. Let's make that final stretch. No, we didn't do any of that dumb crap. We just prayed. And we just believed that God, if this matters to you, you'll make it happen. And guess what? It mattered to him. This place matters to him. I like to say that God likes grace. I don't know why he does. He just does. He likes this place. And he's going to take care of us. And I'm very proud of the course that we charted through it as a church and the way that you guys responded to it. And I will say this too, the course that we charted is not at all a testament to my leadership. It's a testament to the leadership of your elders. Because when we started this journey, I was all about doing it the way the consultants say you need to do it. I was 100% behind sectioning off the givers in the church, me going and meeting with the people who had the highest capacity to give, doing a silent campaign before the campaign, and doing it the professional way that you're supposed to do it. I was all about that. And I took that to the elders, and the elders gave me really strong pushback. That's not right. That's not a good fit for grace. That wouldn't go over well here. I wouldn't do that. And I like, listen, I'll just tell you guys in the elder meeting, sometimes we get a little pointed. We will, um, we will say direct things to one another. And there was some direct things said in those meetings. And I pushed pretty hard. I believe I may have told one of the elders to go frolic in the forest with the animals if that's how they thought we were going to do it. It's possible that I said that. But through the elders' pushback, the Holy Spirit worked in my heart too, and I became convicted that the way we needed to do it is to just let him do his work. And so I am so grateful to our elders for charting the course for grace. That was the right course and the God honoring course. I am proud of our partners for honoring God with your pledges. And I am just overwhelmed with God's goodness to us and how he brought us to accomplish that goal with no strategy in a pandemic when at times there was zero people or 40 people a week even using the building that we're pledging to build. It's pretty cool. So let's pray and thank God for that and then we'll dive into this series. Father, you are so good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for caring about us. Thank you for pursuing us. Thank you for reminding us, God, in myriad ways that you love us, that you care about this place, that what happens at Grace matters to you. God, I just pray that when the right spot becomes available, that you, through your spirit, make it abundantly clear to every person involved that that's exactly where you want us to be. And Lord, I just pray that we would be patient for you to move there just like you moved in this campaign. We trust you with all of our hopes and our dreams and our future, and we pray that what we hope and want for grace is exactly what you hope and want for grace. May your will be done here. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. Our new series is called Colossians. It's creatively titled after the book that we're going to study. If you have a Bible, you can go ahead and open there. It's towards the middle of the New Testament. It's just a short four chapter book. So maybe a little tricky to find, but hopefully you'll find it and read along with it on the reading plan and those things. I'm going to confess something to you about this series because I think it's actually kind of funny and informative for how I kind of arrived at some conclusions this week. But when you plan a, when you plan series, when we plan series as a staff, we kind of, we'll approach a season, the January to Easter or Mother's Day or whatever. And we'll kind of look at that season and we'll think, okay, what are the series that we want to do in here? And there's always one or two that I know I definitely want to do. And so you take the series that you really want to do and you put those where they need to be. And then you kind of see what your time blocks are and what you have space to do otherwise. And so I knew I wanted to start out the beginning of the year with this series called Consumed. And I knew that I wanted to share with you guys what was on my heart about our need for being consumed by church. And then the others were going to be consumed by community and consumed by making disciples. I didn't get a chance to get to that, but we'll get to those topics in the spring. And then we were able to do a response to what does it look like to be consumed by the church. That was on video that we did, I think, last week. So if you haven't seen that, I'd love for you to watch that one. So we knew we wanted to take January. We wanted to do consumed. And then I'm not going to get into too many details about it, but we've got a Lent series coming up that I think is going to be eight total weeks, maybe seven. I'm not quite sure. I forget. But I'm very excited about that and all the things that we're going to be doing. And we've known since Lent of last year that we wanted to really hammer home Lent and focus on that as a church this year. So you can go, everyone's going to be challenged to fast from something. You can go ahead and begin to prayerfully consider what that might be for you if that's something you want to participate in. So I'm very excited about that Lent series. And so we knew where we needed to place that. And that left us with four weeks here in February to do another series. So I'm looking at the staff. I'm like, okay, we got four weeks. We need a series. What do you want to do? So I've been listening in the fall. I was listening to the book of Colossians with John every morning. I'd get him up. I'd feed him his bottle, and I'd turn Colossians on on my Bible app and then just read Colossians to both of us. It's four chapters. We've got four weeks. How's that sound? Everybody's like, yep, sounds great. Colossians is a good book. Cool, let's go. And then we started jokingly referring to this as the filler series, the series in between the two ones that we actually care about. And we would never tell you that because every series is important, but that's how we were joking about this particular series. Even the graphic, Carly sent it to me and I think the graphic looks really good. Carly didn't love it. She was like, here it is. I know this isn't a big deal series. So what do you think? I'm like, that looks great. That's fine with me. I think it looks really, really good. So even to that, we're focused on Lent, right? So this week I dive into research on our filler series. I'm like, okay, God, what do you got for us in Colossians? And I just couldn't help but chuckle, even just 30 minutes into research and reading and praying, at just how very relevant and necessary this book is for us, at how very rich and good I think it's going to be for us. I'm so excited about what I get to preach to you this morning that I'm a little bit emotional about it. I'm afraid I'm going to cry at times that don't make any sense, so I'm going to try to keep it together. But I'm really excited to share with you this message of Colossians. I think Colossians is tucked away in the New Testament and is typically relegated to Bible studies sometimes. And that we don't really study it very often. And we might not even be super familiar with what it is and what its message is. And the more I have gotten into it, the more I thought, gosh, this is going to be so good for grace right now. So God in his goodness, and maybe in those mornings when I randomly landed on Colossians, the Holy Spirit was preparing my heart for the series that he knew he wanted us to do in February that is anything but a filler series. But one of the things that first tipped me off that this would be a good series for Grace right now is the background on the church in Colossae. Paul didn't start this church. Somebody else was running this church. Paul was actually in prison and he got a letter from the person who was running this church. And the letter basically said, hey, Paul, we're doing great. Our folks love God. Our folks are all in. Our folks are full of faith. They're standing up to persecution. Like we've got a really good spirit here. And I thought that feels like grace to me. We're doing a good job. The reaction to, hey, let's be all in was so good and was so encouraging. And it made me so proud in our campaign. It made me so proud. I feel like we're doing pretty good. I feel like we've got a good spirit here. I feel like we've got a good thing going. But the leader of the church told Paul, but they're facing tremendous pressure that I'd like you to speak to. And the pressure was essentially to fold into old ways of legalism or to transition into new ways of liberalism. So there was forces being exerted on them from outside the walls of the church and sometimes from within the walls of the church to recede back into legalistic Judaism, where your spirituality is measured by your ability to follow the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more spotless your life is, the more spiritual you are, the more God loves you. That's how we gain favor with God and respect for man. There's legalism following the rules well. Or this slide to liberalism. Actually, none of those rules really matter. They're not important. Those were never actually meant to be rules. Do whatever you want, no matter what, and God loves and accepts you all the time. Which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism, since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts you all the time, which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts us all the time, but it's doing away with any sort of standards that we need to hold in our life and just embracing every ideology that comes along. And I thought, well, that's pretty similar to grace too. Frankly, that's really similar to any church, particularly in the Southern United States. Every church in the Southern United States right now faces that tension from within and without. There are some people that want to drag us back to legalism, right? My parents grew up in Southern Baptist churches where all the skirts had to be below the knees, where you weren't allowed to be seen at the theater, where you weren't allowed to go dancing or play cards or gamble or any of that stuff. And I don't go dancing, and I don't play cards because those are boring, but I gamble sometimes because that's fun. We don't do that stuff anymore. But every now and again, there's a part of us that wants to go back to that familiar legalism, that we've got to follow the rules better. We have to decide. We have to draw lines in the sand. This is a sin and you can't do that and you can do this. And we want to put up barriers around our behavior and define people's spirituality by how well they follow the rules. That's a comfortable, natural place for the human instinct to go. And if we don't watch it, some of us will always slide towards legalism. In the same way, we're in a culture now that's trying to tell us that none of those rules really matter. All the trains get off at the same station. Everything's really the same. It's you have your faith and we have our faith and yada, yada, yada. We don't really need all those standards. There's a push on the church to let go of some of our tenants so that we can be more acceptable to our culture. And so like the Colossians, we are a church that's doing good, that loves God, that has a heart of faith, but exists under some pressure to go liberal or to go legal. And so Paul writes to encourage the church in Colossians. And in his encouragement to the church in Colossae, I think we can find a lot of encouragement to this church here in Raleigh. And so the question becomes, well, if Paul is writing them to then encourage them in their faith, how does he do it? What does he write to them? What's the first thing he points to, to encourage them in their faith? And I thought about, well, if it were me, if I wanted to encourage our church or any church, or if I'm Paul and I was trying to encourage that church, how would I do it? How would you do it? Would you like me do it strategically? I would probably want to talk to the leader of that church. What's going on? What kind of things are they facing? The legalistic crowd. What kind of rules are they really caring about? The liberal crowd. Where are they coming from? What's their ideology? What are they trying to do? And I would have wanted to directly address those arguments. Like an attorney, let's just break this thing down. Let's address all their arguments. Let's build out a nice rebuttal here so to give them a good foundation to stand on. Let's do this thing strategically, right? Well, Paul didn't do it strategically. Paul did it very simply. And it's so simple and it's so pure and it's so powerful that it convicts me that maybe as a pastor, I don't do this enough for you guys. But Paul didn't choose to encourage them strategically. He didn't choose to figure out where they were and kind of read the tea leaves and try to hit them right where their heart was. He just did it very simply. Paul encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus, plain and simple. He encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus. And when I say this, what I mean is he begins in chapter one, verses one through 14 are really kind of this preamble. He says, hey, you know, I think my God, every time I remember you, I think of you in my prayers. This is what I pray for you. The prayer in Colossians looks very similar to other prayers and the other letters that he's written to the church that are basically, hey, I just want you to know God more than anything else. I want you to know God, grateful for your faith, grateful for your testimony from your church. And then he gets into how he wants to encourage them. And this is what he writes. And this is verses 15 through 23. I'm going to stop a couple of times and talk about some things, but keep your Bibles open. I think this passage is worth reading. It's such a sweeping and stunning portrayal of Jesus. And you know, it's funny that I've come back to this because a few years ago in the spring, we did a series in Hebrews. And I said that Hebrews had the most incredible description of Christ in the Bible. And I preached it to you guys. And I got an email from Brandon Reese right over here, who was in the men's group. And he said, that's a great picture. There's an equal one to it in my mind in Colossians. And so now here we are two years later, and now we're talking about that depiction of Jesus in Colossians. And I want you to read it with me, and we'll kind of digest it together. This is what Paul writes, beginning in verse 15. I'm going to take a break there. I want you to understand what's going on here. What Paul is saying is Jesus was present at creation. He's agreeing with the gospel of John that says, through him all things were made and without him nothing was made. He was present at creation. All of creation hinges upon him. All of his existence now rests upon him. He is saying that all things belong to him, that he is the reconciliation. And if you read this, what you really find is that this is what Paul is saying, that all, everyone who's ever lived has held Christ, whether you realize it or not, as the epicenter of your history and the epicenter of your hope. Which means for every person who has ever lived, all of your understanding of your past hinges on Christ and all of your hope for your future hinges on Christ. That's what that means. Even if you go all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first thing they learn is that God created them. How did he create them? Well, according to Genesis 1 and John 1 and Colossians 1, he created them through his word, Jesus. He created them through his son. So Adam and Eve, with a brief two-day history they had, looked back to the creation of the earth with the hope that it was Jesus who actually did it. Their history hinged upon Jesus. And then when they sinned and they fell and suddenly they need reconciliation and forgiveness, their future hope for that reconciliation and forgiveness without them knowing it hinged upon Jesus. And then over the course of the Old Testament, God begins to shed some light on exactly what that future hope is going to be on the Messiah. And we see whispers in Jeremiah and Isaiah and in the prophets as they kind of shed more light on who this Messiah is going to be and what this hinge of history is going to come to do. And then Jesus shows up in the gospels and he personifies God's goodness and loveliness. And we'll talk about that in a second. And he lives a perfect life and he dies on the cross for our sins. And so all of history to that point culminates in the death of Christ as he fulfills his divine nature to do that for us. And then we move forward into the church era. And now as people who exist in 2022, we look back on the death and the burial and the resurrection of Christ as a hinge of history. All of our history is contingent upon him. And then we look forward to, as we preached in the fall, revelations, when Jesus comes down in Revelation 18 and 19 to come back and rescue his church and to take us back up to heaven with us. He is the hope of our future. So for every person who has ever lived, Jesus is the epicenter of your history and he is the epicenter of your hope. Jesus is the confluence of heaven coming down onto earth and earth experiencing heaven. He is the nexus of the spiritual world meeting the physical world. Jesus sits in the middle of everything. Everything. There is nothing without him. Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we admit it or not, whether we comprehend it or not, Jesus sits at the hinge of all history, of all creation, of all love, of all majesty. And that's the picture that Paul is painting to the church in Colossae and to us is this grandeur of Jesus. And he doesn't stop there. I love this next sentence. I think it's verse 19. For in him, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. We'll pause there again. Much of what I'm about to say comes from this book that Kyle recommended to the staff called Gentle and Lowly. And I can't recommend it to you highly enough if you're a reader. If you're not a reader, become one. It's good. And read Gentle and Lowly. But I love that phrase in verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. What does that mean? This is a clumsy explanation, but it's the best that I can do. I can only try to size it up like this. Do a little mental exercise with me. And just picture in your mind, I don't know how you're gonna do it, just figure it out. Picture in your mind how much you think God loves you. Just how much you think he loves you. And try to wrap your head around that for a second. How much grace do you think God has for you? Wrap your head around that for a second. Grace for your humanity and for who you are and loving you despite of your faults. How much mercy does God have for you? Willingness to look over times you've slighted him or things that you've done. How much compassion does God have for you in your sin and in your hardships? Wrap your head around those things. And then let me tell you this. It's more than that. It's more than that. And now wrap your head around that new reality. But it's more than you can fathom. It's more than that. Wrap your head around that new reality, and guess what? It's more than that. Wrap your head around that reality, and it's more than that, and it keeps going. We cannot comprehend the love and the grace and the mercy and the compassion and the goodness that God holds in his heart for us. It is beyond human comprehension, and I am convinced that the whole Christian life is an exercise in expounding our understanding of how much God loves us and has mercy for us us and then realizing that's not nearly enough to capture how he loves us. And that overwhelming love, that overwhelming goodness, that overwhelming grace and compassion that we cannot fathom is personified, listen to me, is personified in the person of Jesus. That's what it means when it says the fullness of God, all of his grace, all of his mercy, all of his compassion, all of his love was pleased to rest on the person of Christ. And if you want to know how much does God love me, look at Christ crucified and answer the question for yourself. If you want to know how much mercy and compassion does God have on me, look at Jesus weeping with Mary and know that that's the compassion that he has for you. If you want to know how much grace and mercy does he have for me, look at Jesus with the adulterous woman as he defends her from the death penalty and know that that's the compassion that Jesus has for you. If you want to know how much Jesus forgives you, look at him telling Peter to forgive 70 times 7, which is as many times as is necessary, and know that that's God's forgiveness for you. If we want to know how God feels about us and how much he loves us, look at the person of Christ on whom his fullness is pleased to dwell and know that that's how much God loves us, that that's the compassion that he has for us. That that's the grace and the mercy that he offers us. That's what it means when it says that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell on him and then he finishes up this description of Christ in this way. In verse 21, He says, Why did God send the culmination of all history, the fullness of his love and compassion? Why did he send that down here? To get you. To come and get you. To reconcile you back to him so that he can experience eternity with you. Listen to me. Why does Paul choose, when he needs to encourage the Colossians to hang in there, when he needs to encourage them to stay pure in their faith, what does he do? He points them to Jesus in the stunning depiction of Christ. And why does he do that? This is why. Because Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. I don't know if you think about God's love for you in this way, but God loves you. God desires you. God chases after you. God sent his son to win you. And then he left the Holy Spirit to nip at your heels whenever you run from him so that you would turn and accept his embrace. He is coming for you. He desires you. He is yearning for you. He does not sit back and wait for you. He pursues you. So he sent Jesus to come and get you. And he left his spirit to keep the chase going until you finally give in and give up and say, God, I'm yours. Because that's what he longs for. I told you this week I had strep. On Tuesday, I began to feel a little sick, and so I realized with all the COVID junk going on, I should probably mask up in the house and try to stay away from the kids. Wednesday felt like garbage. Thursday was the worst. Literally, I never get sick ever. I've never been as sick as I was on Thursday in my adult life. But by Thursday afternoon, I got some antibiotics, so Friday I was right as rain, baby. It was great. But on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm in the house, and I'm with my kids, but I can't touch them. I'm an affectionate guy. I pick up and scoop up Lily all the time. I pick up and scoop up John all the time. I love holding my babies. And there was one night, I think it was Thursday, Jen was laying with Lily singing her songs and I was standing in Lily's doorway with my mask on just waving at Lily in the bed and she waved back at me and she said, I miss you, Daddy. And I had to go cry in my bedroom. I yearned for them. All I wanted to do is scoop them up. All I wanted to do is pick up John and eat those fat baby cheeks. Is grab Lily when she got home from school and make her tell me about her day. She doesn't do it, so I say, tell me three good things that happened. That's all I wanted to do. All I wanted to do is scoop up my kids, man. And it was like this weird quasi-torture sitting in the house looking at them and not being able to scoop them up. If that's torture for me for three days, knowing good and dang well I'm going to get over this and I'll pick them up again, what must it do to our Father in heaven to watch us and so desperately want to pick us up and to hold us and to cherish us and for us to hold him at arm's length. Because Lily waved back at me and said, I miss you. And I knew that she wanted to hug me as soon as I was able to do it again. How much more would that crush your parent heart if you waved at your kid and they said, I miss you. And they said, if God yearns for me the way that I yearn for my children, if God yearns for you and the people you love the way that you yearn for your children, the way that I yearn for mine, how much must it hurt his fatherly heart in heaven to watch his children run from him, begging them, please just stop running. Please just turn around for a dang second and let me hold on to you. I sent my son to catch you. I left the spirit to keep up the chase. How much must it hurt his father's heart to not be able to hold his babies, to not be able to embrace his children, for us to run from him and to wander off from him. When all he wants is for us to be with him. When all he wants is to hold us. When all he wants is his son or his daughter to talk to him. And tell him about our days. Y'all, God, he yearns for us. It's all over the Bible. Jesus says it like this. He says he leaves the 99 sheep that are safe to go get the one who's lost and wandering. And I think that we make such a mistake about how we view the gospel and the love of God in our life. I think that sometimes we have this attitude that God's like, you know, take it or leave it. I sent my son, he died for you. It's there if you want it. It's yours if you don't want it. You don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. I sent my son. He died for you. It's there. If you want it, it's yours. If you don't want it, you don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. Guys, take it or leave it isn't yearning. Take it or leave it is not what we see in the Bible. Take it or leave it is not what we see pouring out of scriptures and shouting at us through the book of Colossians. What we see in the Bible is a father in heaven who earnestly in his guts yearns for you, who wants you, who loves you. And now for some of us, you've never known that love. You've run from it your whole life. You've never accepted Christianity. There's things about it you can't get your head around. And so you're still running. And I'm begging you that you would let God catch you today. I'm begging you that you would let today be the day that you would embrace your heavenly Father. But there's others of us who have been caught, but after we've been caught, there's been the wandering. And in our wandering, sometimes we feel so badly for what we've done that we think God must be disappointed with us. He can't be yearning for me anymore. And so we keep ourselves at arm's length from God out of a sense of guilt or shame. And to you, I would simply ask, if God came after you when your soul was fundamentally opposed to him, why would he not continue to pursue you when your soul feels actual guilt of your sin? If God chased you down and yearned for you and pursued you before you were his child, then how much more does he still love you now that you're his child? Why would he ever stop loving you? Listen, when God forgave us, when you accepted Christ, he forgave you for all of your sins, past, present, and future. He already knew you were going to go through the season of wandering when he chose to save you. He doesn't love you any less. As a matter of fact, God's, I believe, primary emotion as he looks at you in your sin is not anger, but pity and compassion because of what you're giving up to be away from him when he just wants you close to him. Listen, if you've never known Jesus in your life, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you have doubts and you're not sure about your faith, God yearns for you and will chase you down through those doubts. He's still after you. If you are wandering away, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you're holding on to pet sins that you're not sure you want to give up yet, God is going to chase you through those sins and he will chase you down and the Holy Spirit will nip at your heels until we give in and allow him to embrace us. If you are experiencing incredible victory in your spiritual walk right now, good. God loves you and yearns for you on a deeper level than you can still ever imagine. God loves you and yearns for you deeply. And that's all that the church in Colossae needed to know to be encouraged in their faith. And so my prayer for you this morning is that you will walk out those doors knowing in your guts that God loves you more than you thought he did when you came in here. And as I thought about the best way to finish up the service this week, I was reminded of this song called Reckless Love. Because in that song, there's lines of, there's no walls he won't kick down or lies he won't tear down coming after me. There's all these things that God will do to come after us. But the part about the song I like is that it's called Reckless Love. And when it first came out, there was some kind of dumb arguments about whether or not it was really appropriate to use the word reckless because we didn't want to accuse God of being careless or thoughtless or somehow errant in his love for us. But that word reckless doesn't mean mistaken. The word reckless implies this. When you offer your love to someone, when you expose yourself, you make yourself vulnerable to them and they reject you. That hurts. You take that personally. I don't care who you are. And there's only so many times you can offer your love freely and wholeheartedly to someone and have them reject you before you start to guard yourself against it. And the love you offer isn't as much or it isn't as pure or it isn't as grand. Or even maybe you wall yourself off to it entirely because you just can't stand the pain anymore. We learn self-protection. God's recklessness is that he has no self-protection. God's recklessness is you can reject him as many times as you want to and he will never stop coming after you. It doesn't matter how many times we hurt him, he's gonna continue to come after us to get us, to claim us. And so we should sing and marvel at this reckless love. So I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna sing together, but I would invite you to experience the song however you wanna experience it. If you wanna stand and sing, stand and sing. If you wanna sit and you want the lyrics to wash over you, let them do that. If you wanna kneel at your seat and pray, pray. If you wanna come up here to the front and pray and have me kneel over you and pray with you, I'll do that too. However you wanna experience this song, you experience it that way, but I'm gonna pray, the band's gonna come up, and then we'll finish with that song together. Father, boy, you are good to us. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you pursue us. We thank you that you sent your son as the personification and embodiment of your earnest yearning for us. I simply pray, God, that we would be more certain of your love for us as we leave than we were when we showed up. God, we are your children. We are your sons and your daughters. I pray that we would let you love us like that. May we please quit trying to perform. May we please quit insisting that we get our life in some semblance of order before we come to you. May we please tear down all the roadblocks that exist between you and us and just allow ourselves to feel your overwhelming and reckless love for us. It's in your son's name on whom all of history and hope hinges that we pray. Amen.