Ephesians

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. In part two, we encountered Joseph as a teenager and learned his arrogance earned him such resentment from his brothers that they eventually sold him into slavery. This event changed Joseph forever. Joseph believed, based on God-given dreams, that he would one day rule over his brothers. Now, facing the disillusion of those dreams, Joseph must make a choice. A choice that is eventually faced by all of us. Will he choose to resent God because he feels God let him down? Or will he still cling to the hope that even though he can't see it, he knows that God has a plan? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching online. If you are online and you saw that Hootenanny announcement or here, I know that you did. I would add one thing to it that I'm very excited about. There's actually, we have a guy who comes to the church who is a private chef that you can hire and bring into your home. And then we have some other folks who are a part of the church who have worked as professional chefs. And they are conspiring to come up with kind of an elevated grill menu that they're gonna make for us for the Hootenanny. So we're not just gonna have frozen pucks that we melt on the grill and then slap between buns and expect you to call them good. We're gonna have actual good stuff to eat at the Hootenanny. So come on, invite your friends. I think it's going to be a really fun, special time. I'm looking forward to getting to do that together as a church. Last week as a church, we did Grace Serves. And for those who weren't able to make it, we had a really great turnout. I was very much encouraged by it. We did some work at Fox Road. We packed lunches or meals with Rise Against Hunger. And I was told this week, where's Doug Funk? Are you in here? Are you out in the lobby? Okay. Yeah, you're here. Is it 300,000 meals in 20 years? Yes. 350,000. Sorry. Let's just call it 500. Let's just round up 500,000. But no, we were told by Rise Against Hunger that over the course of 20 years that Grace has helped to pack about 350,000 meals for people who need them a whole, whole lot. So I thought that was great. I don't know if it's appropriate to cheer for ourselves. Let's just know that we did that. No, don't cheer. That's great that we did that. And finally, it's kickoff Sunday. This is a good Sunday. If you're here, your team has a chance to be good this year. If you're watching from home, they're going to be terrible. All right? That's what you get. I wish the best of luck to all of you and your teams, unless your teams are the Panthers or the Patriots or whoever's playing the Falcons. Otherwise, best of luck to you. Let's go. This morning, we're focused on Joseph and moving through his life. As we said in the video, that we ended last week with Joseph facing this decision. He was an arrogant teenager that built resentment with his brothers that got him thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. And then we see, we leave Joseph on the back of presumably an ox cart chained, being carried down to Egypt into a life of slavery. Joseph had just received dreams from God that said that he was going to rule over his brothers and rule over even his mom and his dad. He had received these dreams from God, these promises from God, and then the exact opposite of those promises happened to him as he's riding down to Egypt as a slave? How can he possibly rule over his brothers? He will be irrevocably separated from his family and is now bound to live a life of slavery. And so in that moment, he faces a choice that every God follower faces at some point in their life. He's in a place where he feels disillusioned by God. He's in a place where he feels disappointed by God. And you've been in that place too. And if you haven't, you will be. I was taught this about God and yet it's not happening. I read this in God's word. It says, if I did this, then he would do this. And I did this and he's not doing that. To be a believer is to sit in a place at some point or another where you feel like God should do this thing and he's not doing it. And you're disillusioned and you're disappointed. And you feel that maybe God's not going to keep his word to you. And in those moments, we're faced with the same decision that Joseph was faced with as he's going down to Egypt in the ox cart. Do I resent God because he broke his word to me, because I think he's let me down, or do I choose to love God and trust him because I know that he loves me and I know that he has a plan. And even though I can't see how it's going to work out, I know that God is good and he has a plan. And so Joseph chooses, we see as we pick up the story, he chooses to continue to honor God. He chooses to continue to show God favor. And sometimes there are these times in life where we feel like we want to be resentful of God, but we have no other place to go but to run to him. There is this scene with Jesus and his disciples where Jesus offers this really hard teaching and a lot of people fall away from him because they don't expect that that's what Jesus, the Son of God, would teach. And he looks at the disciples and he says, are you going to leave too? And Peter profoundly and wonderfully responds, where else can I go? Where else can I find hope? And so maybe Joseph relates to that. God, I don't understand what you're doing here. I'm on an ox cart in chains to live a life of slavery. I'm supposed to be ruling over my family and be the head of the clan. This is the exact opposite of what you promised, but I don't know where else to go from here. And so we see that Joseph chooses to lean into God, to trust him, and to trust that God loves him. When he gets to Egypt, he's sold into slavery to a man named Potiphar. Many of you know this story, but in case you don't, Potiphar was the chief of Pharaoh's guard. We're told that he was the second most powerful person in Egypt, which makes him the second most powerful person on the planet at the time because Egypt is the superpower during Joseph's day. Potiphar had risen to prominence in the Egyptian empire and was in charge of Pharaoh's guard. He was tasked with keeping Pharaoh alive, which made him the second most powerful man in the nation. And he buys Joseph. And we don't know how many years for sure that he worked for Potiphar. And well, what we don't know is how many years it took to get to this place. But Joseph is bought by this powerful man in Egypt. He is a Hebrew slave. He's a foreign guy. He's about 17 years old and he sold to Potiphar. And remember he was faced with that choice. Do I honor God or do I run away from him? And Joseph chooses to honor God. And this is how we see that he does this. This is what happens to Joseph in Potiphar's house. We're going to be in Genesis chapter 39 and pick up the story in verse 2. If you read on, what you find is that Joseph ran the house so well and so efficiently and Potiphar trusted him with so much that it says that the only thing that Potiphar had to think about every day was what to eat. Joseph took care of Potiphar so well just saying, let's relate to the text a little bit. Wouldn't that be a pretty sweet gig? How would you like it if you had a personal life assistant that was so good at what they did that they ran your life better than you and all you had to do is decide what you wanted to eat. That's pretty good, especially on NFL Sunday. I wish that that was my life on NFL Sunday. That's how much Potiphar trusted Joseph, which I've got to believe. I don't know. Admittedly, I don't know a lot about the slave culture in ancient Egypt. But I'd be willing to bet that there's not many foreign slaves who rose to such a position of prominence as Joseph did. I bet Potiphar had Egyptian slaves that human nature tells us he would have preferred over the Hebrew slave. But for some reason, Joseph was so impressive that he rose to what I would argue is very likely an unprecedented position for someone who came from outside of Egypt. But Joseph chose to honor God. He chose to do the right thing, and God gave him favor. And God made all that he did prosper. You know those people? I've worked with people like that before. I've worked with people on church staff. I got a buddy named Heath. No matter where he got moved around at my old church, he got moved around to different positions every year and a half or two years. And everywhere he went, that ministry grew. He's just good at everything. I wish I had an ounce of what he has. He's good at everything. This is Joseph. Wherever God puts him, it thrives. And so he rises to prominence in Potiphar's house. At some point in his rise, which would have been over the course of years, this was not an overnight thing, Potiphar's wife comes to Joseph and says, would you lay with me? Now, we've covered this story before, and when we did, for this section, I walked over here and I said, this is going to be my reckless speculation box. This is not biblical truth. This is just me guessing. So with that in mind, I would just like to reiterate this point because I think it bears repeating, and many of you didn't hear it when I made it two or three years ago. And I don't want to be untoward with what I'm about to say, but I think that we can admit that this is objectively true in most cases. Potiphar is rich and powerful. Rich and powerful people tend to be good-looking and have good-looking spouses. Yes, you don't have to answer this out loud, but this is just a thing. It's a dynamic. People get money and they get better looking. That's why I look this way. I have an average amount of money. I look average. If I had a lot of money, I would look amazing. I bet Potiphar's wife was pretty. I bet she was. Joseph grew up in a nomadic tribe that wandered the fields and the hillsides and the deserts. You ever seen people who live a life exposed to the elements? They have a face of a catcher's mitt at like 35. They're not a good-looking people. Go to the coast of Maine and look around. You'd be like, that person's a grandpa. No, they're not. They just graduated college. That's what it was like to be a nomad. I'd be willing to bet. Again, this is conjecture. Joseph grew up in a rough and tumble nomadic tribe where all the girls were his cousins. All right, he didn't have a lot of options. And then this Hebrew nomad comes to the most powerful nation in the world, is elevated in the second most powerful home in the nation, and the wife of that home wants to sleep with him. That would be, for any human who's ever lived, a genuinely tempting situation. Right? Put yourself in his shoes and you tell me what you would do. I'm a big person. When we want to start judging people's sins and what they did and how far they fell and gosh, I can't believe that they would have done that or done that to their family or whatever it was. I always go to, okay, that's fine. Let's judge them. Put yourself in their shoes with their circumstances and the way that they grew up and you tell me that you would make different choices because I don't think you would. Put yourself in Joseph's shoes and ask yourself what choice you would make. Even if you didn't go through with it, would you flirt with it a little bit? Would you let it stroke your ego? Would you want to see if she was really serious? Would you just lean into it because it kind of made you feel good that someone like that would like someone like you? Human nature says that we probably would. Human nature suggests that many of us, including me, I'm saying us on purpose, would at least entertain it a little bit. Would at least want to search it out just a little bit. Would maybe want to see how close can I get to the fire without getting burned. But that wasn't Joseph's response. She came to him day after day. And she tried to entice him. And in that, in that day after day enticement, do you think that it was a formal across the room? Mr. Joseph, as you would be so obliged, I would love to engage in some activities with you. I bet she did what she could to make it more and more difficult for him to stand firm. But this is what he said. And this is the remarkable character of Joseph. Look at his response. When she would come to him day after day and try to entice him, look at what his response was. We see it in verse 8, and I'll read through 10. That is some remarkable integrity. She would try to entice him, and he would say to her, how could I possibly do that? Your husband has entrusted me with his very life. He has given me all his authority. He's not even more powerful in this house than I am. How could I betray him and do this to him? And more than that, and I love the way that Joseph phrases this, how could I sin against my God? My God who has been faithful to me, my God who, yes, let me get sold into slavery, but has shown me favor here and given me a position here that I did not think I could attain to and who has helped me to find favor in my master Potiphar's eyes. How could I sin against him, and sin against Potiphar, and sin against myself, and sin against you, and engage myself in this? How could I possibly do that? I wonder what it would look like to see temptations in our life through the lens of God's blessings. If when we are tempted to sin or to go down a path that we shouldn't go down, I wonder what it would look like to call to mind God's blessings in our life. How could I do that to God after all that he's given me and list off the things that we are grateful for? I wonder what kind of impact that would have on our ability to stand firm when we face the tests of temptation. And as we keep reading the story, we find that one day it comes to a critical point where words are no longer enough. One day Joseph goes into the house and he and Potiphar's wife are alone. It seems that normally there was all kinds of servants around, so even if Potiphar's wife was being suggestive, there really wasn't a time or a place where it would be expedient. But this time, there's nobody else around. This time, there's no accountability. It's just him and her. And she apparently grabs hold of him because she was trying to seize the moment. And you know the story. He, in that moment, sets an example for us that rings through the centuries. He, in that moment, does something that I think is incredibly profound. And I wonder what we would do in that moment. We're a slave. We've risen to prominence. We are subjected to Potiphar. This person who we may be very attracted to wants us to cross a line with them. How many of us in our heads in that moment would justify it? What choice do I have? If I don't, she's going to tell on me, I'm going to go to prison or be killed. I may as well just do it. I may as well just follow through because I'm in an impossible situation. But Joseph doesn't do any of that. Again, he sets an example in that moment that rings throughout history. And he runs. He just gets the heck out of there. He runs away. And as he runs, she holds on to his cloak, his tunic, whatever the outer layer of his garments were, and he flings them off and he goes and he gets out of there. And he runs from that temptation. And this didn't even occur to me in my sermon prep. This occurred to me as I was praying about to get up and do the sermon. But do you understand that when he's running from temptation, that he's running directly to Jesus? It may have felt to him like he was running out of the house and to a safe place, but no, no, no, that's not where he's running. He's running away from evil and towards his Savior. When you choose to run like Joseph, you're running away from evil, the things that would seek to tear you down, and you are running towards your Savior. And I think that's a pretty cool picture. But in that moment, Joseph chooses to run. And it's here in the story that I want to ask a couple questions of us as we reflect on and relate to this story. The first question would be this, what tempts me? If you have notes, you can write that down. I'm not asking you to guess what tempts Nate, okay? I'm asking you to make it personal in your life as you think about yourself. I didn't want to say what tempts you because then we're tempted to think about what tempts other people. No, no, no, no, no. What tempts me? Think about it that way. What tempts you? Don't write it down. People around you will see. They'll be weird. What tempts you? Is it the temptation that Joseph faced? Listen, in a church our size, and the number of marriages that are represented here, you're kidding yourself if you think that people aren't currently facing that temptation. You're kidding yourself if you think people aren't currently involved in that temptation. If you think that people aren't flirting with the idea in their mind. Or maybe it's not a temptation that you have now, but it's not because you don't want that temptation. It's because you don't have the option. But you would invite the option if it came. Maybe that's the temptation that you face. If it is, then you're likely sweaty right now. And that's good. That's the Holy Spirit. Don't worry about that. Maybe the temptation we face is some sort of addiction, a reliance on chemicals. Listen, I've heard a lot of jokes over the course of the pandemic, but has there ever been an easier time in our adult life to develop a habit that's not healthy in the privacy of our own home? We work from home, don't have to be anywhere the next day, just have a couple more. Has it ever been easier to push alcohol into an area where it just doesn't need to be, to take that too far? Maybe that's what's tempting us. Maybe, maybe it's not something that is that blatantly corrosive. Maybe it's greed. Maybe the thing that tempts you is just to chase after the next thing, is to get the next job to make a little bit more money so that you can have the next nice thing. So that when you get that nice thing, you can become instantly dissatisfied with that and then want the next nice thing. And if you think I'm making that up, all right, I know that that's something that we all face. A year and a half ago, Jen and I bought a house. We were so proud of it. We were thrilled with it. This is the nicest house we've ever owned. And then within like nine months, we were like, this place is small. We need more space. Lily's asking us constantly, and on the next house, can I paint my walls this color? And I'm like, we don't have any money to do that. So sure, in 10 years. Maybe we just get caught up in greed for the next thing that we want. Maybe for many of us, I was really trying to think this week about what might tempt us. And I think that there's some obvious things, like the things I've already addressed. But I think that many of us face a temptation that maybe we wouldn't address out loud or we wouldn't even conclude ourselves, but I think it very much is one, but it's the sin of complacency or being good enough. Maybe what tempts you is to simply say, I'm good. I'm good enough. Yeah, I mean, I could maybe come to church with more regularity. I know I could get up and I could read my Bible more. Nate's always talking about that. I could try it. I know I could be more prayerful. I know that I could have devotions with my kids. I know that I could pray with my spouse more. I know that I could volunteer more. I know that I could probably give more if I wanted to. Like, I know that there's more that I could do, sure. But I'm pretty good. I'm okay. My life's not going off the rails. I wasn't in the first group. I'm not tempted by affairs or by alcohol. Oh man, those people are terrible. I'm in the good group. We often get to this place of complacency and good enough by playing comparison games, right? I know that I could be better, but at least I wasn't in that first group. I know that I could do more, but at least I'm not as bad as blank. So-and-so hasn't done this in years, and they seem fine. I think I'm fine, too. And so we find favorable comparisons to ourselves to convince ourselves that, yeah, I could be more healthy spiritually, but I'm doing okay. And I would encourage you to do this if this sounds like you. How about don't compare yourself to other people? How about compare yourself to yourself five years ago? To yourself three years ago? If I'm striking a chord with you and sometimes you think to yourself, yeah, sometimes I just think I'm good enough. I know I could do more, but I don't really want to do it. How do you compare? If you're 50 years old, how do you compare to 45 year old you? Are you healthier? Are you more vibrant spiritually? Do you feel a closeness to Jesus that you didn't feel when you're 45? Are you telling more people about Jesus than you did five years ago? Are you talking with your kids about Jesus more than you did five years ago? Are you seeing more people come to faith in your orbit than you did five years ago? Are you more engaged with scripture? Are you more breathing in God's love and God's goodness and breathing that out to other people than you were five years ago? Or are you about the same? Is it just steady and maybe sometimes a little worse? The sin of good enough just convinces us to flatline for our whole lives and not see any growth. And I kept saying, well, at least I'm not in group one, but guess what? All those sins are just as damaging to us. I thought of one more too. Maybe the sin that you struggle with is letting other people tell you who you are instead of your creator tell you who you are. Maybe you have people in your life who tell you that you're not good enough. Maybe you have voices in your head that tell you that you don't matter. That tell you that no one's going to listen to you. That tell you that you can't really change or that you can't really do or that you're not really that important. I don't want to press too hard on this because that's a difficult place to be, but I would just tell you gently as your pastor, that's sinful too. Because God tells you that you're chosen. God tells you that you're fearfully and wonderfully made. God watched his son die on a cross for you. God is orchestrating this whole thing to come back and get you and bring you to his heaven. God loves you dearly. God made you on purpose. God watches you every day and he roots for you and Jesus sits at the right hand of the father and he intercedes for you. And so maybe your temptation is to listen to voices who aren't God's tell you that you're something or someone that you're not instead of listening to who God tells us that we are. Whatever your temptation is, whatever it is, however you identify with that, I'm not all of them, that'd be too difficult, but pick the one that's most pernicious in your life. That's most relevant in your life. And let's think about that one. What does it look like to run from that sin? Joseph ran. He ran away from that sin and he ran to Jesus. So what does it look like in your life to do that? I would simply like to make this point about running as we try to figure out what that means in our own life. That to run is to take the option off the table. When Joseph ran, he was burning a bridge, man. I was just never coming back. This is never going to happen. I'm getting out of here. I'm not leaving any possibility for it. He didn't go to a different room. He didn't try to talk her out of it. He ran. I'm taking this option that you're proposing off the table. That's not possible. We're not doing it. Not happening. So in your life and the temptations that you face, what does it look like to run from them? What does it look like to take those options off the table? That thing is tempting me and I'm going to make it in my life so that it's not even a possibility. What do you have to do to run from it? What accountability do you have to invite into your life about complacency? What do you have to do to burn the bridge about the affair that you're entertaining? And listen to me, if that's your temptation, run, man, run. Get out of there. Run and burn the bridge. If it's substances, what do you have to do to burn that bridge and take it off the table? If it's complacency, if it's believing the wrong voices, if it's greed, if it's whatever it is, what do we have to do to burn bridges and run, to take that option off the table? And now listen. These are not my favorite kinds of sermons. This is a pretty classic sermon. Hey, what is the sin in your life? You should stop it. That's what this sermon is in its most simple form. And I don't really like to harp on stuff like that because I really don't want this to be a house of guilt. I don't want to bring you in every week, make you feel bad about what you're doing, and then send you out here trying to do better. That's really not the point at all. But it's where we are in the text. It's what happens in the story. And it's a theme of the Bible that we are to pursue holiness and purity. So why does this matter so much to God? Why does God want us to run from our temptations? Why does he want us to take those options off the table? Why does that matter so deeply to him? Well, I had a couple thoughts for that. The first is that we're told in Scripture that we should be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, that we should pursue holiness. God values purity, and so we should too. Jesus died to make us pure. And so we should value that purity. We also talked about in the middle of the summer, we focused in on Psalm 1611, that you make known to me the paths of life in your presence. There is fullness of joy at your right hand. There are pleasures forevermore. And we talked about how this full life is found in God. And we talked about this idea of really God invites us on, this is from C.S. Lewis, God invites us on this incredible vacation, this incredible life to live, and we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies thinking this is the apex of all human experience. When we choose to run away from sin and to Jesus, we're leaving the mud pies and we're pursuing the life that he has laid out for us that's far greater than we could ever ask or imagine. John 10.10 says that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it to the full. We find fullness of joy there. We find pleasures forevermore. He makes known to us the paths of life. So when we sin, we forfeit that. But that's not really the reason that I want us to focus on this morning. To me, the most compelling thought about why does purity matter so much and why should we run from the temptations that exist in our life is simply this thought here. What kingdom work can the enemy short-circuit if you give in to your temptations? What kingdom work can the enemy short circuit if you simply give in to the temptations that you face? It's becoming more and more one of my more favorite used thought about verses in my life, Ephesians 2.10, where Paul writes that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. I know some of you might feel like, listen, man, I don't have any great kingdom work to do. Yes, you do. The Bible tells me so. That God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in him, that he has mapped out for you in your life based on your gifts and your abilities and your spiritual gifts and the way that God has uniquely created and crafted you, that he has laid out for you good works, things to do to build his kingdom for all eternity, to live out our purpose for being here, which our purpose for being alive, I don't know if you know this, is to know Jesus and to bring other people with you as you go to him. That's why we exist. That's why he doesn't snap us up to heaven as soon as we get saved. We were created in Christ Jesus for those good works that we might walk in them. So you might say, gosh, Nate, I'm a stay-at-home mom. My life is a two-year-old. I don't have good works. Bull, you're discipling that kid. You're loving on the families that you invite into your home. You're loving on the friends that that kid has. You're volunteering somewhere. You're loving on your neighborhood somewhere. You're coming to church and loving on kids here and loving on other folks here. You're influencing them, and they're seeing the ripples of God in your life. You cannot tell me that your life doesn't matter. God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. He's got a plan to use you if only we open our eyes to see it. And I wonder, what kingdom building do we short circuit when we allow temptations to take over our life? Here's what I mean. If I allow my temptations to take over my life, what does that do to the work that we're doing at Grace? To what God is doing here in this place? How does it short circuit God's kingdom work here? If you give in to the temptations that you have in your life, how does it short circuit your ability to reach your neighbors, your ability to share Christ's love with your coworkers? How does it short circuit your ability to disciple your children if you give in to the temptations that you're facing? How does it short circuit your ability to love on your family members who don't know Jesus yet but you desperately want them to? If you give in to your temptations, how does it short circuit your ability to be used in those ways? I think this is a huge reason that we pursue purity. So that God can do the work in us and through us that he's always wanted to do. And in being used for that work, we find the greatest joy imaginable. There's another point on your notes, but I'm not going to end it like that. I'm going to end it like this. I don't know what tempts you. I don't know how the enemy would seek to short circuit the work that God has for you to do. But I do know this. That the best choice, the wisest choice, the choice you need to make today is to run from it. Run. Take the option off the table and run to it. And your life may get harder for running. Joseph ran and it landed his butt in prison. Your life may get more difficult if you run, but run. Get away from it. Pursue purity. Know God. Experience his pleasures forevermore and know what it is to live a life of service to his kingdom and live in that peace and that contentment and that fulfillment. If you run, you won't regret it. If you stay, you will. Let's pray. Father, you are so good to us. You're so good to us in how you love us. Father, if there's anybody here who just can't hear your voice and they want so desperately to believe that they are who you say they are, would you just shout at them so they can hear you? God, for those tempted with the same temptation that faced Joseph, give us the strength and wherewithal to run. Whatever we're facing, whatever tempts us, however the enemy would seek to take us off course so that we can't know you like we should and we can't show others who you are. God, I just pray that you would give us the strength and the conviction and the determination to run, to run away from that sin and to run towards you and find the joy that you offer us there. God, let us not think for a second that this is somehow about behaving ourselves better. But let us know and understand that this is all about pursuing you and experiencing the life that you have for us. It's in your son's name who provides us that life that I pray. 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, 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, 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.

Well, good morning. It's good to be up here again. I usually start with my name is Nate, but I think we covered that earlier in the announcement, so I'm just going to jump right into things. This week, I had the opportunity to do two things that I think are kind of a special part of the experience of being a pastor. On Tuesday, I got to go visit a couple in the hospital who goes to the church who just had their new baby, Hudson Harper, the grandson of John Susan Turnburg and then the son of Lauren Harper and Brandon Harper. And it was a sweet, sweet thing to go there and to visit with them and to see this tiny little baby that could barely open his eyes and have the opportunity to talk to them and pray with them. And you kind of get invited into these special spaces that you might not always get to experience. I got invited into this hospital room with them, and it was a really great thing. And then Friday, I got to do a wedding for a couple. They were a sweet couple. He was 34. She was 31. This is their first marriage. They waited for each other. They found each other. They dated for two years. And I got to stand there and do their wedding and be a part of that. And that was a neat experience. And then as we're doing the vows, dude can barely choke through them. Like he is so choked up. He's so moved with love for this woman that he is going to marry. It was a really, really sweet moment. It really was. And what strikes me about those moments is they're both so very full of hope, right? They're both so very full of hopes and dreams. If you know, if you've had a kid, then you know what it is to hold that kid and realize, oh my goodness, all the things you hope for them, all the things that you want for them, all the things that you hope are true of them in their adolescence and into adulthood. And if you know Jesus and you believe in prayer, then you pray for them, you hope for them, you dream about them. And when you get married and you stand at the altar and you look at the person that you're giving your life to, you have hopes and dreams about that marriage as well. You have things that you want to be true, stories that you hope God writes in your life. And those are two really hopeful moments. And they remind me that we all have hopes and dreams. You carried hopes and dreams into this room. We all have things that we want. We all have things that we hope are true one day. That's how we are wired. And sometimes life changes those hopes and dreams. If you go back to when you had a kid and then you look at him now, you're like, that's not what I was hoping for. God adjusts those. Sometimes marriage doesn't go the way that we hoped that it would go. But we change them. We augment them. We still have these hopes and we still have these dreams. We have things that we want for ourselves. And it makes me wonder, if we have hopes and dreams for our children, and we believe that God is our Father in heaven, then he has hopes and dreams for us. And I wonder what those are. I wonder what God hopes for us. I wonder what God's will is for us. I wonder what he wants for each of his children. I wonder what he wants for his church. I wonder what he wants for you. I wonder what he wants for the people that you love the most. And I think that we actually arrive in Ephesians chapter three, as we go through the book of Ephesians in our series, I think we actually arrive at a place where we see God's hopes and dreams for us. I think they're articulated through the person of Paul in this prayer. We're going to be looking at Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. In that span of verses, I tweeted out or sent out on social media this week that this is my favorite passage in the Bible. Aaron, our children's pastor, was laughing at me because apparently I have a lot of favorites, but this is like my favorite favorite, okay? I love this prayer. It's a prayer that he prays to the churches surrounding the ancient city of Ephesus. He prays this prayer, a very similar prayer, over the church in Colossae, in the book of Colossians. We find it there. We find it in the book of Philippians that he prays over the church in Philippi. This prayer has made such an impact on me and the way that I think about things and the way that I hope for the people that God entrusts to me that the very first sermon that I was able to choose when I came to grace, I came to grace in April of 2017. And the first two Sundays were Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. And so those had already kind of been determined what was going to be preached that day. But the first passage that I got to choose to preach to my new church was Ephesians 3, verses 14 through 19. When I go and I visit a kid in the hospital that's born, I pray the ethic or the ethos of this verse over them. The takeaway from this prayer, I pray over them. When I pray for Lily, my own daughter, every night, the first prayer I prayed for her was this. The first thing I pray, the thing I pray for her every night, I try to, is this, that she would know God. And when I pray for the marriages that I do, I pray that they would know God. And that's what we see in this prayer. But I don't just expect you to care about this prayer because I do. I don't just expect you to think it's a big deal because I think it's a big deal. And I don't just expect you to accept that these are God's hopes and dreams for you without a little bit of work or a little bit of background because I say they're a big deal. And I think that fundamental to this prayer is really understanding Paul. I think to appreciate the prayer, we have to appreciate the person who prayed it. Now, if I had made these notes later in the week when I was really on my game, I would have said to appreciate the prayer, you have to appreciate the prayer. Yeah, that's better. But this is fine. You have to appreciate the person who prayed the prayer. So who is the person of Paul? I feel like in church we talk about Paul. You've heard me say Paul before, and you know that you're supposed to acknowledge that he's a big deal. But I wonder if sometimes we don't know bits and pieces of who he is, and we don't really know the whole person of Paul. Maybe Paul to you is kind of like Bruce Springsteen to me. I have to confess to you, I don't really know anything that he sang. I don't, I'm sorry. I grew up in a cruel regime that didn't allow me to listen to secular music. And so the 70s and the 80s are totally lost on me until I could start sneaking like Offspring and Dave Matthews in the 90s. Like that's when I started listening to music. Before that, it was just just the Bill Gaither vocal band, which is awesome. I mean, don't hate on them. Some of you are not laughing. You're like, I don't get this. Don't. Google it. You're going to have a great afternoon. But like, I don't know who Bruce, I don't know what he's saying. I'm pretty sure he's called the boss. I think he's from New Jersey. I don't know. You don't have to tell me. I don't really care. And like, this, I was trying to tell the staff, like what songs did he sing? And my first two guesses were Born to Be Wild. No. And Summer of 69. No, that's not true. I think Born in the USA. Is that one? That's literally all I know. They taught me that this week. That's all I know. But my whole life, people will mention Bruce Springsteen. I'm like, yeah, the boss. He's the man. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know anything about him. I just fake it because by this time it's too late to ask any questions, right? I think sometimes we do that with Paul. We mention him in church. Last week you heard me say that he has these things called epistles. That sounds very fancy. Letters that he wrote to the churches. We know that he went around planting churches. We know things about Paul, but I wonder if we really know this person and who he is. Maybe some of you do. Maybe some of you know the deep cuts, like you know the bootlegs, like you know that there's a third Corinthians floating around somewhere out there that we haven't read before. That's actually a true thing. That's a thing that exists. Maybe you know that. Maybe you don't, but I thought we could kind of piece together our knowledge of Paul so we can really appreciate the person that prays this prayer over the church in Ephesus and ultimately over us. Paul was born, Saul, in a city called Tarsus. And he grew up as a Jew's Jew, man. He came up, he was in training, he had just become a Pharisee. And one thing to know about Jerusalem and Israel at the time is that every civilization has a celebrity culture. Every civilization has people that they look at and go, those are the ones that we want to be like. And in Israel, it was the religious leaders. It was the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And so to grow up becoming a Pharisee was to be a part of the celebrity culture of Israel. It was to be young and up and coming. It was to be known. And he was the cream of the crop. He was at the top of the heap. He was the guy. He was the guy with all the potential in Israel. He was a Jew's Jew. And then when Jesus was crucified and his followers, known as simply the way, began to multiply, he said, this is a threat to Judaism, to what I believe in. It's my job to stamp it out. So he took it on his own shoulders to stamp out this young religion of Christianity. And he began to persecute the Christians in Jerusalem. And then he got a special order to go to the next nation over to a city called Damascus and stamp out the Christian movement going on there. And on the way to Damascus, Jesus appears to him and he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? He blinds him and he sends him to a place. He says, you stay here, someone's going to come to you. And then God goes to Ananias, this great prophet that lives. And he says, I want you to go to Saul, and I want you to heal him of the blindness that I'm struck him with. And Ananias says, I don't want to do that. If I go to see Saul, I'm going to get killed. No way. You can find some other sucker. And God says what I think is maybe one of the most ominous lines in the New Testament. Saul is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. For those of you who think that the Christian life, that once I become a Christian, there's no more suffering and God fixes everything that hurts me, I will show you how much he must suffer for my name. That's not in the Bible, this idea that we don't experience hardship once we know Jesus. The one who followed him maybe the best had some of the hardest trials. So Ananias goes to Saul, now named Paul, and he takes the scales off of his eyes. Paul is infused with his purpose. He is the chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles, okay? Gentile is anybody who's not a Jew. So that's almost everybody in this room. And Paul was the guy that God took his infant church that was birthed in Jerusalem, that had a couple thousand followers in this one city, and he handed, I think, this infant church to Paul, and he said, here, I need you to bring this to adolescence. He entrusted it to him. Carry my word, carry the mystery of the gospel, the thing that happened here with Jesus when he died on the cross. Take that to the other church, to the other cities surrounding us in Asia Minor and spread the word of this church. And Paul did his job well because here we are, another continent 2,000 years later. He went off into the wilderness for a number of years. When he felt like he was ready, he presented himself to the council, to the church council in Jerusalem, populated by the disciples and Jesus' brother, James. And he said, hey, I think I'm ready to do my job. I think I'm ready to go tell the Gentiles about this Jesus. Can I go? And they said, yeah, you have our blessing. So he went for the rest of his life on four missionary journeys. Some scholars say it was three journeys. some say four. The reason there's a debate is that his last journey, he was arrested and then put on a ship and taken to Rome. On his way to Rome, they shipwrecked on this island of Malta, and then eventually they got to Rome. And the whole time, Paul, because he's Paul, was sharing his faith and inspiring churches and writing letters. So some consider that his fourth missionary journey. The important thing to know is for his entire life, he traveled around and he planted churches and he inspired people and he brought people to the gospel. He had what was called a traveling seminary. It wasn't called that then, but we call it that now. He always had people who were younger than him, men and women that he was training up so that they could lead churches too. Timothy is his most famous disciple. He actually, the books of 1 and 2 Timothy were written letters from Paul to Timothy when he made Timothy the pastor in Ephesians. He sent Timothy to Ephesus and he said, that's going to be your church now. Here's some letters to guide you as you lead them. Paul was a great man. He is the most influential Christian to ever live. Paul literally said, and he meant it, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted to be with God so badly that he considered it a good thing if he were gonna die. But he understood that to be here was to serve God, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted death, not in a morose way, not in a suicidal way, not in a depressed way, but in a way that he said his picture of what eternity was was so great that he wanted that more than whatever this life had to offer. I spent a lot of time over the years, I haven't done it lately as much to my detriment, but for a while I was reading a lot of biographies. I love reading biographies about people that have done incredible things, men and women that have impacted history through the years. And whenever I read these biographies about good and bad people, people that did great things, people that did terrible things, I try to look for the commonalities. What is it about these people that make them great? What do they have in common through the years, whether it's Genghis Khan or whether it's George Washington or Steve Jobs? What do they have in common that helped them do these great things? And the one thing that I found in the biographies that I've read is that the thing that these great people have in common is this remarkable singularity of focus. They have this ability in their life to be laser focused on this thing that they think is so important. Above and beyond everything else, often to the detriment of other things that most normal people prioritize. A lot of times what they did, the great thing that they do, costs them all kinds of things in their personal lives. But they have the singularity of focus. And as I study Paul, without a doubt, he has the singularity of focus on God's church. He will not be distracted. All he ever cares about is building God's church and the people in God's church. And Paul had hopes and dreams for you too. He had a desire for you. And he had a desire for grace, just like he had a desire for the church in Ephesus. And if we wanna know what Paul prioritized, I think you can look at his prayers. This prayer is important because it reveals what Paul most values. The reason this passage is important is because it's revelatory to us. It tells us what Paul most values. If you were to go to Paul and you were to say, what's the, to you, if you could only ask for one thing for a church, what would it be? If we went to him and we said, if you could, Paul, if you could only pray one thing over grace, what would it be? I think it would be this. If you said, Paul, what, if you could only pray one thing over my marriage, over my kid, over me, over the people that I love, what would it be? I think it would be this passage. I really, truly do. And I think what's said in this prayer reveals his priorities for us. So let's look at what Paul prays over the churches around Ephesus, and I think over the New Testament church of which we are a part. He says this, That's Paul's prayer for you. If you were to say, Paul, what do you want from me and my family? This is it. This is what he wants. And I think it's worth going through sentence by sentence and making sure we really understand what it is that Paul's asking for us here. So if you look at verses 14, and I've actually asked Lynn running our slides today to just leave it up on the screen so that we can look at it together. If you look at verses 14 and 15, for this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family on heaven and on earth is named. Paul is saying, listen, Ephesus, I want you to know, church, I want you to know, I pray for you. I pray for you. And when I do, here's what I pray. Now, it's interesting to note he gets on his knees. It's a posture of submission. God, your will be done, not mine. It's acknowledging that God is Lord over the whole earth, that all the churches are his. But really, the heart of this is Ephesus, church, I pray for you regularly. And when I do, let me tell you what I pray for. We see in 16, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being. And there's a purpose to that prayer that he wants to be strengthened you. He wants you to be strengthened in your inner being by his spirit so that there's a purpose to that prayer. Okay. That's not just one thing that he wants. He wants that for you because it leads to something else. And the thing that it leads to is so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, okay? Those first two things there, that you would be strengthened with power in your inner being by his spirit so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. That's salvation. That's what he's talking about. To understand what it means to become a Christian is for the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to spiritual truths that you had not yet seen. If you're a believer, then what's happened in your life is at some point or another, your eyes were opened and you realized, oh my goodness, because of choices I've made, I'm at odds with my creator. I have no way to repair my relationship with my creator, and I need something, some supernatural action so that I can be reunited with my creator. And then you realize through the Holy Spirit, because he's working in your heart and in your mind, that that's Jesus. The Holy Spirit's first work in your life is to turn you on to your need for a Savior, and then to open up the doors of your heart so that Christ can take residence in your heart, that Christ would dwell in your hearts through faith. This is a salvation experience. The very first thing that Paul prays for all of us is that we would be Christians, that we would be saved. If you're here this morning and you're not a part of a church and you're not a part of the church because you're not yet a believer, you just came with somebody or you wandered in, we are so glad that you are here. And I want you to know that Paul prays for you. He prays for you that you would become a believer. And not just mental ascent, not just, yeah, I think so. But that you would be strengthened in your inner being. And that phrasing, that denotes your heart, your guts, your core, and your bones down to the fiber of who you are. Be strengthened with the Spirit, I think, so that you won't doubt. So that you'll know that you know that you know that Christ has you. That he will take up residence in your heart, and that you know that you are a believer, that you will be strengthened to your core and have this confidence in knowing that God has you. He prays that for you. But he doesn't stop there. He doesn't just want you to be a believer. He doesn't just want you to know Christ and for Christ to take residence in your heart. But the result of that, and I think this is a beautiful thing, it says that Christ would dwell in your hearts in faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love. I love that phrase. When we're confident in the work that the Holy Spirit has done, we've been strengthened in our core. When Christ has taken up residence in our heart, the result of this, of knowing that we are saved, is that we are rooted and grounded in love. And as I thought about this phrase, I thought, man, this is a really appropriate phrase for 2019. Because we are a people and we are a culture that is becoming more and more aware of the idea of health. All of us, we express it in different ways. Some of us are old school tough guys and we would never really admit this. We just have other ways of saying it, but it's the same thing. We want to be mentally healthy. We want to be physically healthy. We want to be spiritually healthy. We want to be emotionally healthy. We want to be healthy people. Now, some of you, the best way that you have to be emotionally healthy is just to convince yourself that you don't have any of those and then go through life, okay? So that's how some of you have achieved emotional health. If it's working for you, I don't want to mess you up, but we all seek it. We even have little phrases that kind of tip us off and remind us that not everyone's healthy and that's why life happens this way sometimes. Sometimes somebody will say something to hurt your feelings and you'll go to someone who loves you and you'll say, man, so-and-so said this and gosh, it really bothered me. And they'll remind you that, you know what? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. You ever heard that? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. And that's true. Sometimes people who are unhealthy get their unhealth on you by saying regrettable things. Sometimes we see behaviors in others that are gross to us. Just last night, I wasn't gonna use this, but I am now. This will be fun. Jen and I got to go out on a date. It was nice. We went to Second Empire. It was a good restaurant. There's a six-top next to us, and there was a guy there who his voice was loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear all night. He was an insufferable cuss words. And he went on and on about how, I'm not kidding you. He was like in his fifties. We learned how much he could bench. We learned what kind of car he drive. We learned what he did for a living. We learned the people that he knew. We learned the resumes of everybody at the table. It was, he almost ruined our dinner. If my date had to been so pretty, it would have been a waste of a night. Let's pray. But here's the truth. That guy, he's pretty insufferable. He was a me monster. He needed people to like him. He's just not healthy. He hasn't found his true value and his true worth. So he wants you to know those things about him so that you go, you're something. And if you're smart, if you're empathetic, when you're around people like that, and I didn't do it last night because I was neither smart nor empathetic, but right here I can figure it out. You offer those people grace and you go, they're not healthy. They haven't yet found their worth, their sense of being and belonging. And what this verse is telling you is, once the Spirit has moved in your life and strengthened you, once Christ has taken up residence in your heart, man, you are loved by your creator who sent his son to die for you. And you have all the sense of worth and value that you'll ever need if you'll trust it. He gives you your identity. He imbues you with purpose. He tells you every day that he loves you and that you're enough. And if we believe that, if we hear it, and if we walk in it, then we can be rooted and grounded in love. We can be spiritually and emotionally healthy people, and then out of that help, love others. That's the picture of what it is to be a believer, is to be somebody who's healthy enough to know, I'm loved. I don't need affection from other people. I'm affirmed, I don't need other people to tell me I'm special because God does. And then in that freedom and in that confidence, move and love other people. That's a picture of what health is. And I think so often our lives are not rooted and grounded in love. They're rooted and grounded in a myopia or in a narcissism. They're rooted and grounded in anxiety or in things that we can't control. They're rooted and grounded and characterized by a depression or by places where we're not trusting. They're rooted and grounded in ambition and greed and self-consumption. And Paul's prayer is that we would be people who are healthy, who know Christ, who are rooted and grounded in love. Once we are rooted and grounded the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Then he prays, I want you to go deeper into this love of Jesus. I don't want him to just take up residence in your heart. I don't want you to just express his love to other people. I want you to go deeper and deeper into this love that Jesus has for you. I kind of think about it like the ocean. If you go to the ocean and you walk up to it to your knees just before your shorts get wet, you can technically say that you've experienced the ocean. But have you experienced the depths of the ocean? You can walk out there until the waves are breaking over your head and you can feel it kind of swirling you around a little bit. You can feel the power of the ocean. Have you experienced the depths of the world's oceans? When I go to the ocean, what I like to do, and I know this is a terrible choice, and one day I'm just not going to come back, and that's how it goes. I swim out until I get scared. Every time I go to the ocean, I do it. I like to do it. I don't know what's wrong with me. I swim until I get scared. And then I turn around and swim back. Now, I never get scared because, oh my gosh, I'm so far out. I'm not going to have the energy to get back. I become acutely aware that I'm at shark depth and that they've seen me. And I cannot, as much as I try to get that thought out of my head and they're not interested in me, there's other things to eat. they don't want me. As much as I try to reason with myself, I just, there's sharks here, man, and I swim back. But even swimming out as far as I can until I get scared, have I experienced the depths of the ocean? If you've been on a cruise ship and you've had the opportunity to look in every direction and see nothing but the ocean. If you are a marine biologist, a maritime explorer, and you get in a submarine and you go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean, have you experienced all that there is to experience in the ocean? No. You can devote your life to exploring it and you will only ever scratch the surface of what it has to offer. This is the love of Christ. Just because we've been up to our waist, just because it swept over us and we felt the power of it a couple times, just because we were able to venture out far enough so that we got scared does not mean that we have experienced all that the love of Christ has to offer. And Paul's prayer is that your life would be this experience of an ever-deepening understanding of the love that God has for you, understanding that until we get to eternity, we will only ever scratch the surface. You could devote your life to understanding the love that Jesus has for you, and we still won't comprehend it. And then finally, he says, for all of this, that you would be filled with all the fullness of God. Thanksgiving's coming up around the corner. And when it does, we go to Dothan, Alabama, and we have the best meal of the year. It's phenomenal. And about 10 to 15 minutes before that meal, every year, what do I start doing? I start going through the kitchen. There's the turkey, and I pick up a little piece of that turkey and have some turkey. There's a deviled egg. I'm going to sneak like six of those, and I'll have a couple of dev you know? I start to kind of pick at the food. But I'm not full yet. Because what's going to happen is we're going to pray, and everybody's going to get a plate, and they're going to go. And I'm always going to go and wait and let everybody else go first because I don't want to have to worry about portion control when I get there. And when I get up to that food, I'm even thinking this year, I'm going to go to Walmart and buy some of those khakis with like the elastic waistband here. So I got some Thanksgiving pants, you know. I'm going to make some irresponsible choices at Thanksgiving. I'm going to have a big old food baby. And I'm not going to stop until I get the meat sweats, right? That's what America does, man. Yeah. That is full. That's full. When we taste on Sunday morning and we get another taste at small group, we get another taste when we get up in the morning, we get another little taste when we listen to something in the car. Let us not be satisfied with that. Let us be filled with all the fullness of God. That we would know him. And that's the heart of the prayer. All of this, if you had to sum it up, what does Paul pray for us? If you had to sum it up in one sentence, what does Paul want for us more than anything? That you would know God. That you would know Jesus. That you would be filled with the fullness of him. That you would have an inkling of the height and the breadth and the depth of his love for you. That you would be strengthened with power in your inner being. That you would be healthy from that health that you would love. That you would be overwhelmed by God and be full of him every day. That's the number one thing that he prays for you. I think that's remarkable. I think it's remarkable, particularly when you think about the things that he didn't pray. If you look at these churches, these churches in the ancient world, life expectancy was like, what, 40, 45? I can't back that up with paperwork, but I feel pretty confident with that guess. Sickness was very much a part of these churches. Loss was a part of the lives of all the people in these churches. Yet Paul does not pray for health. He does not pray in this prayer. He does in other places, but in this prayer, if he can only pray one thing, he doesn't pray for healing or spiritual health or physical health rather. He doesn't pray, even though he planted this church, he wants it to grow. He wants to see them add numbers day by day. He wants to see this church flourish and be bigger in five years than it is this year. He wants that for this church. He doesn't pray it. He doesn't pray, may your ministry be successful. May God give you favor in your community. He doesn't pray for prosperity or wealth or success or health. He prays that they would know God. Now, does Paul want all of those things? Sure, absolutely he does. And at other places in the Bible, he prays for some of those things. But what's the first thing that he wants? That they would know God. It makes sense to me that he doesn't pray for church growth. Because if your church is filled with people who have mined the depths of the love of Christ, who are filled with all the fullness of God. You don't think that church brings in other people? You don't think that church is a powerful force in the community in which it sits? You don't think that person who is filled in that way isn't an influencer at their place of work? He doesn't have to pray those other things. He prays for the fundamental thing. He doesn't pray for health. I think he doesn't pray for health because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very situation that is going to bring about the answer to this prayer, which is to make you closer to God. He doesn't pray for prosperity because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very struggle that's going to bring you closer to God. And earlier I said that Paul's prayer reveals what he most values. Our prayers reveal our priorities. And if our prayers reveal what we most value, what do your prayers reveal about you? And the times that you pray, for some of us, it's every day. For some of us, it's for our meals. For others, it's when we're at Bible study and someone asks us to pray. We go, well, here we go. For others, it's rarely. It's in dire situations. But when you pray, what do you pray? When you go to God and you ask for something, what's the first thing you ask for? What have you prioritized above everything else? Is it situational? Or does it transcend that? I think the first thing that we should pray in every situation based on this prayer is, Father, let what's happening now conspire in some way to bring people closer to you. When we get the diagnosis, I think first we pray, God, we don't understand this. We hate this. This breaks our heart. Let it conspire to bring people closer to you. And then we go, and if it's still your will, God, could you please get rid of this because this stinks. When we find ourselves between jobs or between purposes, our first prayer should be, God, in this time, when I try to figure out what's next, I pray that the events of this time would conspire to bring me and those around me closer to you. And then the next thing. When something happens in the life of our child, God, I pray that whatever's going on right now, even though I don't understand it, will it please conspire to bring them to a place where they know you better? Will that please be the result of this? And then, Father, do these things. The question I want to ask you is, how should Paul's prayer shape our prayers? How should what he prays for shape what we pray for? How should what he hopes for shape what we hope for? What are your wildest dreams for your kids? Do they start with that they would simply know God? I pray for Lily. I pray that she'd marry a nice man that loves the Lord, that takes care of her, that loves her better than I ever could. I pray that she knows God better than I ever do. But the first thing I pray for her above anything else, any of her character traits, where she goes and what she does, the first thing I pray for her every night is she would know God. When we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, what do we pray for them? When we respond to tragedy, what do we pray in the face of that tragedy? When we respond to triumph, this is where we need to be the most careful. Everything's going great. What do we pray in the face of that triumph? Because we all have hopes and dreams and things that we want in life. But God has those for us too. And I don't know about you, but I want my hopes and dreams to align with his. I want our hopes and dreams as a church to align with what God wants for us. I want us to be people who more than anything else want us and those we love to know God. Let's pray. Father, we love you. You pursue us with a reckless love. You fill us with that love. You offer it to us freely. And God, you call us to it. I pray that we would hear that call, that we would feel it, that we would give into it. Lord, I pray over grace that we would be people who are strengthened in our inner being through your spirit, that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith, that we would be healthy people who are rooted and grounded, God. And because of that, because of that health, because we know your love so much, that we would mind the depths of the love of Christ that he has for us, that we would know with all the saints exactly what that is, and that we would be filled with all of your fullness, Father. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. Good to see everybody. That music makes me feel like I'm waiting for a table at some sort of nice lounge or something. So you get three more weeks of that. That'll be great. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy New Year to everyone, and thank you for making Grace a part of that new year for you. I would just say this. If your church attendance this morning is reflective of a New Year's resolution, that's great. My gym attendance in the morning is going to be reflective of something similar to that. So, Brad, I'll see you at the YMCA bright and early. But if it is reflective of a New Year's resolution and this is something that you want to do more often, I'm just so grateful that you've entrusted that to grace. I hope that we serve you well. And I say this in all sincerity. If you're here because of a New Year's resolution and we don't serve you well and you drive home thinking that wasn't worth it, it's not because church isn't worth it. It's because we didn't do a good job. So give another church a chance to do a good job, but don't quit on church because this sermon stinks, okay? Keep at it. It's super important. Church is absolutely vital to us as people. We were created for church community. As Aaron mentioned earlier in the service, Aaron, our worship pastor, we like to start the year with prayers for grace. We'd like to start these January series now with kind of some hopes and some prayers that we have for grace in the coming years. Last year, we spent all four weeks of January in one of my favorite prayers in the Bible. I have it stenciled out and hung up in my office at home. This is the prayer I pray over new married couples, over new babies. This is the prayer I pray, at least quietly, when I get calls about diagnoses that are tough. This is the prayer I pray when I hear that someone is struggling and might be in their last days or weeks of life. This is the prayer I pray when I go visit people at the hospital. It's in Ephesians chapter 3 verses 14 through 19. We're going to be focused this morning on Colossians chapter 1, which is basically a long form of the Ephesians prayer. Ephesians is a more succinct version, but it's basically praying the same thing. So as we start 2025, I want to remind us of this prayer for grace that we find in Ephesians. And last year we gave out magnets with this prayer on it. So I hope that some of you still have that magnet, have it in a place where you see it. I'm seeing some nodding heads. That's very good. But I just wanted to start this year out by reminding you of this prayer. And then what we're going to do is look at another version of what I believe is virtually the same prayer in Colossians and talk about the different implications of that prayer. But this is what Paul prays for the church in Eph that in the Colossians prayer. But I did want to place that in front of us and be reminded of it as we go into this prayer in Colossians. Now, as I was reflecting on this prayer, and if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to go ahead and turn to Colossians. We're going to go through, this is going to be in my head, kind of an old school sermon, the kind of sermon that I grew up with. Now, a new modern sermon, what I try to do, what I would typically try to do, and what I started out trying to do this week is to read verses three through 14 in Colossians chapter one, where this prayer is, and try to distill it down to this one point. What's the fulcrum? What's the focus? What's the anchor of this prayer? If there can only be one takeaway for us, what should that takeaway be? And then I would spend the entire sermon trying to preach to that takeaway. But as I look through these verses, there's just too much good stuff to sweep it aside for the sake of making one point. So instead of that, we're going to go verse by verse through these 11 or 12 verses. And I'm just going to stop and go, this is what he prays here. This is what it means. This is why we need to talk about it and think about it. So this is going to be an old school five point sermon where we talk about the verse and then we talk about what it means and how it applies to us. I feel like my pastor growing up who I this is just a blow up of the bulletin is what you have on the back of your notes. This is all I ever have. But there's a lot here. And as I look at it, I think in about 25 minutes, I'm going to be halfway through with this and go, OK, we got to go fast. And then I'm just going to start summarizing things, which is what my pastor used to do. So anyways, let's get started. As I was reflecting on this prayer in Colossians, something occurred to me. And I had not really thought about this before as it relates to the prayers in the New Testament. First of all, it's important that we understand what the book of Colossians is. Colossians is what's called in theological circles a Pauline epistle. It's a letter that Paul wrote. So Paul wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. He wrote those. And if you think what I was just doing was showing off, I have a master's degree in this. If I can't do that, I am the stupidest person that's ever gotten a master's degree. But those are the books that he wrote. And all of those books are letters to either a church, like the church in Rome or Corinth or Colossae, or to individuals like Timothy or Philemon. So in these letters, he's writing to instruct the churches that have been founded by him or his ministry. We get a clue in this first chapter, and we'll see that he sent out one of the pastors from amongst his team, a guy named Epaphras. And Epaphras originally shared the gospel, the good news, with the people in Colossae, and they formed a church around this good news. And now they're going and blowing. Now they're growing, and now they have a church. And so Paul spends his life going around Asia Minor planting churches and then writing letters back to the churches that he planted. And so what occurs to me is he's writing this letter to the church in Colossians, which is unique because it's actually to Colossians and Laodicea. Because he says, when you get done reading this, take it to Laodicea and read it there too. This is also for them. It's just called Colossians because they were the first addressee of the letter. But what occurs to me is he might not ever get to share with them again what he prays for them. He indicates in scripture that he prays for them frequently. But by this point in his life, he may never go to Colossae. He may never see these people in person. He may never write them another letter. He might not have that opportunity. It was expensive and time-consuming and laborious to get them a letter. He might not ever be able to share with them again what his prayer for them is. So he's got one shot at articulating a prayer for this church that they can cling to for the years and the decades to come. And I think it's really interesting in that situation to think about what does this founder of the churches, this incredibly influential apostle and missionary, what does he pray for the churches? And I think that's an interesting question because I think it's an interesting question if I could sit down with the parents in the room and ask you, when you pray for your child, when you pray for your children, what do you pray? We've got a mama holding a newborn baby back there. That baby's been prayed over. When you pray for that baby, what do you pray? If you're a grandparent and you pray for your children and your grandchildren, what do you pray for them, what would you write out? When you pray for your friends, what do you pray for them? Small group leaders, if you pray for the people in your small group, and I hope you do, what do you pray for them? When I pray for the church, when the elders pray for the church, what do we pray for you? I think those are interesting questions because you can really get a sense of someone's priorities, someone's heart, someone's clarity of vision, someone's faith by what they pray for the people that they love the most. And so I think we can get a really good glimpse at the heart of Paul and in turn the very heart of God when we ask, what does he pray for the church in Colossae? And what's interesting to me, and I pointed this out last year when we talked about the prayer in Ephesus, it's just as interesting to me what he prays for as what he doesn't pray for. Because you can read this prayer as many times as you want. What you will not find in this prayer is Paul praying for circumstances, or health, or prosperity, or success, or even growth of the church. He doesn't pray for any of those things, some of the things we think we probably find in that list. You will not find them there. So like I said, as I move through this prayer and began the task of trying to distill it down to one point, I just thought it was a disservice to the whole thing to blow by some things and not favor them in favor of making one universal point. So we're going to go verse by verse, and I'm going to occasionally highlight a phrase, and you'll see it when it's on the screen to get your attention. And that's what we're going to key in on and talk about that. So let's look at this prayer in Colossians. Let's think about taking at least aspects of it and making it our prayer for 2025 for you and for the church. And let's see what we can learn from it. We go back to that previous verse, Miss Andrea, is we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we pray for you because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God's people. I think that is an incredible compliment. What if Jesus were to come down and say, could I give the sermon this week? That'd be fine, Jesus. Go ahead. And he started it off and he said, Grace, I'm grateful for you because I know and I've heard of the faith you have in me and the love that you have for one another. What could be a better compliment to a church than that? Than to be known for your faith and love? As an individual, what could be better than that reputation to precede you, that you are known for your faith in Christ and your love for one another. What could be better? How could it possibly be better to be known in any other way? I thank my God because of you, because of your success, because of how effective you are at making money and closing deals. I thank my God because of you, because of your wisdom, because of your leadership, because you seem to be disciplined in staying in shape, because your kids seem all right and they like you. Like what other things could be as good as being known for your faith and for your love? What an incredible compliment to pay a church. It's a compliment that I hope and pray grace can receive or be thought of in that way. And I can't help but wonder then, what must you do to be known for your faith and love? What do you think it takes to become the kind of person whose reputation precedes you in such a way that when someone meets you, they go, oh, I've heard about your faith and your love. I remember my senior year, I played soccer for my high school, which I'm totally bragging about. There was 100 people in my high school. Anybody could have played soccer. Yeah, anybody could have played soccer. But we got a new teacher my senior year, a new computer teacher named Mr. Keithley, and I went in and introduced myself. I told him I'm Nathan Rector because in high school I was Nathan. I wasn't Nate, incidentally, until I waited tables at Macaroni Grill and you had to write your name upside down on the table and I shortened that real quick. That's when I became Nate. And I met Mr. Keithley and I shook his hand and said, hey, I'm Nathan Rector and he goes, oh, I've heard about you. You're the soccer player. And I was like, you're right. I am. I'm one of the best of the 45 males we have available who are willing to play soccer. So, yeah. It's an interesting thing when your reputation precedes you. What must you do to be the kind of person who's known for your faith and for your love, and what better could you be known for? There are lots of answers to this question, but very simply, at the beginning of 2025, the way that I would answer it is, if you want to be known for being a person of faith in Christ and love for one another, then you must become a person of devotion. At Grace, we have five traits. We have five things that we want every partner at Grace to be, and one of those things is to be a person of devotion. And one of the things we say all the time, I say it as often as I can, and I haven't said it often enough lately, so I'm going to start beating the drum again, is the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. The single most important habit. There is no other habit more important than that in your entire life. And there are a lot of things I think you need to do and ways that you need to behave to be known as a person of faith and love. But foundationally, fundamentally, it starts with becoming a person of devotion. So here at the top of 2025, as we launch into the new year, the very first thing I want to challenge you to do in your new year is be a person who wakes up every day and spends time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. If you don't know how to do that, I wrote in this last year a devotional guide that's on the information table right outside these doors. Grab it, read through it. It's meant to help you and jumpstart you in that. But if you are a person for whom that habit has waned, if you are a person who's never successfully begun the habit, if you're a person who's never attempted the habit, if we want to be a church that is known for our faith and for our love, That begins with becoming people of devotion. Let this year be the year that you read your Bible and you spend time in prayer. And if that's what you're going to do, if you just went, you know what, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to wake up tomorrow. I'm going to do that. Great. Give yourself grace for it. You're going to mess up and the heavens are not going to part and angels sing down on you the first time you read your Bible. Stick with it. Give yourself grace. And being a person of devotion will absolutely change your life and change who you are. That's how we become known for that. Then after he tells them what they're known for, he moves on in his prayer and he just makes this interesting note. I'm not going to linger here long, but I do think it's worth pointing out and who also told us of your love in the Spirit. So if we go back to the beginning, Paul says something really interesting there. He says, in the same way that it's borne fruit with you, the gospel is bearing fruit throughout the whole world. We see already that Paul has a heart for the world, That Paul is encouraging them to think outside of Colossae and Laodicea. And think about all the other places where the gospel is flourishing. Don't see yourself as this isolated church battling on your own in this province of the Roman Empire. But understand that as far as the Roman roads spread, so does the gospel. It is spreading throughout the entire world. And I just wanted to pause here to make this statement because I think it's so important. And it's, listen, this is something that we don't talk about enough. And when I say we, I don't mean Christians, I mean me. I mean, I don't bring this up enough in our church and I need to do a better job of it. But this is true, and this is why I wanted to stop here. Mature believers allow God to foster within them a heart for the world. Mature believers, people who are growing in Christ, allow God to foster within them a heart for the world, a heart for our international brothers and sisters. I think our temptation with our faith, like anything else in our life, is to become very myopic in that faith. To just think about that faith in terms of me or my immediate family or my children. Maybe if we're generous and magnanimous enough, we care about the faith of the people around us, and we hope to see our friends grow deeper with Christ, and we hope to see them flourish spiritually. Maybe, maybe if we've been around church long enough and God's really fostered a heart, we have a genuine heart for our small group, a genuine heart for our church, and we want to see the people at Grace come to know God in a more deep way, and we want to see spiritual lives flourish here. But what I've found is rare is the believer who has a genuine heart for their international brothers and sisters. Rare is the believer that thinks about church on a global scale, understanding that there were people worshiping in Korea 16 hours before us on this very same Sunday, singing to the same God. And I think that mature believers begin to get a grasp of the global church and seeing God in action everywhere. And I'll tell you when this clicked for me. I'm blessed to have parents that have been going on mission trips since before they were cool. They went to Jamaica in like 1991 when no one was taking mission trips. I went to Costa Rica when I was going into the eighth grade and started taking mission trips often there. But it wasn't until around 2010 that I was in Cape Town, South Africa, visiting a ministry called Living Hope, which is a phenomenal ministry. My family was involved in it. I wanted to see it, so I went down with a team. And in Cape Town, South Africa, they have these things called townships. And townships are a remnant of apartheid. If you don't know what apartheid is, I do not have time to explain it to you this morning. Google it or ask someone old. The townships are remnants of apartheid. And typically speaking, it's low socioeconomic families that continue to live there. And they run the gamut from hovels and tin roofs and pallet walls to homes that would seem relatively normal to us. But it tends to be low socioeconomic status. And there's one called Masi Pumaleli. And one Sunday we got to go to church there. We go to church in Masi. It's a small white building. We go inside and there was no single worship leader. I still don't understand the organization of it. I have no idea who was in charge. All I know is that there was about 10 South African women dressed the same who were just moving around the room singing. And the words were on the screen, and you sang too, and it was awesome. And they had these things, I'll never forget. There was these like burgundy leather pillows that strapped to their hands, and when they would hit them, it would make this loud percussion noise. I have no idea what it was. But they're doing that and tambourines and one person on the piano, because you you got to have a pianist if it's going to be real worship, and they're going after it. And they're singing some song in their native language that I recognized. I knew the tune to it, and I'm singing along in English. And I was so moved by it that I left the church. I walked outside, and I looked up in the sky, and I listened to the song of praise pouring out of that church being lifted up to my God. And I was reminded of Jesus' instructions to the disciples to go and to spread the word in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and even to the ends of the earth. And I thought, here I am at the literal end of the earth, at the tip of the continent of Africa, 2,000 years later, and there is a church full of Masi people singing praises to my God, a song that I know, and I can sing along with them. Well done, disciples. You carried the gospel to the ends of the earth. And it made an indelible impression on me that we exist in a global church. And it is right and good to care about our international brothers and sisters. In March, a friend of mine is going to travel to Istanbul. And when he gets to Istanbul, he's going to meet with 15 or 20 Iranian Christian pastors who have to go to Istanbul because they can't train in Iran because their churches are illegal and they're putting themselves and their families at risk for even going and participating. And they're going to receive training so that they can go back into their communities and they can reach people for Christ. We should care deeply for what happens over those few days. We should care about those pastors and what they're doing. And that's not unique. There's underground churches all throughout China. The church is flourishing like crazy in places like Korea and in Africa and in South America. We should care about those things. So this year, maybe for you, is the year that you allow God to begin to expose your heart to things that happen internationally. Maybe this is the year you go to Mexico with our team that goes in October. Maybe you go see what's happening in Ethiopia and visit AJ. Maybe you go to Cape Town and visit Mbuntu and see what the princes are doing there. Maybe you find another way to be exposed to what's happening internationally, but I think it's vitally important for mature believers to allow God to foster within them a heart for the global church and our international brothers and sisters. And so as I was reading through this prayer and I saw Paul's commentary there, I couldn't pass it up and not mention it to you. Now we get into the heart of the prayer. This next verse is the anchor of the prayer, and it's why I say that this is a long-form version of the prayer in Ephesians, because it's praying virtually the same thing. Just verse 9. For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives. That phrase, we continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will, is still very similar to the Ephesians prayer. When Paul prays there, we pray that you would be filled to the fullness with the knowledge of God, that you would know the love of Christ that surpasses understanding. He prays more than anything else that you would know God. To Paul, his top priority for his churches, his top priority for you, his top priority for anybody in his life that they knew is that they would know God. That's number one. There's not a close second that they would know God. But as you go year to year, you would grow in your depth of knowledge. When you think about the person in your life who seems to be the closest to God, who exudes his love, who just oozes wisdom and compassion and grace, Paul's prayer for that person is that they would know God more. If you think of yourself as someone who's very far from God and doesn't know him very well at all, you're not even really super comfortable with this Christian thing. Paul's prayer for you is that you would know God more. If you've been languishing in your Christianity for a decade and feel not much closer to him now than you did 10 years ago, his prayer for you is that you would know God more. And when earlier I asked, parents, what do you pray for your kids? Grandparents, what do you pray for your children and their children? What do you pray for your friends? What do we pray for churches? What do we pray for people in our small group? I hope that whatever else you pray follows. Father, I simply pray that they would know you more. The way that we say it here is this. We pray this. Would the events of this life conspire to bring you closer to God? I believe this so fervently that when I get the news that someone has cancer, which has touched my life in multiple ways, I've lost multiple loved ones to cancer. So it's not callously that I pray this. But when I hear that someone is sick, the very first thing I pray before I pray for their physical health is that the events of this battle would conspire to bring them and those around them closer to you, Father. I pray that this would drive them into a deeper depth of knowledge of you. And then I pray for healing. When I hear a marriage is struggling, before I pray that that marriage is healed, I pray that the path to that healing would bring them to a deeper knowledge of you. When I pray over a new baby, I don't pray for circumstances, and I don't pray for prosperity, and I don't pray for success, and I don't pray for health. I pray that the events of this child's life and the things that surround it would conspire to bring this child closer to you. There can be no more important thing that we pray. That's why this is the anchor of this prayer. This is the stud and the wall on which the whole prayer is hung. Before it is, hey, I know about your faith and your love and the gospel's flourishing in the whole world, but here's what I really pray for you, that you would know God. And then we get two results because of two things after this that we're going to talk about. Because I'm praying for you to know God, I want you to know this and this. But this is the anchor of the prayer. If I were going to distill it down to one thing, to one verse, to treat it how I would normally treat it, we would be entirely focused on verse 9 this morning because there can be no greater priority that we can have for ourselves or for anyone else than that they would know God more deeply. That's the prayer. I hope that you'll pray that for yourselves, for your families, and for our church. That's the biggest priority. Now, why is that the biggest priority? Why is that the anchor prayer? Because of what we see in verse 10. Verse 10 says, why do we do this? So that, I love this, you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God. I don't think we put that thought in front of us often enough. Why does Paul pray that we would know Christ in increasing measure? So that we can live a life worthy of the Lord. So that we can live a life worthy of him who loves us and sacrifices us and created us and pursues us. I don't know how often you put that thought in front of yourself. Am I living a life worthy of my calling? But the reason we pray that our children would know God deeper. I always pray for my kids that they would know you soon and love you well. That they would love you better than I did. That they would obey you better than I have. Why do I pray that for my kids, John and Lily? Because they have things to do. Because I want them to live a life pleasing to God. I want them to live a life worthy, more worthy than what I have lived. This is why we pray this over the people who would follow us and over the people around us. Simply put, Paul wants you to grow in your knowledge of God because you have stuff to do. He wants you to grow in your knowledge of God because you've got things you need to get done. Because you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. You've got some good works to do. You guys, the apex goal for everybody at Grace, if you're a part of Grace for a year or two decades or more, the thing I want for you more than I want anything else in the whole world is that you would become a kingdom builder. That you would understand that you spend your entire life building a kingdom. And that it is a waste of your time to build your kingdom or anyone else's. The only kingdom worth building is God's eternal kingdom. And when we build God's kingdom, we grow it in breadth and depth. We add to the numbers of it and we grow the spiritual depth of it. And that's the whole reason that you exist is to be a kingdom builder, to leverage every gift and every talent and every treasure and every resource you've ever been blessed by and leverage that for God's kingdom rather than your own. And I believe that to be a Christian is to have a progressive revelation of what exactly that means. Because I thought I knew what it meant seven years ago when I took the job. And now these seven years later, I have a wildly different impression of what that actually means. And it's far more challenging than I ever thought it could be. So to be a Christian is to have this progressive revelation that my life is not my own. It does not belong to me. My resources and my time and my talents and my treasures are not my own. They do not belong to me. I am a kingdom builder. I have stuff to do. So why do we pray that you would know God more, that you would know Christ more deeply? Not only because it's what's best for you and will bring you the most peace and bring heaven down to earth here as we begin to experience the presence of God, but also because he's got a plan for you. And unless you know him well and are known for your love and for your faith, you're not going to be able to execute that plan of what he wants you to do. You're not going to be able to build his kingdom like he wants you to use you to build it. So we pray that people would know God better because we've got stuff to do. We are kingdom builders. God has a plan for you and a way he intends to use you. But the more years we fritter away not pursuing him fully, not being known for our faith and our love, the less we get to execute the plan. And we watch someone else do what God might have used us to do. We are kingdom builders. We can't do that unless we're growing towards God in a deeper, in a greater depth of knowledge. The other thing there that I didn't want to pass up. If we can put that verse back on the screen, verse 10, please. This is here so so that you would live a life worthy of the Lord, and then look here, please him in every way. That arrested me as I read it this week. I don't know how many of you have a life in such a way that it pleases God, joy to him. I think if most of us are being honest, the highest mark we ever hope for as it relates to how God sees us and has an impression of us, I try to live my life in such a way that I quell his disappointment or mitigate his anger. Right? Just don't be mad at me today. Just tell me I was good enough today. Just this week. I mean, honestly, this week, I pray every time before I'm about to preach, I pray just to get my mindset right and remind me of what's important. A vast majority of those prayers are thinking through the week and thinking of if I feel worthy or not to come do this, which is stupid because the answer is no, I'm never worthy of it. But it's like, have I ticked you off this week? Have I disappointed you this week? Have I lived a life worthy of you this week, or have I let you down again? My greatest hope when it comes to God is that I simply don't disappoint him that day. But I was reminded in this verse and in this prayer that it's actually possible for us to live a life that pleases him. For us to live a life that brings him joy. To live our life in such a way that he's proud. That he smiles in heaven because of us. And let me just tell you, as a parent, like all the parents here, I'm sure, I have days when I feel like I've been a good father, and I have days where I don't feel that way. And on the days when I'm not a good father, when I'm selfish or curmudgeonly or grumpy, the greatest thing my daughter Lily, who's almost nine years old, which is weird to say, the greatest thing my daughter Lily can hope for is that she doesn't tick me off that day. That she wasn't annoying that day. That she avoided my wrath and my frustration that day. She can live her life in such a way that she doesn't incite me to frustration. When you have a bad father, that's your greatest goal for that day in that relationship. But on days when I'm a good father, when I'm patient and kind and gracious and present, when I think about the negative, when I think about how often I'm getting on to her versus how often I'm praising her. When I think about what is she hearing from me? Is she hearing any encouragement? Is she hearing any support? Is she hearing any love or is she only hearing frustration? When I think about those things in those days, what I see in Lily, not in myself, what I see in my daughter is a smile, a smile, is this exuberance, this, this ability to know that she's making me proud. And when I stop and tell her, Hey, I saw the way you handled this with your brother. I'm very proud of you for that. When I sent her upstairs to clean a room and she actually does it miracle of miracles. And I sit her down and instead of just not getting mad at her, I go, I trusted you to clean your room. You did it. This is awesome. Thanks so much. That's the exact kind of little girl I want you to be. And young lady, I want you to become. You're growing in your trustworthiness. That's wonderful. When I stop and I do that like a good father and I encourage her and she has this vision for her days that she can live in such a way that it pleases her mom and I and makes us proud. There is a different aura around her. I see it bring joy out of her. You guys have a good father. The greatest goal for a bad father is to simply avoid their anger. And often we treat God like he's not a good father. But he is. And the greatest thing we could hope for day in and day out is to live our life in such a way that it pleases him. And let that give us an exuberance and a spring in our step and a greater vision for who he is. It'll allow us to hear his encouragement from the people He uses to speak things into our life. Maybe for 2025, you simply need a greater vision of who God is and what He expects from you and how proud He is of you and how much He loves you. Because if you think God just goes through His days being disappointed in you, you're wrong. I was listening to a song this morning. And it basically said that he's never loved you more, more wildly and more passionately than he did on your worst day. We can live lives that please our Heavenly Father because he's a good father. And I think we need to have a vision for that. We wrap up the prayer with the last three verses. This is very simple. So he says, I pray that you would know God more deeply, that you would know his will. Why? Because you have things to do. You need to live a life worthy of Him. You can actually please Him if you get to work on building His kingdom and follow Him faithfully. And in doing those things, we see these words highlighted that you may have great endurance and patience and that you'll be reminded that you've been qualified to share in the inheritance of His holy people in the kingdom of light. Simply put, a faithful life gives you patience for the promise. A faithful life gives you patience for the promise. Paul talks about perseverance a lot in scripture. Jesus talks about perseverance. The other authors talk about perseverance. The reality of the Christian life is that faith is hard sometimes. I think that one of the greatest blessings of heaven that we don't talk about very often is that once you get to heaven, you no longer need your faith. Not required anymore. You can set that down. Because Romans 8 tells us who hopes for what he can see. I don't know if you've ever thought about that at all, but when you get to heaven, you don't need faith anymore. Faith is choosing to believe. Sometimes in spite of sickness. Sometimes in spite of disappointments. Sometimes in spite of doubts and questions. Sometimes in spite of a lack of clarity. Or a life and a culture and voices that will clamor it out and make it difficult to hear God. The reality of the Christian life, and those of you who have lived it for a while know this to be true, it's not always easy to cling to your faith. It's not always easy to walk as stridently with Jesus as it has been or as it will be. And it's possible that we let go of that faith because we don't persevere in it, because we let the things of the world drown it out. But what Paul says is, if you're known for your faith and your love, you care about the global church, if you grow in your knowledge of God and his will, and then as a result of that knowledge of God, you're a kingdom builder who lives a life worthy of the calling that you've received, and you live in such a way that it pleases God, then in doing all of those things, you will have patience for the promise of the kingdom for which you await. So I'll be direct with you. I don't expect that all five of the points that I just made and the things that I highlighted are deeply resonating with every person in the room and you're going to do all five things. But what I really genuinely hope is that one of them got you. And that maybe 2025 is the year that you commit to becoming a person known for your faith and your love. And so to take that step, you become a person of devotion for the first time ever or for the first time in a long time. Maybe that's what you need to grab onto. Maybe you realize and are convicted, I don't have a heart for the global church, and this is the year I'm going to open myself up and allow God to begin to point me in that direction and develop a heart within me for my international brothers and sisters. Maybe this is the year that you see and prioritize, man, there's nothing more important than knowing God deeply, and that's what I'm going to pray for me and for the people around me. Maybe this is a year that you realize, gosh, I need to get to work. I have things to do. I'm a kingdom builder and I want to go live a life worthy of my Lord. I want to live in such a way this year that I actually bring joy to my Father who is in heaven. Or maybe this is the year that you just need to be encouraged to follow God and pursue Him and He will give you the patience and the perseverance to cling to the promises that he's made you. I don't know which one of these resonates with you the most, but I hope one does and I hope that you'll cling to it as we go out these doors today. I'm going to pray for us. We're going to sing and then Mikey's going to dismiss us. Father, thank you for a new year. Thank you for what it represents, for the fresh start for those of us that need it, for new opportunities for those of us that want them. God, give us a vision for living a life that pleases you, to thinking beyond you simply being disappointed in us. Remind us that we have a good father. God, I pray for everybody in this room that they would know you more deeply this year than they did last year. That they would grow in their depth of knowledge of you and your will and in that growth, God, that you would begin to put their hand to the plow and they would begin to do your work. And they would experience the joy and satisfaction that can only come from being used by you. God, we pray over grace in 2025 that you would bring to us people that need to be a part of this family, that we would be good stewards of the people who come here. God, that this would be a year marked by spiritual flourishing, by a strength of community that even folks who have been coming here for decades would mark this year as a time of flourishing for them. We pray for the weeks and the months to come. We pray that we would honor you. We pray that you would draw us close. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. Good to see everybody. That music makes me feel like I'm waiting for a table at some sort of nice lounge or something. So you get three more weeks of that. That'll be great. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy New Year to everyone, and thank you for making Grace a part of that new year for you. I would just say this. If your church attendance this morning is reflective of a New Year's resolution, that's great. My gym attendance in the morning is going to be reflective of something similar to that. So, Brad, I'll see you at the YMCA bright and early. But if it is reflective of a New Year's resolution and this is something that you want to do more often, I'm just so grateful that you've entrusted that to grace. I hope that we serve you well. And I say this in all sincerity. If you're here because of a New Year's resolution and we don't serve you well and you drive home thinking that wasn't worth it, it's not because church isn't worth it. It's because we didn't do a good job. So give another church a chance to do a good job, but don't quit on church because this sermon stinks, okay? Keep at it. It's super important. Church is absolutely vital to us as people. We were created for church community. As Aaron mentioned earlier in the service, Aaron, our worship pastor, we like to start the year with prayers for grace. We'd like to start these January series now with kind of some hopes and some prayers that we have for grace in the coming years. Last year, we spent all four weeks of January in one of my favorite prayers in the Bible. I have it stenciled out and hung up in my office at home. This is the prayer I pray over new married couples, over new babies. This is the prayer I pray, at least quietly, when I get calls about diagnoses that are tough. This is the prayer I pray when I hear that someone is struggling and might be in their last days or weeks of life. This is the prayer I pray when I go visit people at the hospital. It's in Ephesians chapter 3 verses 14 through 19. We're going to be focused this morning on Colossians chapter 1, which is basically a long form of the Ephesians prayer. Ephesians is a more succinct version, but it's basically praying the same thing. So as we start 2025, I want to remind us of this prayer for grace that we find in Ephesians. And last year we gave out magnets with this prayer on it. So I hope that some of you still have that magnet, have it in a place where you see it. I'm seeing some nodding heads. That's very good. But I just wanted to start this year out by reminding you of this prayer. And then what we're going to do is look at another version of what I believe is virtually the same prayer in Colossians and talk about the different implications of that prayer. But this is what Paul prays for the church in Eph that in the Colossians prayer. But I did want to place that in front of us and be reminded of it as we go into this prayer in Colossians. Now, as I was reflecting on this prayer, and if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to go ahead and turn to Colossians. We're going to go through, this is going to be in my head, kind of an old school sermon, the kind of sermon that I grew up with. Now, a new modern sermon, what I try to do, what I would typically try to do, and what I started out trying to do this week is to read verses three through 14 in Colossians chapter one, where this prayer is, and try to distill it down to this one point. What's the fulcrum? What's the focus? What's the anchor of this prayer? If there can only be one takeaway for us, what should that takeaway be? And then I would spend the entire sermon trying to preach to that takeaway. But as I look through these verses, there's just too much good stuff to sweep it aside for the sake of making one point. So instead of that, we're going to go verse by verse through these 11 or 12 verses. And I'm just going to stop and go, this is what he prays here. This is what it means. This is why we need to talk about it and think about it. So this is going to be an old school five point sermon where we talk about the verse and then we talk about what it means and how it applies to us. I feel like my pastor growing up who I this is just a blow up of the bulletin is what you have on the back of your notes. This is all I ever have. But there's a lot here. And as I look at it, I think in about 25 minutes, I'm going to be halfway through with this and go, OK, we got to go fast. And then I'm just going to start summarizing things, which is what my pastor used to do. So anyways, let's get started. As I was reflecting on this prayer in Colossians, something occurred to me. And I had not really thought about this before as it relates to the prayers in the New Testament. First of all, it's important that we understand what the book of Colossians is. Colossians is what's called in theological circles a Pauline epistle. It's a letter that Paul wrote. So Paul wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. He wrote those. And if you think what I was just doing was showing off, I have a master's degree in this. If I can't do that, I am the stupidest person that's ever gotten a master's degree. But those are the books that he wrote. And all of those books are letters to either a church, like the church in Rome or Corinth or Colossae, or to individuals like Timothy or Philemon. So in these letters, he's writing to instruct the churches that have been founded by him or his ministry. We get a clue in this first chapter, and we'll see that he sent out one of the pastors from amongst his team, a guy named Epaphras. And Epaphras originally shared the gospel, the good news, with the people in Colossae, and they formed a church around this good news. And now they're going and blowing. Now they're growing, and now they have a church. And so Paul spends his life going around Asia Minor planting churches and then writing letters back to the churches that he planted. And so what occurs to me is he's writing this letter to the church in Colossians, which is unique because it's actually to Colossians and Laodicea. Because he says, when you get done reading this, take it to Laodicea and read it there too. This is also for them. It's just called Colossians because they were the first addressee of the letter. But what occurs to me is he might not ever get to share with them again what he prays for them. He indicates in scripture that he prays for them frequently. But by this point in his life, he may never go to Colossae. He may never see these people in person. He may never write them another letter. He might not have that opportunity. It was expensive and time-consuming and laborious to get them a letter. He might not ever be able to share with them again what his prayer for them is. So he's got one shot at articulating a prayer for this church that they can cling to for the years and the decades to come. And I think it's really interesting in that situation to think about what does this founder of the churches, this incredibly influential apostle and missionary, what does he pray for the churches? And I think that's an interesting question because I think it's an interesting question if I could sit down with the parents in the room and ask you, when you pray for your child, when you pray for your children, what do you pray? We've got a mama holding a newborn baby back there. That baby's been prayed over. When you pray for that baby, what do you pray? If you're a grandparent and you pray for your children and your grandchildren, what do you pray for them, what would you write out? When you pray for your friends, what do you pray for them? Small group leaders, if you pray for the people in your small group, and I hope you do, what do you pray for them? When I pray for the church, when the elders pray for the church, what do we pray for you? I think those are interesting questions because you can really get a sense of someone's priorities, someone's heart, someone's clarity of vision, someone's faith by what they pray for the people that they love the most. And so I think we can get a really good glimpse at the heart of Paul and in turn the very heart of God when we ask, what does he pray for the church in Colossae? And what's interesting to me, and I pointed this out last year when we talked about the prayer in Ephesus, it's just as interesting to me what he prays for as what he doesn't pray for. Because you can read this prayer as many times as you want. What you will not find in this prayer is Paul praying for circumstances, or health, or prosperity, or success, or even growth of the church. He doesn't pray for any of those things, some of the things we think we probably find in that list. You will not find them there. So like I said, as I move through this prayer and began the task of trying to distill it down to one point, I just thought it was a disservice to the whole thing to blow by some things and not favor them in favor of making one universal point. So we're going to go verse by verse, and I'm going to occasionally highlight a phrase, and you'll see it when it's on the screen to get your attention. And that's what we're going to key in on and talk about that. So let's look at this prayer in Colossians. Let's think about taking at least aspects of it and making it our prayer for 2025 for you and for the church. And let's see what we can learn from it. We go back to that previous verse, Miss Andrea, is we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we pray for you because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God's people. I think that is an incredible compliment. What if Jesus were to come down and say, could I give the sermon this week? That'd be fine, Jesus. Go ahead. And he started it off and he said, Grace, I'm grateful for you because I know and I've heard of the faith you have in me and the love that you have for one another. What could be a better compliment to a church than that? Than to be known for your faith and love? As an individual, what could be better than that reputation to precede you, that you are known for your faith in Christ and your love for one another. What could be better? How could it possibly be better to be known in any other way? I thank my God because of you, because of your success, because of how effective you are at making money and closing deals. I thank my God because of you, because of your wisdom, because of your leadership, because you seem to be disciplined in staying in shape, because your kids seem all right and they like you. Like what other things could be as good as being known for your faith and for your love? What an incredible compliment to pay a church. It's a compliment that I hope and pray grace can receive or be thought of in that way. And I can't help but wonder then, what must you do to be known for your faith and love? What do you think it takes to become the kind of person whose reputation precedes you in such a way that when someone meets you, they go, oh, I've heard about your faith and your love. I remember my senior year, I played soccer for my high school, which I'm totally bragging about. There was 100 people in my high school. Anybody could have played soccer. Yeah, anybody could have played soccer. But we got a new teacher my senior year, a new computer teacher named Mr. Keithley, and I went in and introduced myself. I told him I'm Nathan Rector because in high school I was Nathan. I wasn't Nate, incidentally, until I waited tables at Macaroni Grill and you had to write your name upside down on the table and I shortened that real quick. That's when I became Nate. And I met Mr. Keithley and I shook his hand and said, hey, I'm Nathan Rector and he goes, oh, I've heard about you. You're the soccer player. And I was like, you're right. I am. I'm one of the best of the 45 males we have available who are willing to play soccer. So, yeah. It's an interesting thing when your reputation precedes you. What must you do to be the kind of person who's known for your faith and for your love, and what better could you be known for? There are lots of answers to this question, but very simply, at the beginning of 2025, the way that I would answer it is, if you want to be known for being a person of faith in Christ and love for one another, then you must become a person of devotion. At Grace, we have five traits. We have five things that we want every partner at Grace to be, and one of those things is to be a person of devotion. And one of the things we say all the time, I say it as often as I can, and I haven't said it often enough lately, so I'm going to start beating the drum again, is the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. The single most important habit. There is no other habit more important than that in your entire life. And there are a lot of things I think you need to do and ways that you need to behave to be known as a person of faith and love. But foundationally, fundamentally, it starts with becoming a person of devotion. So here at the top of 2025, as we launch into the new year, the very first thing I want to challenge you to do in your new year is be a person who wakes up every day and spends time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. If you don't know how to do that, I wrote in this last year a devotional guide that's on the information table right outside these doors. Grab it, read through it. It's meant to help you and jumpstart you in that. But if you are a person for whom that habit has waned, if you are a person who's never successfully begun the habit, if you're a person who's never attempted the habit, if we want to be a church that is known for our faith and for our love, That begins with becoming people of devotion. Let this year be the year that you read your Bible and you spend time in prayer. And if that's what you're going to do, if you just went, you know what, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to wake up tomorrow. I'm going to do that. Great. Give yourself grace for it. You're going to mess up and the heavens are not going to part and angels sing down on you the first time you read your Bible. Stick with it. Give yourself grace. And being a person of devotion will absolutely change your life and change who you are. That's how we become known for that. Then after he tells them what they're known for, he moves on in his prayer and he just makes this interesting note. I'm not going to linger here long, but I do think it's worth pointing out and who also told us of your love in the Spirit. So if we go back to the beginning, Paul says something really interesting there. He says, in the same way that it's borne fruit with you, the gospel is bearing fruit throughout the whole world. We see already that Paul has a heart for the world, That Paul is encouraging them to think outside of Colossae and Laodicea. And think about all the other places where the gospel is flourishing. Don't see yourself as this isolated church battling on your own in this province of the Roman Empire. But understand that as far as the Roman roads spread, so does the gospel. It is spreading throughout the entire world. And I just wanted to pause here to make this statement because I think it's so important. And it's, listen, this is something that we don't talk about enough. And when I say we, I don't mean Christians, I mean me. I mean, I don't bring this up enough in our church and I need to do a better job of it. But this is true, and this is why I wanted to stop here. Mature believers allow God to foster within them a heart for the world. Mature believers, people who are growing in Christ, allow God to foster within them a heart for the world, a heart for our international brothers and sisters. I think our temptation with our faith, like anything else in our life, is to become very myopic in that faith. To just think about that faith in terms of me or my immediate family or my children. Maybe if we're generous and magnanimous enough, we care about the faith of the people around us, and we hope to see our friends grow deeper with Christ, and we hope to see them flourish spiritually. Maybe, maybe if we've been around church long enough and God's really fostered a heart, we have a genuine heart for our small group, a genuine heart for our church, and we want to see the people at Grace come to know God in a more deep way, and we want to see spiritual lives flourish here. But what I've found is rare is the believer who has a genuine heart for their international brothers and sisters. Rare is the believer that thinks about church on a global scale, understanding that there were people worshiping in Korea 16 hours before us on this very same Sunday, singing to the same God. And I think that mature believers begin to get a grasp of the global church and seeing God in action everywhere. And I'll tell you when this clicked for me. I'm blessed to have parents that have been going on mission trips since before they were cool. They went to Jamaica in like 1991 when no one was taking mission trips. I went to Costa Rica when I was going into the eighth grade and started taking mission trips often there. But it wasn't until around 2010 that I was in Cape Town, South Africa, visiting a ministry called Living Hope, which is a phenomenal ministry. My family was involved in it. I wanted to see it, so I went down with a team. And in Cape Town, South Africa, they have these things called townships. And townships are a remnant of apartheid. If you don't know what apartheid is, I do not have time to explain it to you this morning. Google it or ask someone old. The townships are remnants of apartheid. And typically speaking, it's low socioeconomic families that continue to live there. And they run the gamut from hovels and tin roofs and pallet walls to homes that would seem relatively normal to us. But it tends to be low socioeconomic status. And there's one called Masi Pumaleli. And one Sunday we got to go to church there. We go to church in Masi. It's a small white building. We go inside and there was no single worship leader. I still don't understand the organization of it. I have no idea who was in charge. All I know is that there was about 10 South African women dressed the same who were just moving around the room singing. And the words were on the screen, and you sang too, and it was awesome. And they had these things, I'll never forget. There was these like burgundy leather pillows that strapped to their hands, and when they would hit them, it would make this loud percussion noise. I have no idea what it was. But they're doing that and tambourines and one person on the piano, because you you got to have a pianist if it's going to be real worship, and they're going after it. And they're singing some song in their native language that I recognized. I knew the tune to it, and I'm singing along in English. And I was so moved by it that I left the church. I walked outside, and I looked up in the sky, and I listened to the song of praise pouring out of that church being lifted up to my God. And I was reminded of Jesus' instructions to the disciples to go and to spread the word in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and even to the ends of the earth. And I thought, here I am at the literal end of the earth, at the tip of the continent of Africa, 2,000 years later, and there is a church full of Masi people singing praises to my God, a song that I know, and I can sing along with them. Well done, disciples. You carried the gospel to the ends of the earth. And it made an indelible impression on me that we exist in a global church. And it is right and good to care about our international brothers and sisters. In March, a friend of mine is going to travel to Istanbul. And when he gets to Istanbul, he's going to meet with 15 or 20 Iranian Christian pastors who have to go to Istanbul because they can't train in Iran because their churches are illegal and they're putting themselves and their families at risk for even going and participating. And they're going to receive training so that they can go back into their communities and they can reach people for Christ. We should care deeply for what happens over those few days. We should care about those pastors and what they're doing. And that's not unique. There's underground churches all throughout China. The church is flourishing like crazy in places like Korea and in Africa and in South America. We should care about those things. So this year, maybe for you, is the year that you allow God to begin to expose your heart to things that happen internationally. Maybe this is the year you go to Mexico with our team that goes in October. Maybe you go see what's happening in Ethiopia and visit AJ. Maybe you go to Cape Town and visit Mbuntu and see what the princes are doing there. Maybe you find another way to be exposed to what's happening internationally, but I think it's vitally important for mature believers to allow God to foster within them a heart for the global church and our international brothers and sisters. And so as I was reading through this prayer and I saw Paul's commentary there, I couldn't pass it up and not mention it to you. Now we get into the heart of the prayer. This next verse is the anchor of the prayer, and it's why I say that this is a long-form version of the prayer in Ephesians, because it's praying virtually the same thing. Just verse 9. For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives. That phrase, we continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will, is still very similar to the Ephesians prayer. When Paul prays there, we pray that you would be filled to the fullness with the knowledge of God, that you would know the love of Christ that surpasses understanding. He prays more than anything else that you would know God. To Paul, his top priority for his churches, his top priority for you, his top priority for anybody in his life that they knew is that they would know God. That's number one. There's not a close second that they would know God. But as you go year to year, you would grow in your depth of knowledge. When you think about the person in your life who seems to be the closest to God, who exudes his love, who just oozes wisdom and compassion and grace, Paul's prayer for that person is that they would know God more. If you think of yourself as someone who's very far from God and doesn't know him very well at all, you're not even really super comfortable with this Christian thing. Paul's prayer for you is that you would know God more. If you've been languishing in your Christianity for a decade and feel not much closer to him now than you did 10 years ago, his prayer for you is that you would know God more. And when earlier I asked, parents, what do you pray for your kids? Grandparents, what do you pray for your children and their children? What do you pray for your friends? What do we pray for churches? What do we pray for people in our small group? I hope that whatever else you pray follows. Father, I simply pray that they would know you more. The way that we say it here is this. We pray this. Would the events of this life conspire to bring you closer to God? I believe this so fervently that when I get the news that someone has cancer, which has touched my life in multiple ways, I've lost multiple loved ones to cancer. So it's not callously that I pray this. But when I hear that someone is sick, the very first thing I pray before I pray for their physical health is that the events of this battle would conspire to bring them and those around them closer to you, Father. I pray that this would drive them into a deeper depth of knowledge of you. And then I pray for healing. When I hear a marriage is struggling, before I pray that that marriage is healed, I pray that the path to that healing would bring them to a deeper knowledge of you. When I pray over a new baby, I don't pray for circumstances, and I don't pray for prosperity, and I don't pray for success, and I don't pray for health. I pray that the events of this child's life and the things that surround it would conspire to bring this child closer to you. There can be no more important thing that we pray. That's why this is the anchor of this prayer. This is the stud and the wall on which the whole prayer is hung. Before it is, hey, I know about your faith and your love and the gospel's flourishing in the whole world, but here's what I really pray for you, that you would know God. And then we get two results because of two things after this that we're going to talk about. Because I'm praying for you to know God, I want you to know this and this. But this is the anchor of the prayer. If I were going to distill it down to one thing, to one verse, to treat it how I would normally treat it, we would be entirely focused on verse 9 this morning because there can be no greater priority that we can have for ourselves or for anyone else than that they would know God more deeply. That's the prayer. I hope that you'll pray that for yourselves, for your families, and for our church. That's the biggest priority. Now, why is that the biggest priority? Why is that the anchor prayer? Because of what we see in verse 10. Verse 10 says, why do we do this? So that, I love this, you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God. I don't think we put that thought in front of us often enough. Why does Paul pray that we would know Christ in increasing measure? So that we can live a life worthy of the Lord. So that we can live a life worthy of him who loves us and sacrifices us and created us and pursues us. I don't know how often you put that thought in front of yourself. Am I living a life worthy of my calling? But the reason we pray that our children would know God deeper. I always pray for my kids that they would know you soon and love you well. That they would love you better than I did. That they would obey you better than I have. Why do I pray that for my kids, John and Lily? Because they have things to do. Because I want them to live a life pleasing to God. I want them to live a life worthy, more worthy than what I have lived. This is why we pray this over the people who would follow us and over the people around us. Simply put, Paul wants you to grow in your knowledge of God because you have stuff to do. He wants you to grow in your knowledge of God because you've got things you need to get done. Because you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. You've got some good works to do. You guys, the apex goal for everybody at Grace, if you're a part of Grace for a year or two decades or more, the thing I want for you more than I want anything else in the whole world is that you would become a kingdom builder. That you would understand that you spend your entire life building a kingdom. And that it is a waste of your time to build your kingdom or anyone else's. The only kingdom worth building is God's eternal kingdom. And when we build God's kingdom, we grow it in breadth and depth. We add to the numbers of it and we grow the spiritual depth of it. And that's the whole reason that you exist is to be a kingdom builder, to leverage every gift and every talent and every treasure and every resource you've ever been blessed by and leverage that for God's kingdom rather than your own. And I believe that to be a Christian is to have a progressive revelation of what exactly that means. Because I thought I knew what it meant seven years ago when I took the job. And now these seven years later, I have a wildly different impression of what that actually means. And it's far more challenging than I ever thought it could be. So to be a Christian is to have this progressive revelation that my life is not my own. It does not belong to me. My resources and my time and my talents and my treasures are not my own. They do not belong to me. I am a kingdom builder. I have stuff to do. So why do we pray that you would know God more, that you would know Christ more deeply? Not only because it's what's best for you and will bring you the most peace and bring heaven down to earth here as we begin to experience the presence of God, but also because he's got a plan for you. And unless you know him well and are known for your love and for your faith, you're not going to be able to execute that plan of what he wants you to do. You're not going to be able to build his kingdom like he wants you to use you to build it. So we pray that people would know God better because we've got stuff to do. We are kingdom builders. God has a plan for you and a way he intends to use you. But the more years we fritter away not pursuing him fully, not being known for our faith and our love, the less we get to execute the plan. And we watch someone else do what God might have used us to do. We are kingdom builders. We can't do that unless we're growing towards God in a deeper, in a greater depth of knowledge. The other thing there that I didn't want to pass up. If we can put that verse back on the screen, verse 10, please. This is here so so that you would live a life worthy of the Lord, and then look here, please him in every way. That arrested me as I read it this week. I don't know how many of you have a life in such a way that it pleases God, joy to him. I think if most of us are being honest, the highest mark we ever hope for as it relates to how God sees us and has an impression of us, I try to live my life in such a way that I quell his disappointment or mitigate his anger. Right? Just don't be mad at me today. Just tell me I was good enough today. Just this week. I mean, honestly, this week, I pray every time before I'm about to preach, I pray just to get my mindset right and remind me of what's important. A vast majority of those prayers are thinking through the week and thinking of if I feel worthy or not to come do this, which is stupid because the answer is no, I'm never worthy of it. But it's like, have I ticked you off this week? Have I disappointed you this week? Have I lived a life worthy of you this week, or have I let you down again? My greatest hope when it comes to God is that I simply don't disappoint him that day. But I was reminded in this verse and in this prayer that it's actually possible for us to live a life that pleases him. For us to live a life that brings him joy. To live our life in such a way that he's proud. That he smiles in heaven because of us. And let me just tell you, as a parent, like all the parents here, I'm sure, I have days when I feel like I've been a good father, and I have days where I don't feel that way. And on the days when I'm not a good father, when I'm selfish or curmudgeonly or grumpy, the greatest thing my daughter Lily, who's almost nine years old, which is weird to say, the greatest thing my daughter Lily can hope for is that she doesn't tick me off that day. That she wasn't annoying that day. That she avoided my wrath and my frustration that day. She can live her life in such a way that she doesn't incite me to frustration. When you have a bad father, that's your greatest goal for that day in that relationship. But on days when I'm a good father, when I'm patient and kind and gracious and present, when I think about the negative, when I think about how often I'm getting on to her versus how often I'm praising her. When I think about what is she hearing from me? Is she hearing any encouragement? Is she hearing any support? Is she hearing any love or is she only hearing frustration? When I think about those things in those days, what I see in Lily, not in myself, what I see in my daughter is a smile, a smile, is this exuberance, this, this ability to know that she's making me proud. And when I stop and tell her, Hey, I saw the way you handled this with your brother. I'm very proud of you for that. When I sent her upstairs to clean a room and she actually does it miracle of miracles. And I sit her down and instead of just not getting mad at her, I go, I trusted you to clean your room. You did it. This is awesome. Thanks so much. That's the exact kind of little girl I want you to be. And young lady, I want you to become. You're growing in your trustworthiness. That's wonderful. When I stop and I do that like a good father and I encourage her and she has this vision for her days that she can live in such a way that it pleases her mom and I and makes us proud. There is a different aura around her. I see it bring joy out of her. You guys have a good father. The greatest goal for a bad father is to simply avoid their anger. And often we treat God like he's not a good father. But he is. And the greatest thing we could hope for day in and day out is to live our life in such a way that it pleases him. And let that give us an exuberance and a spring in our step and a greater vision for who he is. It'll allow us to hear his encouragement from the people He uses to speak things into our life. Maybe for 2025, you simply need a greater vision of who God is and what He expects from you and how proud He is of you and how much He loves you. Because if you think God just goes through His days being disappointed in you, you're wrong. I was listening to a song this morning. And it basically said that he's never loved you more, more wildly and more passionately than he did on your worst day. We can live lives that please our Heavenly Father because he's a good father. And I think we need to have a vision for that. We wrap up the prayer with the last three verses. This is very simple. So he says, I pray that you would know God more deeply, that you would know his will. Why? Because you have things to do. You need to live a life worthy of Him. You can actually please Him if you get to work on building His kingdom and follow Him faithfully. And in doing those things, we see these words highlighted that you may have great endurance and patience and that you'll be reminded that you've been qualified to share in the inheritance of His holy people in the kingdom of light. Simply put, a faithful life gives you patience for the promise. A faithful life gives you patience for the promise. Paul talks about perseverance a lot in scripture. Jesus talks about perseverance. The other authors talk about perseverance. The reality of the Christian life is that faith is hard sometimes. I think that one of the greatest blessings of heaven that we don't talk about very often is that once you get to heaven, you no longer need your faith. Not required anymore. You can set that down. Because Romans 8 tells us who hopes for what he can see. I don't know if you've ever thought about that at all, but when you get to heaven, you don't need faith anymore. Faith is choosing to believe. Sometimes in spite of sickness. Sometimes in spite of disappointments. Sometimes in spite of doubts and questions. Sometimes in spite of a lack of clarity. Or a life and a culture and voices that will clamor it out and make it difficult to hear God. The reality of the Christian life, and those of you who have lived it for a while know this to be true, it's not always easy to cling to your faith. It's not always easy to walk as stridently with Jesus as it has been or as it will be. And it's possible that we let go of that faith because we don't persevere in it, because we let the things of the world drown it out. But what Paul says is, if you're known for your faith and your love, you care about the global church, if you grow in your knowledge of God and his will, and then as a result of that knowledge of God, you're a kingdom builder who lives a life worthy of the calling that you've received, and you live in such a way that it pleases God, then in doing all of those things, you will have patience for the promise of the kingdom for which you await. So I'll be direct with you. I don't expect that all five of the points that I just made and the things that I highlighted are deeply resonating with every person in the room and you're going to do all five things. But what I really genuinely hope is that one of them got you. And that maybe 2025 is the year that you commit to becoming a person known for your faith and your love. And so to take that step, you become a person of devotion for the first time ever or for the first time in a long time. Maybe that's what you need to grab onto. Maybe you realize and are convicted, I don't have a heart for the global church, and this is the year I'm going to open myself up and allow God to begin to point me in that direction and develop a heart within me for my international brothers and sisters. Maybe this is the year that you see and prioritize, man, there's nothing more important than knowing God deeply, and that's what I'm going to pray for me and for the people around me. Maybe this is a year that you realize, gosh, I need to get to work. I have things to do. I'm a kingdom builder and I want to go live a life worthy of my Lord. I want to live in such a way this year that I actually bring joy to my Father who is in heaven. Or maybe this is the year that you just need to be encouraged to follow God and pursue Him and He will give you the patience and the perseverance to cling to the promises that he's made you. I don't know which one of these resonates with you the most, but I hope one does and I hope that you'll cling to it as we go out these doors today. I'm going to pray for us. We're going to sing and then Mikey's going to dismiss us. Father, thank you for a new year. Thank you for what it represents, for the fresh start for those of us that need it, for new opportunities for those of us that want them. God, give us a vision for living a life that pleases you, to thinking beyond you simply being disappointed in us. Remind us that we have a good father. God, I pray for everybody in this room that they would know you more deeply this year than they did last year. That they would grow in their depth of knowledge of you and your will and in that growth, God, that you would begin to put their hand to the plow and they would begin to do your work. And they would experience the joy and satisfaction that can only come from being used by you. God, we pray over grace in 2025 that you would bring to us people that need to be a part of this family, that we would be good stewards of the people who come here. God, that this would be a year marked by spiritual flourishing, by a strength of community that even folks who have been coming here for decades would mark this year as a time of flourishing for them. We pray for the weeks and the months to come. We pray that we would honor you. We pray that you would draw us close. In Jesus' name, amen.