All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right. Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. Thanks for being here. Happy New Year's. I'm so grateful that you've chosen to make grace not just a part of your Sunday, but by being here the first Sunday of the year, you're at least, some of us are going, and you know, I didn't go to church enough last year, so I'm going to come more this year. Great. Go Bills back there, by the way. Go Bills up here. By the way, who do you all play in today? The other team. I hope you beat the other team. That's great. And today's a fun day for me as a Falcons fan because all you jerk Panthers fans that cheer for an Arena League team now have to cheer for my team so you can make the playoffs. So go Falcons today. Yeah, we can get behind it. Yes. All right. Good deal. Well, listen, thanks for making church a part of your year and a part of your Sunday. I hope we don't let you down. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for doing that. This is the time of year where everybody, for the most part, assesses the person that they are and thinks about the kind of person that they'd like to become or that they'd like to be. And so this is the time of year when we tend to set goals for ourselves, whether you're comfortable with the idea of New Year's resolutions or just in general setting goals that we have for ourselves, this is the time of year when we do that. If you haven't thought about that, if you're not doing that, if this has not occurred to you, then I can only assume about you that either you think you're nailing it, like you're just so good at life, no notes, no changes. I hope the next year is just as good as the last four years. And if that's you, you're a jerk. All right. There's some notes for you. Or you've given up, which I wouldn't blame you for. But maybe let's try to log in and set some goals and think about the kind of people that we want to be in the new year. We've done that in our house. We've set some goals. Jen wants to be a more supportive and loving wife, and I'm so grateful that she has set that goal for us this year. I'm trying to be a more accepting husband of her faults. And so in that way, we're hoping for a better marriage in 20... I'm so sorry, Jen. I'm sorry for all of that. So in that vein, in thinking about how we want to be in the new year, the series that we're going to be in for the next four weeks is simply called You'll Be Glad You Did. And what we're going to do is look at some proverbial wisdom from the book of Proverbs written by King Solomon, who is, we are told, the wisest man to ever live. And just look at his wisdom and with the premise of if we'll simply listen to him and take his advice this year, we'll be glad we did. And one of the reasons I wanted to open the year with it is simply this. I don't know where you are spiritually. I don't know where you are on that journey. I don't know how much of what we're selling you're buying, I don't know. Many of you who are here are Christians. You would call yourself a Christian. God is your Father. Jesus is your Savior. Wonderful. Some of you may be kicking the tires going, is church worth it? When I get to talk to those people, I used to lead high school Bible studies. I was close with the high school football coaches at my last church, and I would go lead Bible studies for the football teams, optional, after practice on a certain day of the week. And I would always start with them with Proverbs. Because in Proverbs, you don't have to believe in everything to follow the advice that we find there. But here's what I will posit to you. If you listen to the wisdom of Solomon in Proverbs, you'll be glad you did. I hope that you'll listen to that wisdom. And for those of you who don't yet know Jesus, I hope that by listening to that wisdom, it gives you more trust in the other words in this book, and you come to faith in Jesus, and you come to call yourself a Christian and believe in God as your Father and Jesus as your Savior, because you entered in from this perspective of Proverbs, which is simply, if we listen to the wisest man who's ever lived, who points us towards Jesus, we will be glad we did. So that's all I'm inviting you to do today. And this morning, I'm particularly excited about the topic, because it's one that is very dear to me. And so I'll just say this up front. Here's my goal this morning. I'm going to say this and then preach to it. And we'll return to it in 25 minutes or so. But here's my goal for you this year. Set some friend goals this year. We all have goals that we're setting. I hope you do. I hope there are things that you want to accomplish in your life. I hope there's some goals that you're setting for yourself. I'm going to exercise. I'm not going to eat sugar. I'm not going to drink this. I'm not going to ingest that. I'm going to show up at work and actually care about what I'm doing. Whatever it is that might be your goal, I hope you're setting some goals this year. But what I would like to encourage you to do is to set some friend goals this year. And this is something that means so much to me. I never, and you guys who have been here a long time, you know this to be true. I never ever establish myself as moral exemplar. I'm the pastor. Don't giggle, Zach. I'm making a point. This is important. Shut up. I never approach talking to you as if I am on some moral high ground and I'm trying to help you get on my level. Ever. I think that's disrespectful. I've actually said that I live my life the way that I do as a favor to you so it's easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm helping you in that way. That's why I cuss. Just not on stage. But here's what I would say about this one this week. I know how to be a good friend. I know how to be a friend. Friendship is one of the most important things to me in my life. As a matter of fact, I've told Jen, you can ask her afterwards, because the other thing I said about her is absolutely not true, but this is true. I've told her, in the case of my untimely demise, the only thing I want on my headstone, if we can afford one, is Nate was a friend. That's what I want. Nate was a friend to his wife, to his church, to his co-workers, to his children, to his parents, to his friends. Nate was a friend. It's deeply important to me. And I hope that friendship is deeply important to you. And here's what I would say as a person who is fortunate enough to have some good, deep friendships. As a matter of fact, Jen and I were driving back this Christmas. Excuse me. We were driving back home. When you come from Atlanta, really it's from Athens, there's two ways to come home. The fast way is to come just straight 85, and we do that every time. But this time, judge me if you'd like, and you probably should, but we chose to go the long way, 20 to Florence and then 95 north. Do you know why? Who knows why? Who knows why we went that way? Does anybody know? Buc-ee's. Yes, ma'am. Buc-ee's. That's why. We wasted 30 minutes of our lives so that we could take our children to Buc-ee's and buy beef jerky that I still have at the house. No, I will not share it because it was hard-earned. It was a stupid decision. I'll never make it again. But as I was driving, I had set my cruise at 8 over. That's just what I do. I set it at 78. I don't know if our resident highway patrol officer is in the crowd, but I don't think he would pull me over for that. I set it at 78. So I'm going, and I'm speeding. I know I'm speeding, but I'm not speeding by a lot. Like, come on, get over it. It's fine. I'm just trying to get home. And I pass a cop. And, of course, I'm in my rearview mirror. Is this cop following me? Am I about to get pulled over? And so then I start the doom spiral. If he pulls me over, I don't have a license. Okay? I have a license. I'm a licensed driver. Don't worry about that. I just lost it. And I lost it weeks ago. And I went online. Get this. This is just my personal complaint. This doesn't need to be in a sermon. I'm just telling you. I went online to try to replace my lost license. And as a part of that, they asked me for my license number. How am I going to know that? I lost it. Do any of you take a picture of your license and save it just in case? Like, no. So I don't have a license right now. Okay. And I'm like, if I get pulled over, he's going to ask for my license and I'm going to have to say, I don't, I don't have one officer. And then he's going to say, and this is further judgment, I understand. Then he's going to say, well, do you have a proof of insurance? I'm going to say, no, I don't carry that around. I assume you have a database you can look it up in. And then at that point, he's going to arrest me in front of my family. He's going to pull me out of the car and he's going to put handcuffs on me and arrest me in front of my family. At this point, I'm about in Goldsboro, North Carolina, just past Fort Bragg. I have no idea how Fort Bragg and Fayetteville has that many exits on 95. Jen and I felt like we were in a Twilight Zone doom loop coming home trying to get through Fort Bragg. But we had just gotten through and I'm like, I'm going to get arrested and they're going to take me to jail and I'm going to look at Jen and I'm going to say, let's just be calm, just take it easy, just get the kids home. We don't need to upset them for this. I'm going to be fine. They're going to take me to jail. And I thought to myself, who am I going to call? And I thought, I'm going to call Harris Winston. I'm going to call Harris. Because I know if I call Harris, I'm going to say, hey, dude, I'm in jail in Goldsboro. I need you to come bail me out. And Harris, at 9 o'clock at night, is going to go, and I would have called Chris, except I knew he'd be asleep. That's useless. I knew that Harris would be like, all right, dude, I'll see you in 45 minutes. And come down there and bail me out, no questions asked. And then in the car, as we're driving home, he would go, what did you do? I know I have those kinds of friends. Everybody needs those kinds of friends. The people you can call at any hour of the night who will show up and help you. There's this great line from a movie, and I don't remember the movie or the actors, but I just know that the main character walks into a room and says something to the effect of, hey, I need you to come with me. We're going to hurt some people and do illegal things, and you can't ask any questions about it, or you enter out. And the person that he's speaking to says, whose car do you want to take? Those are the kinds of friends we need. I'm not standing here supporting your illegal activities. I'm just hypothetically saying if you wanted to engage in them, you need some friends who will without asking questions. We need those kinds of friends in our life. But here's what I know. And I have those and I'm so grateful for them. But here's what I know about friends. Okay? Friends are like children. They are fundamentally inconvenient. Okay? Friends are like children. They are fundamentally inconvenient. You'll hear this side isn't laughing because you think it's inappropriate. This side that has young children is they're all giggling because they know it's true. I heard a comedian in an interview on a podcast say that children are fundamentally inconvenient, and I thought, well, that's absolutely true. John and Lily, my two children, they inconvenience me every day. They're looking forward to inconveniencing me when I'm done doing this. But friends are like that. They're fundamentally inconvenient. Just this last weekend, John and Lily had some friends over. For the sake of anonymity, we'll call them Chandler and Jackson Johnson. And they were over, and John comes downstairs crying. Jen had absconded and gone to the grocery store, leaving me with the children by myself. And I was watching them diligently. And John comes downstairs and is upset and he's crying. And I said, what's wrong, buddy? John's four and a half, so when you're four and a half, you cry about anything with no regard to reality. And I said, what's wrong, buddy? And he said that he was upset and I got it out of him. He was upset because Jackson wasn't playing right. Because John got a castle for Christmas that had knights and a wizard and a king and a queen and a dragon, and they all have certain roles to play. And in John's mind, clearly the dragon's the enemy attacking the castle. But he had decided that the wizard was team dragon instead of team castle. And Jackson really was ardent in his belief that the wizard was pro-castle and anti-dragon, which I've got to say, I think Jackson's right on this one. But he wasn't playing right. Meaning, he's not playing the way I want him to play. He's not listening to me and letting me boss him around. And I told him, yeah, son, that's what friends are. They don't always play right. But if you want to be a good friend, then you have to learn to play the way that they want to play. And this doesn't change as adults. Our friends don't always play right. If you go golfing with your friend, they might reach a level of anger that is unwarranted based on their level of practice. But you have to deal with it because they may not know how to play right. They may play too fast or too slow. I say, when you golf and you address the ball, the longer it takes you to hit it, the better that shot needs to be. Otherwise, just be bad quickly and let's move forward. Some of our friends don't gossip enough for our tastes. All right? We like to get some more deets. Some gossip too much, and we're like, that's enough, and I don't trust you. Some friends show up late. Some friends, like Keith Cathcart, when he texts you, will text you 95 times in a row until you have to silence the messages because I'm doing other stuff, Keith, and I don't care about the Steelers right now. Thank you, Jeff. Our friends don't play right, but it's still worth it to invest in them. It's still worth it to have them. And we still need to consider who our friends are. And that's not something that I just think from living life. That's something that has been ingrained in me since I was a child. And it starts with this verse in Proverbs 13, verse 20, which says, Now, when I memorized it, I memorized it this way. The companion of the wise will become wise, and the companion of fools will suffer harm. Growing up in my house, what was told to me over and over again is this simple thought, which is simply, show me your friends, and I'll show you your future. Statistically speaking, it's true empirically that we become the average of the five people that we spend the most time around. And so this morning, as we begin the year, I want to ask you, who are your closest friends? Who's the person you would call if you got arrested in Goldsboro? Who's the person that you could call in the middle of the night that would answer their phone and show up where you needed them to be? Who are the people that when your spouse goes out of town and you want to have a fun hang, you go, hey, and you text, let's do steaks, let's go out, let's play golf, let's go watch a movie. Let's go, I don't know what girls do. Let's brush each other's hair for fun. Whatever it is. Who are the people that you call and say, I've got some free time. Let's hang. Who are those folks? Who are the people that on Christmas you texted? Said, hey, I'm grateful for you. Merry Christmas. Who are the people on January 1st you texted? Hey, I'm grateful for you. Happy New Year. Who are your friends? Not your acquaintances. We all have acquaintances. Who are your friends? Who are the people that show up for you no matter what? Who are the people that you love? And here's this. This is going to be harder for the men than the women. And you may reject it on its face. That's fine. That's your issue to deal with in therapy. Who are the people that you have told them, I love you? I love you. I'm grateful for you. Men, men, be man enough to tell the people in your life that you love that you love them. Make sure they know. And make sure you show it. And so this morning I'm asking you, men and women, who are the five people that you spend the most time with? Who are you becoming like? Who is shaping you inexorably into the person that you are becoming? Because I remind you, and I'm asking you that question here at the top of the year, so you can think about it as you go through 2026. Who are the people that you spend the most time around who are shaping the person that you are becoming? Here's why I ask this and why I think it's important and worth talking about on Sunday. I say to you often, I quote this verse all the time. It's one of my favorite ones, Ephesians 2.10. You are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that you might walk in them. Parents. Phil, nodding your head. Your son Wyatt is 10. Is he 10 yet? A couple weeks. Lily, too. Do you know what my job is and your job is? It's not to get them to behave as a 10-year-old, although you're doing great at that. No thanks to faith. It is your job and my job to help Wyatt and Lily identify their good works and empower them to walk in those. Man to man, I'm emotional as I say it. You guys too. That's our job. How do we help our children identify their good works and walk in them? That's the job of parents. Your job as adults, what are your good works? What did God create you to do? And how might you walk in them? Whatever those are. And I'm not here today to expound on that or articulate upon those. But I want us to capture that idea. Because as we think about our friends, I think this question is important. Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person God created me to be? Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person that God created me to be. Now I was talking to Jen about this sermon this week and she made a great point to me to answer this question. Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person that God created me to be? If it is true that I become the average of the five people that I spend the most time with, then who should I be spending my time with? And here's what she says is the mark of a good friend. A good friend listens to everything you have to say. You go get dinner, you call on the phone, whatever it is, you go grab a drink and you're talking and you say everything you need to say. Here's what's happening at work. Here's what's happening in my marriage. Here's where I don't like my kids. Here's what's going on with other people in my life. Here's all the things. And you just kind of unload, right, on your friend because that's what friends do. Friends listen. But here's the mark of a good friend. They don't just listen to you, but they hear you and then they take you and they point you back to Jesus. I hear all of that. I'm so sorry for what's happening at your work. I'm so sorry that your husband or your wife is disappointing you in that way. I'm so sorry that your kids are so difficult in this season of life. I'm so sorry that that amount of stress is on you right now. That's a big decision that you have to make, and I'm not sure I can correctly advise you on how to make it. But where do we see Jesus in this? Where do we see him talking to us? Where is he guiding you spiritually? What do you think God's plan is in this? What do you think God's purpose is in allowing this to go on in your life? Let me tell you something. That's another level of friend. And that's what I want you to have. Is the people that you go to and you say all the things you need to say and they hear you and they listen and then they love you enough to grab your face. Theoretically. Hopefully they're not grabbing your face. That's weird. But they love you enough to grab your face and orient it towards Christ. And say, what is he teaching you through this? Those are your true friends. Those are the ones that you can walk through fire with. Those are the ones that you need. So who do you have in your life who can grab you and hear you, who will answer the call at 3 a.m., who will come bail you out of jail if you need it, who will engage in illegal activities if they benefit you, but at the end of all of that will grab your face and point you towards Jesus. Who do you have in your life that will do that? And here's what I would say before moving on. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. Maybe you're sitting here this morning and I'm asking you to do a friend inventory. And you're thinking about the people in your life that you could call, the people in your life that you talk to. And you're like, man, they don't point me towards Jesus. If anything, they point me away from Jesus. They don't help me spiritually at all. I don't have good friends in my life. My friends don't point me towards him. They're not good friends. They're bad friends. They discourage me. But here's what I would tell you. At least you have some. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. I came across a statistic recently and I double checked it because it sounded absurd. But there are more people every year that die due to loneliness than people who die due to lung issues dealing with smoking. Meaning, it is statistically true that it is more dangerous to not have any friends than it is to smoke a pack a day. By being lonely, you are more at risk for mortality than you are if you smoke a pack a day. Which brings me back to this idea of needing friends. This is the whole ethic of grace, by the way. Every week we say from stage, at Grace we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to? Yes. This is the whole ethic of grace. I tell my non-believing friends, even if you don't buy what we are selling, it's best for you and your family to come because of the benefits you get from the community, of people investing in you and you investing in them. And I hope, as I say that, that eventually they'll believe what we believe. But even if you don't, it's better for you and your family to be a part of a church so that you're engaged in friendships, so that people look out for you, people care about you and point you towards Christ. So two thoughts quickly there. If you are someone who would say, and this is, I've done some research on it, this is largely, this is more prevalent in the male community than the female community. There's a preponderance of men in their 60s who report, I have no one that I would call a close friend. It's so sad. There's even more men that would say, I've made no new friends since my 20s. Men are bad at being friends. Do you know why? Because other people don't play right. Because you're five. That's why. You're a dope. Sorry, I don't mean that. I don't mean that. Men have a hard time making friends because to be a true friend requires some emotional vulnerability. We have to put ourselves out there. We have to share our weaknesses. And we have to trust that we're going to be met with kindness. Men are taught not to show weakness, not to show need, to be self-sufficient, to take care of ourselves. And those things are not conducive to real friendship. To be a friend, Proverbs says, to be a friend, you must show thyself friendly. We have to do that. And so, men, here's what I would tell you. Leaders lead in vulnerability. You want friends? 2026? Go make some. Put yourself out there. Invite somebody to lunch. Dude, that's going to be weird. What if they tell me that they don't want to eat lunch with me? Well, then they're not going to be your friend. Be a grown-up. Invite the next person. We need these people in our lives. And here's the other place where I would challenge you, men and women alike. I'd be willing to bet that you have people in your life that you know and you care for and you respect and you wish you were better friends with them. I bet that's true. I know that's true for us because yesterday, out of conviction, I texted another couple in the church and I said I said hey tomorrow I'm going to be preaching about friend goals and you guys are ours we love you and don't spend enough time with you or your family can you come over and hang out the only thing I'm going to ask is that you not wear Panthers gear when you come and they wouldn't even agree to that So I don't know if we're off to a great start. But I bet you have people in your life that you respect and you know would point you towards Jesus and would listen to your things. But because of your own insecurities, because of your own uncertainties, because friends are fundamentally inconvenient. I mean, listen, listen, listen. Sometimes Tuesday Nate makes plans for Friday Nate. And when Friday Nate wakes up and is reminded of Tuesday Nate's commitment, he's ticked. Because I don't want to get, like I don't want to shower and go see you people. I don't want you to come over to the house that I now have to clean maniacally. I don't want to do that. Until you get there and then Friday Nate's happy again because now I'm with my friends. It's hard to spend the time that we should spend investing in relationships with other people, but it's absolutely worth it. And so this year I started out, set some friend goals. I bet you know people who you respect, who you care for, who would point you towards Christ, and maybe you're not as close with them as you'd like to be. Let me challenge you to take steps this year. Let me challenge you to engage in more new friendships. My friends who are over 50, okay? Just talking to my over 50 crowd here. When's the last time you made a new friend? Do you have some friendships in your life that are dear to you that have slipped away? That you could re-engage? Statistics tell me that that's very likely. Who are the people that you know already that you can engage with who will point you towards Jesus and be there for you? It's worth the investment and here's one of the big reasons why. Proverbs 24 6. Surely you need guidance to wage war and victory is won through many advisors. Now I'm not espousing that any of us are about to declare war. If I were preaching at a church in Washington, D.C., I might have to couch this a little bit differently, but in Raleigh, none of us have that capacity. But the point of the verse is not really about waging war. It's about doing the wise thing in the challenge that we're facing. And Solomon's point is, the more counsel that we have, the wiser choices that we will make. And when you have friends in your life who point you towards Jesus, they will offer you wise counsel, and that counsel is invaluable. It cannot be quantified. Just in 2025, and I'm not saying this to aggrandize myself and my friendships. I'm just saying it to be a real human. In 2025, I have friends that I texted at 7.30 in the morning and I said, I need to come over. I need to talk. And when I got there, they hugged me and we all cried because of stuff that was happening in my life. They were there for me, drop of a hat, in the morning. Those are friends. I have friends that I texted. I said, I just need to process some things. Can we do dinner soon? And within a night or two, I was having beef bourbignon at La Coquette, crying over our issues with a friend that made time for me. I have a friend in my life named Trip that when I call, he answers. And when he calls, I answer. No questions asked. He called yesterday. I was working. I said, hey, man, what's up? And he goes, nothing, I'm just bored. And I said, well, then I don't have any time for you. And I hung up on him. We have not talked since. I don't care to until there's a good reason for it. But if he calls today, I will answer. And so will he. We need those friends. So the simple message for you today, who are you getting counsel from? Who is loving you? Who is pointing you towards Jesus? And most importantly, what friends do you have that will take everything from you and at the end of the conversation say, yes, I hear you. What is Jesus saying to you in this moment? What people do you have in your life that you can turn to who will turn your face towards Christ? And what kinds of people should you be pursuing in 2026? Here's the question. Who should I be friends with in 2026? And here's my point. If you think about that critically and meaningfully and act on those decisions, you'll be glad you did. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this church family, for bringing us together and allowing us to enjoy one another. God, thank you for friends and the gift that they are. Thank you for connecting us and giving us the capacity for love and relationship and friendship. Father, I ask that everybody here would have a friend that loves them dearly, that accepts them completely, and that points them towards Christ. May we all enjoy those kinds of friendships. And God, for those of us in this room who feel lonely, I pray that that would be solved this year and that would not be a thing that we need to carry forward. And for those of us who have put up walls and maybe don't have the depth of friends that we know that we need, God, would you help us to have the courage to tear those down and invite people into our lives who point us towards you so that we might become the version of ourselves that you intended us to be. In Jesus' name, amen.
