Ephesians

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's exciting and a privilege to be up here this morning. So thank you all for coming and thanks as well to all those who are listening elsewhere. Although I probably shouldn't admit this, I wasn't initially excited about the prospect of speaking this morning. In fact, and as my wife Debbie will attest, when Nate first texted me to ask, my initial gut reaction was pretty much the same as it's always been when asked to speak. Texting Nate back, I wrote, hey, I was thinking that with Kyle and Aaron in the bullpen, perhaps my speaking days were coming to a close. And Nate replied, and I quote, we have a lot in the bullpen to be sure, but I think the church is best served through multiple voices, and I'd like for Grace to hear from you again, if possible. Now, I totally subscribe to the idea that hearing from a variety of voices is a healthy and good thing. But after a few moments, I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute, he didn't really answer my question. Why ask me and not the other more capable and willing voices? And this is where, if you're squeamish and like your safe spaces, you should cover your ears and avert your eyes, because I'm going to give you a glimpse into the seeming underbelly of church life. Nate's a gifted speaker and does a great job of conveying the truth of Scripture. He's also pretty smart. Not super smart, but pretty smart. And he's very clever. But most of all, he's cunning. Not pretty cunning. I mean really, really cunning. And he understands that no matter how good his sermons might be, it's an inevitable human tendency as night follows day for people to start taking things for granted, including his sermons. So for Nate, what better way to solve this problem than to remind everyone just how dry, pointless, and uninspiring a sermon can be if not done well. And what better way to do that than to trot me up here every six months or so. Voila. Presto change-o. Problem solved. Next Sunday morning, people will be streaming early to Grace just to get a seat, chomping at the bit to hear what Nate has to say. Not to worry, though. Despite being used in this way, it's not all bad for me. In fact, selfishly, two very good things have happened. The first is that I find preparing a sermon a big responsibility and a bit nerve-wracking, which in turn compels me to read more, study more, think more, pray more. I always feel completely inadequate, and that, paradoxically, turns out to be a very good place to be. So despite my early misgivings, by the time I'm finally ready and up here on stage, it's been such a spiritually rich experience for me that I'm truly excited and deeply grateful for the opportunity. Trying to get a little more light, excuse me. The other really good thing that's happened is that even though we are now in our third week of the sermon series on Jesus' Beatitudes, I got to pick which Beatitude to talk about. And I picked Jesus' first one, my favorite one. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's the first Beatitude and my favorite because it reveals an absolutely essential truth for each of us, regardless of station or circumstance. I was raised in a modern split-level suburban house wedged between Chicago Proper and O'Hare Airport. Down in the family room, my father had a large bookshelf filled with all sorts of fabulous books. Works of Shakespeare, Winston Churchill's six-volume set on World War II, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Contiki by Thor Heyerdahl, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and on and on. I didn't actually read many of them, and for sure none of the Shakespeare's. I could not make head nor tail of his Elizabethan English. But I loved taking the books down and paging through them. However, there was one book I actually did read a lot. This little book, 101 Famous Poems. I came to treasure this little book so much that when I was leaving home for good, I just took it from my parents' house without a word, and obviously have kept it since. I have many weaknesses and vices, some of which I freely admit and openly share, and others which I only acknowledge to God as they are embarrassing and a source of personal disappointment and even shame. But I can confidently say that stealing is not one of them, except perhaps this one time. Vice of mine or not, I couldn't think of a more fitting way to introduce today's beatitude than by reading the following poem from a book that I stole from my own parents. The Fool's Prayer by Edward Sill. The royal feast was done. The king sought some new sport to banish care, and to his jester cried, Sir fool, kneel down and make for us a prayer. The jester doffed his cap and bells and stood the mocking court before. They could not see the bitter smile behind the painted grin he wore. He bowed his head and bent his knee upon the monarch's silken stool. His pleading voice arose, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. No pity, Lord, can change the heart from red with wrong to white as wool. The rod must heal the sin, but Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. Tis not by guilt the onward sweep of truth and right, O Lord, we stay. Tis by our follies that so long we hold the earth from heaven away. These clumsy feet still in the mire go crushing blossoms without end. These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust among the heartstrings of a friend. The old-time truth we might have kept, who knows how sharp it pierced and stung. The word we had not sense to say, who knows how grandly it had rung. Our faults no tenderness should ask, the chastening stripes must cleanse them all, but for our blunders, oh, and shame, before the eyes of heaven we fall. Earth bears no balsam for mistakes. Men crown the knave and scourge the tool that did his will. But thou, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. The rooms hushed, and silence rose the king and sought his gardens cool, and walked apart and murmured low, be merciful to me, a fool. There are a million reasons why I love that poem. It tells of a surprise, a reversal in the accepted order. The greater brought low and it is the jester, not the king, who is wise. Everyone is equal before God. Everyone is lost. Everyone in need. It resonates because in our heart of hearts, we know it's true. It is the Upside down and inside out in virtually every way imaginable. And if I was in a court of law having to prove that point, I might start with the Beatitudes as my exhibit A. or the happy and healthy or the beautiful or the self-sufficient. But blessed are those who know that before God, they are a spiritual dumpster fire without merit and utterly undeserving of God's favor and blessing. That is what it means biblically to be poor in spirit. And that is a radically different take on how one goes about getting on God's good side. But a bit differently, the only thing that qualifies you or me to experience God's blessing is to honestly confess that we don't deserve to experience it at all. And why is that admission that we are utterly undeserving and without merit such a big deal? Because it's an acknowledgement that we are not okay, that we are separated from God and in desperate straits. And that, although it might seem initially like a depressing admission, in fact is a magnificent, mind-blowing blessing from God because it creates and fosters in us a posture receptive to his free offer of mercy, grace, and forgiveness through his son, Jesus Christ. In the book of Luke, Jesus tells a very famous story, the parable of the prodigal son that illustrates precisely this point. As many of you might recall, a man has two sons. The younger son asks for his inheritance, an act of enormous disrespect and outright rebellion in those days given that the father was still alive. The younger son then takes his share to a distant land where he proceeds to completely squander it on wild living. Predictably, he eventually falls on to hard times. Poverty, hunger, utter destitution. When he finally hits rock bottom, he has an epiphany. Realizing that he had sinned against his father and was no longer worthy of being called his father's son, he decides to return home and beg for mercy. But the father, seeing his son approaching in the distance, runs to him and hugs and kisses him and then throws a lavish party in the younger son's honor. All the while, the older son was having a fit, refusing to go into the party despite his father coming out and pleading with him to do so. The father tried to explain that everything he had was the older son's and that he was always with him. But all the older son could think about was the unfairness of it all. How obedient and hardworking he had been, how deserving, certainly compared to his brother. Although the extravagant, unmerited love and forgiveness the father offered his youngest son is breathtaking in that story, there is another key takeaway, the remarkable contrast between the fates of the two sons, a complete reversal of what we would suspect. The younger son failed spectacularly, but in so doing was brought to a place in which he clearly acknowledged that he stood before his father without a claim. Albeit not by his design, and certainly not something he signed up for, the younger son, through his ordeal, had become poor in spirit. And as a result of that condition, that posture, he experienced the mercy, forgiveness, and grace freely offered to him by his father. Tragically, his older son, convinced of his own righteousness and merit, was blinded to what his father was always offering him. And at the end of the day, it was the younger, the prodigal son who was advantaged and blessed, and it was the older who remained lost. Admittedly, those takeaways are somewhat nuanced and subtle, so I'll read another parable from Luke This is in Luke 18. some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked downterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Jesus goes on to say, I tell you that this man, the tax collector, rather than the other, went home justified before God. That word means made right before him, declared not guilty. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. It's pretty straightforward. The Pharisee thought he was okay and was not. The tax collector knew he was not and was blessed. Over the previous two weeks, Nates explained that our English translation of blessed doesn't do justice to what Jesus was talking about in the Beatitudes. More than happy, more than good fortune, more than favorable circumstances. Biblically, the word refers to an eternal security and well-being that aren't at all dependent on our feelings and circumstances. Regardless how difficult or unpromising things might seem at the time. And to be given the kingdom of heaven is simply another way of referring to salvation, redeemed by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's the ultimate blessedness, beginning first in this life, but ultimately culminating in an eternity with God. So this first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, is second to none in importance as all roads to God's blessing and favor run through it. And there's a lot at stake, as it's my belief, that realizing one's desperate need is the single biggest stumbling block for people coming to faith to Jesus Christ. After all, salvation doesn't mean much if you're not convinced you need saving. But as critical as it is to recognize one's need, it's not sufficient. It's necessary, but just like in the story of the prodigal son, one must, in faith, return to the father to experience his goodness. Now, some may feel the urge to protest. Hey, Doug, I'm not that bad a person. In fact, I'm a pretty good person. In response, I'd say, that may very well be true. You may be a good person. Not only is that a very low bar, it's also the wrong bar. So why do we have to admit that we're spiritually bankrupt? The simplest answer is that it's true. I've often made the point that if I ever meet someone who seems like they have their act totally together, I simply conclude that I must not know them well enough. Although trying to be funny when I say that, I believe it's true. You might accuse me of being overly cynical, but I don't think so, and neither does Scripture. As the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans, there is no one righteous, not even one. And a few verses later, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, there's that word again, declared not guilty, made right with God, freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. And in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul makes the so that no one can boast. The kingdom of heaven, God's ultimate blessing and desire for each of us is simply not attained by the good things we might do, no matter how many or how good. Rather, it's reserved for the poor in spirit. Now, why is it so hard for us to admit our poverty and desperate need? There are lots of reasons, but the biggest is sin itself. In a massive, universal catch-22, it's our own sinfulness which keeps us from seeing how sinful we actually are. Virtually everything in our nature is singing a different tune. Hey, I'm really not that bad, and I'm certainly not totally helpless. I have agency. At its core, it's human pride, an implicit assertion of our own sovereignty, that we can steer our own ship. Thank you very much. We can figure out what's best for us. Confessing one's spiritual bankruptcy and abject need so completely rubs against the grain of everything our world tells us that even among the world's great religions, Christianity alone invokes such a confession. In all the others, there are things one can and even must do to get in God's good graces. It's transactional in a sense. I've done this or that. I've earned it, so God owes me. And I should get at least some of the credit. In essence, I'm the one in the driver's seat. Whereas the Christian gospel in polar opposition asserts that God did it. Everything. And he gets the credit. All of it. I did absolutely nothing and am in his debt. Truly being poor in spirit has always been a challenge for humankind, and it's not getting any easier. Virtue signaling is a term that's gained a lot of traction in our popular culture, and although the term may be relatively new, the concept is not. As human beings, since time immemorial, have sought ways to assert their own virtue. Perhaps it's where we live, who we associate with, the church we attend, the good things we do, our families, our social setting, our vocation, our possessions, our education, our politics, you name it, we find a way to do it and have always found ways to do it. But But the temptation of virtue signal today is greater than ever. Advances in technology and communication, though life-changing and transformative in many, many ways, have a dark side. The platform, audience, and access each of us is now afforded are unrivaled in human history, and not all for the good. Without a doubt, there's great value in having a marketplace for ideas, social discourse, advocacy, and the like. But the ease with which we can now signal our virtue is nectar to our innate human desire to build ourselves up. It seems as if our entire society, certainly our media, entertainment, politics, commerce, have all become performance art. Everyone morphing into little Torquemadas, Spanish inquisitors, casting about, looking for those not thinking right, not speaking right, not acting right, not looking right, not voting right, not caring enough about the right things, caring too much about the wrong things, we've become quicker than ever to accuse and condemn. I'm not even on social media to speak of, yet I'm still caught up in this overall mood of the times. On my news feed each morning, I'll read something about an entertainer or politician or businessman or some journalist, and I'll immediately think to myself, what a twit. What a moron, an idiot. It's judgment. It's pride. An implicit comparison between me and the object of my ridicule and scorn. An assertion of my own virtue. I'm marinating in my rightness, goodness, and wisdom when I do that. How different is that from the Pharisee and the parable I read earlier? Thank God I'm not like that tax collector. I'll tell you what virtue signaling is not. It's not like anything resembling Jesus Christ and is absolutely antithetical to the gospel news, excuse me, to the good news of the gospel. Virtue signaling has a corrosive effect on us and social media hasn't helped but only amplified. After all, I already have these impulses to want to be right and viewed as smart and virtuous. I don't need them so easily catered to. It turns out the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of the day, were the first century's poster children for what today we call virtue signaling. Everything they did was performative for others to see and admire, totally wrapped up in an external righteousness rather than the real deal. And if one reads a little further in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reserved his harshest and most withering criticism and contempt for them, declaring that when Pharisees gave, prayed, and fasted in public for the praise and affirmation of men that they had received their reward in full. Convinced and satisfied with their own righteousness, they could not see their desperate need. They were far, far away from being poor in spirit and far, far away from the kingdom of heaven. Personally, I do not find these times we live in very helpful if I genuinely desire to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk of my faith. They do not cultivate in me a posture receptive to grace, nor encourage me to offer grace, empathy, and mercy to others. Rather, what is cultivated in me is a spirit of judgment, superiority, and disdain. Very hard to reconcile with Jesus' words, for whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Although we all virtue signal in some form or fashion, it's especially harmful when done by believers, those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. The temptation to signal our virtue has always been and continues to be an enormous Achilles heel for Christians and for the church. We are susceptible, because we still sin, to moving away over time from our initial confession of brokenness and need, of being poor in spirit, to something quite different. For example, I'm an elder here at Grace. I lead a couple of small groups. I volunteer in the toddler room. Man, I even went on a mission trip last fall. Sure, Christ died for my sins, but look at me now. I think we can all safely agree that I'm nailing it, right? Go me! Now those things I'm doing aren't bad. In fact, they're good things. It's my pride that's a problem. My lens has moved stealthily, covertly from my need to my merit. What I'm now presenting in my life is not the gospel and it's not the truth and is terribly misleading to anyone genuinely searching for the truth. So what can we do about this state of things? As I reflect on today's beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'm convinced we'd be better off signaling our vices more and our virtues less. More emphasis on what Christ has done on our behalf and less of what we've done on his. Being poor in spirit, confessing our spiritual poverty and need is not intended to be a one-time event, but only the beginning of a lifelong transformation empowered by God's Holy Spirit. We tend to underestimate the amazing power and ongoing blessing being poor in spirit offers to each of us individually and to the church as a whole. When we embrace our weakness and need, it's a much more honest and compelling witness of Jesus Christ than when we don't. I find it very revealing that the following brief little episode was deemed important enough to be included in three of the four Gospels, accounts of Jesus' life and ministry. Matthew, the disciple and former tax collector, was hosting a great banquet at his house for Jesus, along with a large crowd of tax collectors and other unsavory sorts. The Pharisees complained. Of course they did. Every party needs a poop. Asking why Jesus was dining and hanging out with these sinners, Jesus answered them as follows. It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. If the church is to be a welcoming, grace-filled infirmary that it's designed to be, rather than an exclusive enclave for the moral and virtuous. It's a shame that we so often act and are perceived as if we're the latter rather than the former. There is no advantage to clinging to these pretenses. We in the church are far more appealing and credible when we don't. One of the things I've always loved and valued most about grace is that we have, for the most part, leaned into the notion that we do not have our act together and hold such a confession to not only be self-evident, but hopeful, attractive, and life-giving. And though admitting one's abject spiritual poverty and desperate need might be a giant, depressing downer in the world's eyes, it offers great comfort and new life to those who actually know themselves to be sinners. Now, it's important to note that we can't make ourselves poor in spirit. It's not something we can do or become on our own. It's the work of God's Holy Spirit who convicts us of our sin and draws us to Jesus. But we can certainly cooperate with the Spirit. How we respond matters. We can remind ourselves through prayer, study, and worship that we are now in Jesus Christ not through anything we've done. When we embrace that defining fact that we are not Christ due to our being either moral or good, but because we've been forgiven, rescued, and redeemed, it unlocks the door to the magnificence of grace and grows our appetite to extend grace to others. Speaking only for myself, when I'm poor in spirit, there is a softening in my heart, a little more empathy and tolerance of others, a little less focused on others' deficiencies, a little more patient, a little more inclined to forgive. I'd like to close with one final remarkable and eye-opening parable from the book of Luke, which has such profound implications that I don't think it gets the attention that it deserves. Jesus was invited to dine at one of the Pharisees' houses. Learning of this, a woman from town who had led an immoral life brought perfume and stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping. Wetting his feet with her tears, she then wiped them with her hair, kissed, and poured perfume on them. The Pharisee was indignant, thinking to himself that if Jesus was truly a prophet, he would have known that the woman touching him was a sinner and how wrong this entire situation was. Knowing what his host was thinking, Jesus asked the Pharisee a question. He supposed the one who had the bigger debt canceled. You have judged correctly, Nor did she put oil on my head, but she has covered my feet with perfume. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little, loves little. Jesus then said to the woman, your sins are forgiven. Once again, the gospel turns everything we know on its head. It's not the upstanding and righteous who are most inclined and most able to love, but those who most appreciate the depth of their need for forgiveness, mercy, and grace, the poor in spirit. It literally is the gift that keeps on giving and the blessing that keeps on blessing. This moment in our culture, with all its acrimony and angst, presents an opportune time for us to offer something different, to truly be salt and light in a lost world that really just seems like it's thrashing about. In addition to being biblical and true, it's a lot more attractive and inviting to others when our lives reflect a healthy circumspection and wariness of our own virtue. And a well-founded confidence and well-placed trust in the righteousness and redemption offered through Jesus Christ. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Not only is poorness in spirit key to God's kingdom for us, it's the key to the kingdom for the world. There's a lot at stake. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your love. Thank you for the fact that we can stand before you without a claim, and you love us. That's what you expect. You're our God. You, your righteousness, your love, your grace and mercy are sufficient for us. Thank you for this morning. Pray that you'll use it to however you see fit. And I thank you for being merciful to me, a fool. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's exciting and a privilege to be up here this morning. So thank you all for coming and thanks as well to all those who are listening elsewhere. Although I probably shouldn't admit this, I wasn't initially excited about the prospect of speaking this morning. In fact, and as my wife Debbie will attest, when Nate first texted me to ask, my initial gut reaction was pretty much the same as it's always been when asked to speak. Texting Nate back, I wrote, hey, I was thinking that with Kyle and Aaron in the bullpen, perhaps my speaking days were coming to a close. And Nate replied, and I quote, we have a lot in the bullpen to be sure, but I think the church is best served through multiple voices, and I'd like for Grace to hear from you again, if possible. Now, I totally subscribe to the idea that hearing from a variety of voices is a healthy and good thing. But after a few moments, I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute, he didn't really answer my question. Why ask me and not the other more capable and willing voices? And this is where, if you're squeamish and like your safe spaces, you should cover your ears and avert your eyes, because I'm going to give you a glimpse into the seeming underbelly of church life. Nate's a gifted speaker and does a great job of conveying the truth of Scripture. He's also pretty smart. Not super smart, but pretty smart. And he's very clever. But most of all, he's cunning. Not pretty cunning. I mean really, really cunning. And he understands that no matter how good his sermons might be, it's an inevitable human tendency as night follows day for people to start taking things for granted, including his sermons. So for Nate, what better way to solve this problem than to remind everyone just how dry, pointless, and uninspiring a sermon can be if not done well. And what better way to do that than to trot me up here every six months or so. Voila. Presto change-o. Problem solved. Next Sunday morning, people will be streaming early to Grace just to get a seat, chomping at the bit to hear what Nate has to say. Not to worry, though. Despite being used in this way, it's not all bad for me. In fact, selfishly, two very good things have happened. The first is that I find preparing a sermon a big responsibility and a bit nerve-wracking, which in turn compels me to read more, study more, think more, pray more. I always feel completely inadequate, and that, paradoxically, turns out to be a very good place to be. So despite my early misgivings, by the time I'm finally ready and up here on stage, it's been such a spiritually rich experience for me that I'm truly excited and deeply grateful for the opportunity. Trying to get a little more light, excuse me. The other really good thing that's happened is that even though we are now in our third week of the sermon series on Jesus' Beatitudes, I got to pick which Beatitude to talk about. And I picked Jesus' first one, my favorite one. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's the first Beatitude and my favorite because it reveals an absolutely essential truth for each of us, regardless of station or circumstance. I was raised in a modern split-level suburban house wedged between Chicago Proper and O'Hare Airport. Down in the family room, my father had a large bookshelf filled with all sorts of fabulous books. Works of Shakespeare, Winston Churchill's six-volume set on World War II, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Contiki by Thor Heyerdahl, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and on and on. I didn't actually read many of them, and for sure none of the Shakespeare's. I could not make head nor tail of his Elizabethan English. But I loved taking the books down and paging through them. However, there was one book I actually did read a lot. This little book, 101 Famous Poems. I came to treasure this little book so much that when I was leaving home for good, I just took it from my parents' house without a word, and obviously have kept it since. I have many weaknesses and vices, some of which I freely admit and openly share, and others which I only acknowledge to God as they are embarrassing and a source of personal disappointment and even shame. But I can confidently say that stealing is not one of them, except perhaps this one time. Vice of mine or not, I couldn't think of a more fitting way to introduce today's beatitude than by reading the following poem from a book that I stole from my own parents. The Fool's Prayer by Edward Sill. The royal feast was done. The king sought some new sport to banish care, and to his jester cried, Sir fool, kneel down and make for us a prayer. The jester doffed his cap and bells and stood the mocking court before. They could not see the bitter smile behind the painted grin he wore. He bowed his head and bent his knee upon the monarch's silken stool. His pleading voice arose, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. No pity, Lord, can change the heart from red with wrong to white as wool. The rod must heal the sin, but Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. Tis not by guilt the onward sweep of truth and right, O Lord, we stay. Tis by our follies that so long we hold the earth from heaven away. These clumsy feet still in the mire go crushing blossoms without end. These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust among the heartstrings of a friend. The old-time truth we might have kept, who knows how sharp it pierced and stung. The word we had not sense to say, who knows how grandly it had rung. Our faults no tenderness should ask, the chastening stripes must cleanse them all, but for our blunders, oh, and shame, before the eyes of heaven we fall. Earth bears no balsam for mistakes. Men crown the knave and scourge the tool that did his will. But thou, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. The rooms hushed, and silence rose the king and sought his gardens cool, and walked apart and murmured low, be merciful to me, a fool. There are a million reasons why I love that poem. It tells of a surprise, a reversal in the accepted order. The greater brought low and it is the jester, not the king, who is wise. Everyone is equal before God. Everyone is lost. Everyone in need. It resonates because in our heart of hearts, we know it's true. It is the Upside down and inside out in virtually every way imaginable. And if I was in a court of law having to prove that point, I might start with the Beatitudes as my exhibit A. or the happy and healthy or the beautiful or the self-sufficient. But blessed are those who know that before God, they are a spiritual dumpster fire without merit and utterly undeserving of God's favor and blessing. That is what it means biblically to be poor in spirit. And that is a radically different take on how one goes about getting on God's good side. But a bit differently, the only thing that qualifies you or me to experience God's blessing is to honestly confess that we don't deserve to experience it at all. And why is that admission that we are utterly undeserving and without merit such a big deal? Because it's an acknowledgement that we are not okay, that we are separated from God and in desperate straits. And that, although it might seem initially like a depressing admission, in fact is a magnificent, mind-blowing blessing from God because it creates and fosters in us a posture receptive to his free offer of mercy, grace, and forgiveness through his son, Jesus Christ. In the book of Luke, Jesus tells a very famous story, the parable of the prodigal son that illustrates precisely this point. As many of you might recall, a man has two sons. The younger son asks for his inheritance, an act of enormous disrespect and outright rebellion in those days given that the father was still alive. The younger son then takes his share to a distant land where he proceeds to completely squander it on wild living. Predictably, he eventually falls on to hard times. Poverty, hunger, utter destitution. When he finally hits rock bottom, he has an epiphany. Realizing that he had sinned against his father and was no longer worthy of being called his father's son, he decides to return home and beg for mercy. But the father, seeing his son approaching in the distance, runs to him and hugs and kisses him and then throws a lavish party in the younger son's honor. All the while, the older son was having a fit, refusing to go into the party despite his father coming out and pleading with him to do so. The father tried to explain that everything he had was the older son's and that he was always with him. But all the older son could think about was the unfairness of it all. How obedient and hardworking he had been, how deserving, certainly compared to his brother. Although the extravagant, unmerited love and forgiveness the father offered his youngest son is breathtaking in that story, there is another key takeaway, the remarkable contrast between the fates of the two sons, a complete reversal of what we would suspect. The younger son failed spectacularly, but in so doing was brought to a place in which he clearly acknowledged that he stood before his father without a claim. Albeit not by his design, and certainly not something he signed up for, the younger son, through his ordeal, had become poor in spirit. And as a result of that condition, that posture, he experienced the mercy, forgiveness, and grace freely offered to him by his father. Tragically, his older son, convinced of his own righteousness and merit, was blinded to what his father was always offering him. And at the end of the day, it was the younger, the prodigal son who was advantaged and blessed, and it was the older who remained lost. Admittedly, those takeaways are somewhat nuanced and subtle, so I'll read another parable from Luke This is in Luke 18. some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked downterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Jesus goes on to say, I tell you that this man, the tax collector, rather than the other, went home justified before God. That word means made right before him, declared not guilty. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. It's pretty straightforward. The Pharisee thought he was okay and was not. The tax collector knew he was not and was blessed. Over the previous two weeks, Nates explained that our English translation of blessed doesn't do justice to what Jesus was talking about in the Beatitudes. More than happy, more than good fortune, more than favorable circumstances. Biblically, the word refers to an eternal security and well-being that aren't at all dependent on our feelings and circumstances. Regardless how difficult or unpromising things might seem at the time. And to be given the kingdom of heaven is simply another way of referring to salvation, redeemed by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's the ultimate blessedness, beginning first in this life, but ultimately culminating in an eternity with God. So this first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, is second to none in importance as all roads to God's blessing and favor run through it. And there's a lot at stake, as it's my belief, that realizing one's desperate need is the single biggest stumbling block for people coming to faith to Jesus Christ. After all, salvation doesn't mean much if you're not convinced you need saving. But as critical as it is to recognize one's need, it's not sufficient. It's necessary, but just like in the story of the prodigal son, one must, in faith, return to the father to experience his goodness. Now, some may feel the urge to protest. Hey, Doug, I'm not that bad a person. In fact, I'm a pretty good person. In response, I'd say, that may very well be true. You may be a good person. Not only is that a very low bar, it's also the wrong bar. So why do we have to admit that we're spiritually bankrupt? The simplest answer is that it's true. I've often made the point that if I ever meet someone who seems like they have their act totally together, I simply conclude that I must not know them well enough. Although trying to be funny when I say that, I believe it's true. You might accuse me of being overly cynical, but I don't think so, and neither does Scripture. As the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans, there is no one righteous, not even one. And a few verses later, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, there's that word again, declared not guilty, made right with God, freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. And in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul makes the so that no one can boast. The kingdom of heaven, God's ultimate blessing and desire for each of us is simply not attained by the good things we might do, no matter how many or how good. Rather, it's reserved for the poor in spirit. Now, why is it so hard for us to admit our poverty and desperate need? There are lots of reasons, but the biggest is sin itself. In a massive, universal catch-22, it's our own sinfulness which keeps us from seeing how sinful we actually are. Virtually everything in our nature is singing a different tune. Hey, I'm really not that bad, and I'm certainly not totally helpless. I have agency. At its core, it's human pride, an implicit assertion of our own sovereignty, that we can steer our own ship. Thank you very much. We can figure out what's best for us. Confessing one's spiritual bankruptcy and abject need so completely rubs against the grain of everything our world tells us that even among the world's great religions, Christianity alone invokes such a confession. In all the others, there are things one can and even must do to get in God's good graces. It's transactional in a sense. I've done this or that. I've earned it, so God owes me. And I should get at least some of the credit. In essence, I'm the one in the driver's seat. Whereas the Christian gospel in polar opposition asserts that God did it. Everything. And he gets the credit. All of it. I did absolutely nothing and am in his debt. Truly being poor in spirit has always been a challenge for humankind, and it's not getting any easier. Virtue signaling is a term that's gained a lot of traction in our popular culture, and although the term may be relatively new, the concept is not. As human beings, since time immemorial, have sought ways to assert their own virtue. Perhaps it's where we live, who we associate with, the church we attend, the good things we do, our families, our social setting, our vocation, our possessions, our education, our politics, you name it, we find a way to do it and have always found ways to do it. But But the temptation of virtue signal today is greater than ever. Advances in technology and communication, though life-changing and transformative in many, many ways, have a dark side. The platform, audience, and access each of us is now afforded are unrivaled in human history, and not all for the good. Without a doubt, there's great value in having a marketplace for ideas, social discourse, advocacy, and the like. But the ease with which we can now signal our virtue is nectar to our innate human desire to build ourselves up. It seems as if our entire society, certainly our media, entertainment, politics, commerce, have all become performance art. Everyone morphing into little Torquemadas, Spanish inquisitors, casting about, looking for those not thinking right, not speaking right, not acting right, not looking right, not voting right, not caring enough about the right things, caring too much about the wrong things, we've become quicker than ever to accuse and condemn. I'm not even on social media to speak of, yet I'm still caught up in this overall mood of the times. On my news feed each morning, I'll read something about an entertainer or politician or businessman or some journalist, and I'll immediately think to myself, what a twit. What a moron, an idiot. It's judgment. It's pride. An implicit comparison between me and the object of my ridicule and scorn. An assertion of my own virtue. I'm marinating in my rightness, goodness, and wisdom when I do that. How different is that from the Pharisee and the parable I read earlier? Thank God I'm not like that tax collector. I'll tell you what virtue signaling is not. It's not like anything resembling Jesus Christ and is absolutely antithetical to the gospel news, excuse me, to the good news of the gospel. Virtue signaling has a corrosive effect on us and social media hasn't helped but only amplified. After all, I already have these impulses to want to be right and viewed as smart and virtuous. I don't need them so easily catered to. It turns out the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of the day, were the first century's poster children for what today we call virtue signaling. Everything they did was performative for others to see and admire, totally wrapped up in an external righteousness rather than the real deal. And if one reads a little further in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reserved his harshest and most withering criticism and contempt for them, declaring that when Pharisees gave, prayed, and fasted in public for the praise and affirmation of men that they had received their reward in full. Convinced and satisfied with their own righteousness, they could not see their desperate need. They were far, far away from being poor in spirit and far, far away from the kingdom of heaven. Personally, I do not find these times we live in very helpful if I genuinely desire to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk of my faith. They do not cultivate in me a posture receptive to grace, nor encourage me to offer grace, empathy, and mercy to others. Rather, what is cultivated in me is a spirit of judgment, superiority, and disdain. Very hard to reconcile with Jesus' words, for whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Although we all virtue signal in some form or fashion, it's especially harmful when done by believers, those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. The temptation to signal our virtue has always been and continues to be an enormous Achilles heel for Christians and for the church. We are susceptible, because we still sin, to moving away over time from our initial confession of brokenness and need, of being poor in spirit, to something quite different. For example, I'm an elder here at Grace. I lead a couple of small groups. I volunteer in the toddler room. Man, I even went on a mission trip last fall. Sure, Christ died for my sins, but look at me now. I think we can all safely agree that I'm nailing it, right? Go me! Now those things I'm doing aren't bad. In fact, they're good things. It's my pride that's a problem. My lens has moved stealthily, covertly from my need to my merit. What I'm now presenting in my life is not the gospel and it's not the truth and is terribly misleading to anyone genuinely searching for the truth. So what can we do about this state of things? As I reflect on today's beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'm convinced we'd be better off signaling our vices more and our virtues less. More emphasis on what Christ has done on our behalf and less of what we've done on his. Being poor in spirit, confessing our spiritual poverty and need is not intended to be a one-time event, but only the beginning of a lifelong transformation empowered by God's Holy Spirit. We tend to underestimate the amazing power and ongoing blessing being poor in spirit offers to each of us individually and to the church as a whole. When we embrace our weakness and need, it's a much more honest and compelling witness of Jesus Christ than when we don't. I find it very revealing that the following brief little episode was deemed important enough to be included in three of the four Gospels, accounts of Jesus' life and ministry. Matthew, the disciple and former tax collector, was hosting a great banquet at his house for Jesus, along with a large crowd of tax collectors and other unsavory sorts. The Pharisees complained. Of course they did. Every party needs a poop. Asking why Jesus was dining and hanging out with these sinners, Jesus answered them as follows. It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. If the church is to be a welcoming, grace-filled infirmary that it's designed to be, rather than an exclusive enclave for the moral and virtuous. It's a shame that we so often act and are perceived as if we're the latter rather than the former. There is no advantage to clinging to these pretenses. We in the church are far more appealing and credible when we don't. One of the things I've always loved and valued most about grace is that we have, for the most part, leaned into the notion that we do not have our act together and hold such a confession to not only be self-evident, but hopeful, attractive, and life-giving. And though admitting one's abject spiritual poverty and desperate need might be a giant, depressing downer in the world's eyes, it offers great comfort and new life to those who actually know themselves to be sinners. Now, it's important to note that we can't make ourselves poor in spirit. It's not something we can do or become on our own. It's the work of God's Holy Spirit who convicts us of our sin and draws us to Jesus. But we can certainly cooperate with the Spirit. How we respond matters. We can remind ourselves through prayer, study, and worship that we are now in Jesus Christ not through anything we've done. When we embrace that defining fact that we are not Christ due to our being either moral or good, but because we've been forgiven, rescued, and redeemed, it unlocks the door to the magnificence of grace and grows our appetite to extend grace to others. Speaking only for myself, when I'm poor in spirit, there is a softening in my heart, a little more empathy and tolerance of others, a little less focused on others' deficiencies, a little more patient, a little more inclined to forgive. I'd like to close with one final remarkable and eye-opening parable from the book of Luke, which has such profound implications that I don't think it gets the attention that it deserves. Jesus was invited to dine at one of the Pharisees' houses. Learning of this, a woman from town who had led an immoral life brought perfume and stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping. Wetting his feet with her tears, she then wiped them with her hair, kissed, and poured perfume on them. The Pharisee was indignant, thinking to himself that if Jesus was truly a prophet, he would have known that the woman touching him was a sinner and how wrong this entire situation was. Knowing what his host was thinking, Jesus asked the Pharisee a question. He supposed the one who had the bigger debt canceled. You have judged correctly, Nor did she put oil on my head, but she has covered my feet with perfume. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little, loves little. Jesus then said to the woman, your sins are forgiven. Once again, the gospel turns everything we know on its head. It's not the upstanding and righteous who are most inclined and most able to love, but those who most appreciate the depth of their need for forgiveness, mercy, and grace, the poor in spirit. It literally is the gift that keeps on giving and the blessing that keeps on blessing. This moment in our culture, with all its acrimony and angst, presents an opportune time for us to offer something different, to truly be salt and light in a lost world that really just seems like it's thrashing about. In addition to being biblical and true, it's a lot more attractive and inviting to others when our lives reflect a healthy circumspection and wariness of our own virtue. And a well-founded confidence and well-placed trust in the righteousness and redemption offered through Jesus Christ. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Not only is poorness in spirit key to God's kingdom for us, it's the key to the kingdom for the world. There's a lot at stake. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your love. Thank you for the fact that we can stand before you without a claim, and you love us. That's what you expect. You're our God. You, your righteousness, your love, your grace and mercy are sufficient for us. Thank you for this morning. Pray that you'll use it to however you see fit. And I thank you for being merciful to me, a fool. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's exciting and a privilege to be up here this morning. So thank you all for coming and thanks as well to all those who are listening elsewhere. Although I probably shouldn't admit this, I wasn't initially excited about the prospect of speaking this morning. In fact, and as my wife Debbie will attest, when Nate first texted me to ask, my initial gut reaction was pretty much the same as it's always been when asked to speak. Texting Nate back, I wrote, hey, I was thinking that with Kyle and Aaron in the bullpen, perhaps my speaking days were coming to a close. And Nate replied, and I quote, we have a lot in the bullpen to be sure, but I think the church is best served through multiple voices, and I'd like for Grace to hear from you again, if possible. Now, I totally subscribe to the idea that hearing from a variety of voices is a healthy and good thing. But after a few moments, I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute, he didn't really answer my question. Why ask me and not the other more capable and willing voices? And this is where, if you're squeamish and like your safe spaces, you should cover your ears and avert your eyes, because I'm going to give you a glimpse into the seeming underbelly of church life. Nate's a gifted speaker and does a great job of conveying the truth of Scripture. He's also pretty smart. Not super smart, but pretty smart. And he's very clever. But most of all, he's cunning. Not pretty cunning. I mean really, really cunning. And he understands that no matter how good his sermons might be, it's an inevitable human tendency as night follows day for people to start taking things for granted, including his sermons. So for Nate, what better way to solve this problem than to remind everyone just how dry, pointless, and uninspiring a sermon can be if not done well. And what better way to do that than to trot me up here every six months or so. Voila. Presto change-o. Problem solved. Next Sunday morning, people will be streaming early to Grace just to get a seat, chomping at the bit to hear what Nate has to say. Not to worry, though. Despite being used in this way, it's not all bad for me. In fact, selfishly, two very good things have happened. The first is that I find preparing a sermon a big responsibility and a bit nerve-wracking, which in turn compels me to read more, study more, think more, pray more. I always feel completely inadequate, and that, paradoxically, turns out to be a very good place to be. So despite my early misgivings, by the time I'm finally ready and up here on stage, it's been such a spiritually rich experience for me that I'm truly excited and deeply grateful for the opportunity. Trying to get a little more light, excuse me. The other really good thing that's happened is that even though we are now in our third week of the sermon series on Jesus' Beatitudes, I got to pick which Beatitude to talk about. And I picked Jesus' first one, my favorite one. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's the first Beatitude and my favorite because it reveals an absolutely essential truth for each of us, regardless of station or circumstance. I was raised in a modern split-level suburban house wedged between Chicago Proper and O'Hare Airport. Down in the family room, my father had a large bookshelf filled with all sorts of fabulous books. Works of Shakespeare, Winston Churchill's six-volume set on World War II, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Contiki by Thor Heyerdahl, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and on and on. I didn't actually read many of them, and for sure none of the Shakespeare's. I could not make head nor tail of his Elizabethan English. But I loved taking the books down and paging through them. However, there was one book I actually did read a lot. This little book, 101 Famous Poems. I came to treasure this little book so much that when I was leaving home for good, I just took it from my parents' house without a word, and obviously have kept it since. I have many weaknesses and vices, some of which I freely admit and openly share, and others which I only acknowledge to God as they are embarrassing and a source of personal disappointment and even shame. But I can confidently say that stealing is not one of them, except perhaps this one time. Vice of mine or not, I couldn't think of a more fitting way to introduce today's beatitude than by reading the following poem from a book that I stole from my own parents. The Fool's Prayer by Edward Sill. The royal feast was done. The king sought some new sport to banish care, and to his jester cried, Sir fool, kneel down and make for us a prayer. The jester doffed his cap and bells and stood the mocking court before. They could not see the bitter smile behind the painted grin he wore. He bowed his head and bent his knee upon the monarch's silken stool. His pleading voice arose, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. No pity, Lord, can change the heart from red with wrong to white as wool. The rod must heal the sin, but Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. Tis not by guilt the onward sweep of truth and right, O Lord, we stay. Tis by our follies that so long we hold the earth from heaven away. These clumsy feet still in the mire go crushing blossoms without end. These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust among the heartstrings of a friend. The old-time truth we might have kept, who knows how sharp it pierced and stung. The word we had not sense to say, who knows how grandly it had rung. Our faults no tenderness should ask, the chastening stripes must cleanse them all, but for our blunders, oh, and shame, before the eyes of heaven we fall. Earth bears no balsam for mistakes. Men crown the knave and scourge the tool that did his will. But thou, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. The rooms hushed, and silence rose the king and sought his gardens cool, and walked apart and murmured low, be merciful to me, a fool. There are a million reasons why I love that poem. It tells of a surprise, a reversal in the accepted order. The greater brought low and it is the jester, not the king, who is wise. Everyone is equal before God. Everyone is lost. Everyone in need. It resonates because in our heart of hearts, we know it's true. It is the Upside down and inside out in virtually every way imaginable. And if I was in a court of law having to prove that point, I might start with the Beatitudes as my exhibit A. or the happy and healthy or the beautiful or the self-sufficient. But blessed are those who know that before God, they are a spiritual dumpster fire without merit and utterly undeserving of God's favor and blessing. That is what it means biblically to be poor in spirit. And that is a radically different take on how one goes about getting on God's good side. But a bit differently, the only thing that qualifies you or me to experience God's blessing is to honestly confess that we don't deserve to experience it at all. And why is that admission that we are utterly undeserving and without merit such a big deal? Because it's an acknowledgement that we are not okay, that we are separated from God and in desperate straits. And that, although it might seem initially like a depressing admission, in fact is a magnificent, mind-blowing blessing from God because it creates and fosters in us a posture receptive to his free offer of mercy, grace, and forgiveness through his son, Jesus Christ. In the book of Luke, Jesus tells a very famous story, the parable of the prodigal son that illustrates precisely this point. As many of you might recall, a man has two sons. The younger son asks for his inheritance, an act of enormous disrespect and outright rebellion in those days given that the father was still alive. The younger son then takes his share to a distant land where he proceeds to completely squander it on wild living. Predictably, he eventually falls on to hard times. Poverty, hunger, utter destitution. When he finally hits rock bottom, he has an epiphany. Realizing that he had sinned against his father and was no longer worthy of being called his father's son, he decides to return home and beg for mercy. But the father, seeing his son approaching in the distance, runs to him and hugs and kisses him and then throws a lavish party in the younger son's honor. All the while, the older son was having a fit, refusing to go into the party despite his father coming out and pleading with him to do so. The father tried to explain that everything he had was the older son's and that he was always with him. But all the older son could think about was the unfairness of it all. How obedient and hardworking he had been, how deserving, certainly compared to his brother. Although the extravagant, unmerited love and forgiveness the father offered his youngest son is breathtaking in that story, there is another key takeaway, the remarkable contrast between the fates of the two sons, a complete reversal of what we would suspect. The younger son failed spectacularly, but in so doing was brought to a place in which he clearly acknowledged that he stood before his father without a claim. Albeit not by his design, and certainly not something he signed up for, the younger son, through his ordeal, had become poor in spirit. And as a result of that condition, that posture, he experienced the mercy, forgiveness, and grace freely offered to him by his father. Tragically, his older son, convinced of his own righteousness and merit, was blinded to what his father was always offering him. And at the end of the day, it was the younger, the prodigal son who was advantaged and blessed, and it was the older who remained lost. Admittedly, those takeaways are somewhat nuanced and subtle, so I'll read another parable from Luke This is in Luke 18. some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked downterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Jesus goes on to say, I tell you that this man, the tax collector, rather than the other, went home justified before God. That word means made right before him, declared not guilty. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. It's pretty straightforward. The Pharisee thought he was okay and was not. The tax collector knew he was not and was blessed. Over the previous two weeks, Nates explained that our English translation of blessed doesn't do justice to what Jesus was talking about in the Beatitudes. More than happy, more than good fortune, more than favorable circumstances. Biblically, the word refers to an eternal security and well-being that aren't at all dependent on our feelings and circumstances. Regardless how difficult or unpromising things might seem at the time. And to be given the kingdom of heaven is simply another way of referring to salvation, redeemed by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's the ultimate blessedness, beginning first in this life, but ultimately culminating in an eternity with God. So this first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, is second to none in importance as all roads to God's blessing and favor run through it. And there's a lot at stake, as it's my belief, that realizing one's desperate need is the single biggest stumbling block for people coming to faith to Jesus Christ. After all, salvation doesn't mean much if you're not convinced you need saving. But as critical as it is to recognize one's need, it's not sufficient. It's necessary, but just like in the story of the prodigal son, one must, in faith, return to the father to experience his goodness. Now, some may feel the urge to protest. Hey, Doug, I'm not that bad a person. In fact, I'm a pretty good person. In response, I'd say, that may very well be true. You may be a good person. Not only is that a very low bar, it's also the wrong bar. So why do we have to admit that we're spiritually bankrupt? The simplest answer is that it's true. I've often made the point that if I ever meet someone who seems like they have their act totally together, I simply conclude that I must not know them well enough. Although trying to be funny when I say that, I believe it's true. You might accuse me of being overly cynical, but I don't think so, and neither does Scripture. As the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans, there is no one righteous, not even one. And a few verses later, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, there's that word again, declared not guilty, made right with God, freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. And in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul makes the so that no one can boast. The kingdom of heaven, God's ultimate blessing and desire for each of us is simply not attained by the good things we might do, no matter how many or how good. Rather, it's reserved for the poor in spirit. Now, why is it so hard for us to admit our poverty and desperate need? There are lots of reasons, but the biggest is sin itself. In a massive, universal catch-22, it's our own sinfulness which keeps us from seeing how sinful we actually are. Virtually everything in our nature is singing a different tune. Hey, I'm really not that bad, and I'm certainly not totally helpless. I have agency. At its core, it's human pride, an implicit assertion of our own sovereignty, that we can steer our own ship. Thank you very much. We can figure out what's best for us. Confessing one's spiritual bankruptcy and abject need so completely rubs against the grain of everything our world tells us that even among the world's great religions, Christianity alone invokes such a confession. In all the others, there are things one can and even must do to get in God's good graces. It's transactional in a sense. I've done this or that. I've earned it, so God owes me. And I should get at least some of the credit. In essence, I'm the one in the driver's seat. Whereas the Christian gospel in polar opposition asserts that God did it. Everything. And he gets the credit. All of it. I did absolutely nothing and am in his debt. Truly being poor in spirit has always been a challenge for humankind, and it's not getting any easier. Virtue signaling is a term that's gained a lot of traction in our popular culture, and although the term may be relatively new, the concept is not. As human beings, since time immemorial, have sought ways to assert their own virtue. Perhaps it's where we live, who we associate with, the church we attend, the good things we do, our families, our social setting, our vocation, our possessions, our education, our politics, you name it, we find a way to do it and have always found ways to do it. But But the temptation of virtue signal today is greater than ever. Advances in technology and communication, though life-changing and transformative in many, many ways, have a dark side. The platform, audience, and access each of us is now afforded are unrivaled in human history, and not all for the good. Without a doubt, there's great value in having a marketplace for ideas, social discourse, advocacy, and the like. But the ease with which we can now signal our virtue is nectar to our innate human desire to build ourselves up. It seems as if our entire society, certainly our media, entertainment, politics, commerce, have all become performance art. Everyone morphing into little Torquemadas, Spanish inquisitors, casting about, looking for those not thinking right, not speaking right, not acting right, not looking right, not voting right, not caring enough about the right things, caring too much about the wrong things, we've become quicker than ever to accuse and condemn. I'm not even on social media to speak of, yet I'm still caught up in this overall mood of the times. On my news feed each morning, I'll read something about an entertainer or politician or businessman or some journalist, and I'll immediately think to myself, what a twit. What a moron, an idiot. It's judgment. It's pride. An implicit comparison between me and the object of my ridicule and scorn. An assertion of my own virtue. I'm marinating in my rightness, goodness, and wisdom when I do that. How different is that from the Pharisee and the parable I read earlier? Thank God I'm not like that tax collector. I'll tell you what virtue signaling is not. It's not like anything resembling Jesus Christ and is absolutely antithetical to the gospel news, excuse me, to the good news of the gospel. Virtue signaling has a corrosive effect on us and social media hasn't helped but only amplified. After all, I already have these impulses to want to be right and viewed as smart and virtuous. I don't need them so easily catered to. It turns out the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of the day, were the first century's poster children for what today we call virtue signaling. Everything they did was performative for others to see and admire, totally wrapped up in an external righteousness rather than the real deal. And if one reads a little further in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reserved his harshest and most withering criticism and contempt for them, declaring that when Pharisees gave, prayed, and fasted in public for the praise and affirmation of men that they had received their reward in full. Convinced and satisfied with their own righteousness, they could not see their desperate need. They were far, far away from being poor in spirit and far, far away from the kingdom of heaven. Personally, I do not find these times we live in very helpful if I genuinely desire to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk of my faith. They do not cultivate in me a posture receptive to grace, nor encourage me to offer grace, empathy, and mercy to others. Rather, what is cultivated in me is a spirit of judgment, superiority, and disdain. Very hard to reconcile with Jesus' words, for whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Although we all virtue signal in some form or fashion, it's especially harmful when done by believers, those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. The temptation to signal our virtue has always been and continues to be an enormous Achilles heel for Christians and for the church. We are susceptible, because we still sin, to moving away over time from our initial confession of brokenness and need, of being poor in spirit, to something quite different. For example, I'm an elder here at Grace. I lead a couple of small groups. I volunteer in the toddler room. Man, I even went on a mission trip last fall. Sure, Christ died for my sins, but look at me now. I think we can all safely agree that I'm nailing it, right? Go me! Now those things I'm doing aren't bad. In fact, they're good things. It's my pride that's a problem. My lens has moved stealthily, covertly from my need to my merit. What I'm now presenting in my life is not the gospel and it's not the truth and is terribly misleading to anyone genuinely searching for the truth. So what can we do about this state of things? As I reflect on today's beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'm convinced we'd be better off signaling our vices more and our virtues less. More emphasis on what Christ has done on our behalf and less of what we've done on his. Being poor in spirit, confessing our spiritual poverty and need is not intended to be a one-time event, but only the beginning of a lifelong transformation empowered by God's Holy Spirit. We tend to underestimate the amazing power and ongoing blessing being poor in spirit offers to each of us individually and to the church as a whole. When we embrace our weakness and need, it's a much more honest and compelling witness of Jesus Christ than when we don't. I find it very revealing that the following brief little episode was deemed important enough to be included in three of the four Gospels, accounts of Jesus' life and ministry. Matthew, the disciple and former tax collector, was hosting a great banquet at his house for Jesus, along with a large crowd of tax collectors and other unsavory sorts. The Pharisees complained. Of course they did. Every party needs a poop. Asking why Jesus was dining and hanging out with these sinners, Jesus answered them as follows. It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. If the church is to be a welcoming, grace-filled infirmary that it's designed to be, rather than an exclusive enclave for the moral and virtuous. It's a shame that we so often act and are perceived as if we're the latter rather than the former. There is no advantage to clinging to these pretenses. We in the church are far more appealing and credible when we don't. One of the things I've always loved and valued most about grace is that we have, for the most part, leaned into the notion that we do not have our act together and hold such a confession to not only be self-evident, but hopeful, attractive, and life-giving. And though admitting one's abject spiritual poverty and desperate need might be a giant, depressing downer in the world's eyes, it offers great comfort and new life to those who actually know themselves to be sinners. Now, it's important to note that we can't make ourselves poor in spirit. It's not something we can do or become on our own. It's the work of God's Holy Spirit who convicts us of our sin and draws us to Jesus. But we can certainly cooperate with the Spirit. How we respond matters. We can remind ourselves through prayer, study, and worship that we are now in Jesus Christ not through anything we've done. When we embrace that defining fact that we are not Christ due to our being either moral or good, but because we've been forgiven, rescued, and redeemed, it unlocks the door to the magnificence of grace and grows our appetite to extend grace to others. Speaking only for myself, when I'm poor in spirit, there is a softening in my heart, a little more empathy and tolerance of others, a little less focused on others' deficiencies, a little more patient, a little more inclined to forgive. I'd like to close with one final remarkable and eye-opening parable from the book of Luke, which has such profound implications that I don't think it gets the attention that it deserves. Jesus was invited to dine at one of the Pharisees' houses. Learning of this, a woman from town who had led an immoral life brought perfume and stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping. Wetting his feet with her tears, she then wiped them with her hair, kissed, and poured perfume on them. The Pharisee was indignant, thinking to himself that if Jesus was truly a prophet, he would have known that the woman touching him was a sinner and how wrong this entire situation was. Knowing what his host was thinking, Jesus asked the Pharisee a question. He supposed the one who had the bigger debt canceled. You have judged correctly, Nor did she put oil on my head, but she has covered my feet with perfume. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little, loves little. Jesus then said to the woman, your sins are forgiven. Once again, the gospel turns everything we know on its head. It's not the upstanding and righteous who are most inclined and most able to love, but those who most appreciate the depth of their need for forgiveness, mercy, and grace, the poor in spirit. It literally is the gift that keeps on giving and the blessing that keeps on blessing. This moment in our culture, with all its acrimony and angst, presents an opportune time for us to offer something different, to truly be salt and light in a lost world that really just seems like it's thrashing about. In addition to being biblical and true, it's a lot more attractive and inviting to others when our lives reflect a healthy circumspection and wariness of our own virtue. And a well-founded confidence and well-placed trust in the righteousness and redemption offered through Jesus Christ. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Not only is poorness in spirit key to God's kingdom for us, it's the key to the kingdom for the world. There's a lot at stake. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your love. Thank you for the fact that we can stand before you without a claim, and you love us. That's what you expect. You're our God. You, your righteousness, your love, your grace and mercy are sufficient for us. Thank you for this morning. Pray that you'll use it to however you see fit. And I thank you for being merciful to me, a fool. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's exciting and a privilege to be up here this morning. So thank you all for coming and thanks as well to all those who are listening elsewhere. Although I probably shouldn't admit this, I wasn't initially excited about the prospect of speaking this morning. In fact, and as my wife Debbie will attest, when Nate first texted me to ask, my initial gut reaction was pretty much the same as it's always been when asked to speak. Texting Nate back, I wrote, hey, I was thinking that with Kyle and Aaron in the bullpen, perhaps my speaking days were coming to a close. And Nate replied, and I quote, we have a lot in the bullpen to be sure, but I think the church is best served through multiple voices, and I'd like for Grace to hear from you again, if possible. Now, I totally subscribe to the idea that hearing from a variety of voices is a healthy and good thing. But after a few moments, I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute, he didn't really answer my question. Why ask me and not the other more capable and willing voices? And this is where, if you're squeamish and like your safe spaces, you should cover your ears and avert your eyes, because I'm going to give you a glimpse into the seeming underbelly of church life. Nate's a gifted speaker and does a great job of conveying the truth of Scripture. He's also pretty smart. Not super smart, but pretty smart. And he's very clever. But most of all, he's cunning. Not pretty cunning. I mean really, really cunning. And he understands that no matter how good his sermons might be, it's an inevitable human tendency as night follows day for people to start taking things for granted, including his sermons. So for Nate, what better way to solve this problem than to remind everyone just how dry, pointless, and uninspiring a sermon can be if not done well. And what better way to do that than to trot me up here every six months or so. Voila. Presto change-o. Problem solved. Next Sunday morning, people will be streaming early to Grace just to get a seat, chomping at the bit to hear what Nate has to say. Not to worry, though. Despite being used in this way, it's not all bad for me. In fact, selfishly, two very good things have happened. The first is that I find preparing a sermon a big responsibility and a bit nerve-wracking, which in turn compels me to read more, study more, think more, pray more. I always feel completely inadequate, and that, paradoxically, turns out to be a very good place to be. So despite my early misgivings, by the time I'm finally ready and up here on stage, it's been such a spiritually rich experience for me that I'm truly excited and deeply grateful for the opportunity. Trying to get a little more light, excuse me. The other really good thing that's happened is that even though we are now in our third week of the sermon series on Jesus' Beatitudes, I got to pick which Beatitude to talk about. And I picked Jesus' first one, my favorite one. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's the first Beatitude and my favorite because it reveals an absolutely essential truth for each of us, regardless of station or circumstance. I was raised in a modern split-level suburban house wedged between Chicago Proper and O'Hare Airport. Down in the family room, my father had a large bookshelf filled with all sorts of fabulous books. Works of Shakespeare, Winston Churchill's six-volume set on World War II, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Contiki by Thor Heyerdahl, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and on and on. I didn't actually read many of them, and for sure none of the Shakespeare's. I could not make head nor tail of his Elizabethan English. But I loved taking the books down and paging through them. However, there was one book I actually did read a lot. This little book, 101 Famous Poems. I came to treasure this little book so much that when I was leaving home for good, I just took it from my parents' house without a word, and obviously have kept it since. I have many weaknesses and vices, some of which I freely admit and openly share, and others which I only acknowledge to God as they are embarrassing and a source of personal disappointment and even shame. But I can confidently say that stealing is not one of them, except perhaps this one time. Vice of mine or not, I couldn't think of a more fitting way to introduce today's beatitude than by reading the following poem from a book that I stole from my own parents. The Fool's Prayer by Edward Sill. The royal feast was done. The king sought some new sport to banish care, and to his jester cried, Sir fool, kneel down and make for us a prayer. The jester doffed his cap and bells and stood the mocking court before. They could not see the bitter smile behind the painted grin he wore. He bowed his head and bent his knee upon the monarch's silken stool. His pleading voice arose, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. No pity, Lord, can change the heart from red with wrong to white as wool. The rod must heal the sin, but Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. Tis not by guilt the onward sweep of truth and right, O Lord, we stay. Tis by our follies that so long we hold the earth from heaven away. These clumsy feet still in the mire go crushing blossoms without end. These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust among the heartstrings of a friend. The old-time truth we might have kept, who knows how sharp it pierced and stung. The word we had not sense to say, who knows how grandly it had rung. Our faults no tenderness should ask, the chastening stripes must cleanse them all, but for our blunders, oh, and shame, before the eyes of heaven we fall. Earth bears no balsam for mistakes. Men crown the knave and scourge the tool that did his will. But thou, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. The rooms hushed, and silence rose the king and sought his gardens cool, and walked apart and murmured low, be merciful to me, a fool. There are a million reasons why I love that poem. It tells of a surprise, a reversal in the accepted order. The greater brought low and it is the jester, not the king, who is wise. Everyone is equal before God. Everyone is lost. Everyone in need. It resonates because in our heart of hearts, we know it's true. It is the Upside down and inside out in virtually every way imaginable. And if I was in a court of law having to prove that point, I might start with the Beatitudes as my exhibit A. or the happy and healthy or the beautiful or the self-sufficient. But blessed are those who know that before God, they are a spiritual dumpster fire without merit and utterly undeserving of God's favor and blessing. That is what it means biblically to be poor in spirit. And that is a radically different take on how one goes about getting on God's good side. But a bit differently, the only thing that qualifies you or me to experience God's blessing is to honestly confess that we don't deserve to experience it at all. And why is that admission that we are utterly undeserving and without merit such a big deal? Because it's an acknowledgement that we are not okay, that we are separated from God and in desperate straits. And that, although it might seem initially like a depressing admission, in fact is a magnificent, mind-blowing blessing from God because it creates and fosters in us a posture receptive to his free offer of mercy, grace, and forgiveness through his son, Jesus Christ. In the book of Luke, Jesus tells a very famous story, the parable of the prodigal son that illustrates precisely this point. As many of you might recall, a man has two sons. The younger son asks for his inheritance, an act of enormous disrespect and outright rebellion in those days given that the father was still alive. The younger son then takes his share to a distant land where he proceeds to completely squander it on wild living. Predictably, he eventually falls on to hard times. Poverty, hunger, utter destitution. When he finally hits rock bottom, he has an epiphany. Realizing that he had sinned against his father and was no longer worthy of being called his father's son, he decides to return home and beg for mercy. But the father, seeing his son approaching in the distance, runs to him and hugs and kisses him and then throws a lavish party in the younger son's honor. All the while, the older son was having a fit, refusing to go into the party despite his father coming out and pleading with him to do so. The father tried to explain that everything he had was the older son's and that he was always with him. But all the older son could think about was the unfairness of it all. How obedient and hardworking he had been, how deserving, certainly compared to his brother. Although the extravagant, unmerited love and forgiveness the father offered his youngest son is breathtaking in that story, there is another key takeaway, the remarkable contrast between the fates of the two sons, a complete reversal of what we would suspect. The younger son failed spectacularly, but in so doing was brought to a place in which he clearly acknowledged that he stood before his father without a claim. Albeit not by his design, and certainly not something he signed up for, the younger son, through his ordeal, had become poor in spirit. And as a result of that condition, that posture, he experienced the mercy, forgiveness, and grace freely offered to him by his father. Tragically, his older son, convinced of his own righteousness and merit, was blinded to what his father was always offering him. And at the end of the day, it was the younger, the prodigal son who was advantaged and blessed, and it was the older who remained lost. Admittedly, those takeaways are somewhat nuanced and subtle, so I'll read another parable from Luke This is in Luke 18. some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked downterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Jesus goes on to say, I tell you that this man, the tax collector, rather than the other, went home justified before God. That word means made right before him, declared not guilty. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. It's pretty straightforward. The Pharisee thought he was okay and was not. The tax collector knew he was not and was blessed. Over the previous two weeks, Nates explained that our English translation of blessed doesn't do justice to what Jesus was talking about in the Beatitudes. More than happy, more than good fortune, more than favorable circumstances. Biblically, the word refers to an eternal security and well-being that aren't at all dependent on our feelings and circumstances. Regardless how difficult or unpromising things might seem at the time. And to be given the kingdom of heaven is simply another way of referring to salvation, redeemed by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's the ultimate blessedness, beginning first in this life, but ultimately culminating in an eternity with God. So this first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, is second to none in importance as all roads to God's blessing and favor run through it. And there's a lot at stake, as it's my belief, that realizing one's desperate need is the single biggest stumbling block for people coming to faith to Jesus Christ. After all, salvation doesn't mean much if you're not convinced you need saving. But as critical as it is to recognize one's need, it's not sufficient. It's necessary, but just like in the story of the prodigal son, one must, in faith, return to the father to experience his goodness. Now, some may feel the urge to protest. Hey, Doug, I'm not that bad a person. In fact, I'm a pretty good person. In response, I'd say, that may very well be true. You may be a good person. Not only is that a very low bar, it's also the wrong bar. So why do we have to admit that we're spiritually bankrupt? The simplest answer is that it's true. I've often made the point that if I ever meet someone who seems like they have their act totally together, I simply conclude that I must not know them well enough. Although trying to be funny when I say that, I believe it's true. You might accuse me of being overly cynical, but I don't think so, and neither does Scripture. As the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans, there is no one righteous, not even one. And a few verses later, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, there's that word again, declared not guilty, made right with God, freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. And in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul makes the so that no one can boast. The kingdom of heaven, God's ultimate blessing and desire for each of us is simply not attained by the good things we might do, no matter how many or how good. Rather, it's reserved for the poor in spirit. Now, why is it so hard for us to admit our poverty and desperate need? There are lots of reasons, but the biggest is sin itself. In a massive, universal catch-22, it's our own sinfulness which keeps us from seeing how sinful we actually are. Virtually everything in our nature is singing a different tune. Hey, I'm really not that bad, and I'm certainly not totally helpless. I have agency. At its core, it's human pride, an implicit assertion of our own sovereignty, that we can steer our own ship. Thank you very much. We can figure out what's best for us. Confessing one's spiritual bankruptcy and abject need so completely rubs against the grain of everything our world tells us that even among the world's great religions, Christianity alone invokes such a confession. In all the others, there are things one can and even must do to get in God's good graces. It's transactional in a sense. I've done this or that. I've earned it, so God owes me. And I should get at least some of the credit. In essence, I'm the one in the driver's seat. Whereas the Christian gospel in polar opposition asserts that God did it. Everything. And he gets the credit. All of it. I did absolutely nothing and am in his debt. Truly being poor in spirit has always been a challenge for humankind, and it's not getting any easier. Virtue signaling is a term that's gained a lot of traction in our popular culture, and although the term may be relatively new, the concept is not. As human beings, since time immemorial, have sought ways to assert their own virtue. Perhaps it's where we live, who we associate with, the church we attend, the good things we do, our families, our social setting, our vocation, our possessions, our education, our politics, you name it, we find a way to do it and have always found ways to do it. But But the temptation of virtue signal today is greater than ever. Advances in technology and communication, though life-changing and transformative in many, many ways, have a dark side. The platform, audience, and access each of us is now afforded are unrivaled in human history, and not all for the good. Without a doubt, there's great value in having a marketplace for ideas, social discourse, advocacy, and the like. But the ease with which we can now signal our virtue is nectar to our innate human desire to build ourselves up. It seems as if our entire society, certainly our media, entertainment, politics, commerce, have all become performance art. Everyone morphing into little Torquemadas, Spanish inquisitors, casting about, looking for those not thinking right, not speaking right, not acting right, not looking right, not voting right, not caring enough about the right things, caring too much about the wrong things, we've become quicker than ever to accuse and condemn. I'm not even on social media to speak of, yet I'm still caught up in this overall mood of the times. On my news feed each morning, I'll read something about an entertainer or politician or businessman or some journalist, and I'll immediately think to myself, what a twit. What a moron, an idiot. It's judgment. It's pride. An implicit comparison between me and the object of my ridicule and scorn. An assertion of my own virtue. I'm marinating in my rightness, goodness, and wisdom when I do that. How different is that from the Pharisee and the parable I read earlier? Thank God I'm not like that tax collector. I'll tell you what virtue signaling is not. It's not like anything resembling Jesus Christ and is absolutely antithetical to the gospel news, excuse me, to the good news of the gospel. Virtue signaling has a corrosive effect on us and social media hasn't helped but only amplified. After all, I already have these impulses to want to be right and viewed as smart and virtuous. I don't need them so easily catered to. It turns out the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of the day, were the first century's poster children for what today we call virtue signaling. Everything they did was performative for others to see and admire, totally wrapped up in an external righteousness rather than the real deal. And if one reads a little further in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reserved his harshest and most withering criticism and contempt for them, declaring that when Pharisees gave, prayed, and fasted in public for the praise and affirmation of men that they had received their reward in full. Convinced and satisfied with their own righteousness, they could not see their desperate need. They were far, far away from being poor in spirit and far, far away from the kingdom of heaven. Personally, I do not find these times we live in very helpful if I genuinely desire to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk of my faith. They do not cultivate in me a posture receptive to grace, nor encourage me to offer grace, empathy, and mercy to others. Rather, what is cultivated in me is a spirit of judgment, superiority, and disdain. Very hard to reconcile with Jesus' words, for whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Although we all virtue signal in some form or fashion, it's especially harmful when done by believers, those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. The temptation to signal our virtue has always been and continues to be an enormous Achilles heel for Christians and for the church. We are susceptible, because we still sin, to moving away over time from our initial confession of brokenness and need, of being poor in spirit, to something quite different. For example, I'm an elder here at Grace. I lead a couple of small groups. I volunteer in the toddler room. Man, I even went on a mission trip last fall. Sure, Christ died for my sins, but look at me now. I think we can all safely agree that I'm nailing it, right? Go me! Now those things I'm doing aren't bad. In fact, they're good things. It's my pride that's a problem. My lens has moved stealthily, covertly from my need to my merit. What I'm now presenting in my life is not the gospel and it's not the truth and is terribly misleading to anyone genuinely searching for the truth. So what can we do about this state of things? As I reflect on today's beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'm convinced we'd be better off signaling our vices more and our virtues less. More emphasis on what Christ has done on our behalf and less of what we've done on his. Being poor in spirit, confessing our spiritual poverty and need is not intended to be a one-time event, but only the beginning of a lifelong transformation empowered by God's Holy Spirit. We tend to underestimate the amazing power and ongoing blessing being poor in spirit offers to each of us individually and to the church as a whole. When we embrace our weakness and need, it's a much more honest and compelling witness of Jesus Christ than when we don't. I find it very revealing that the following brief little episode was deemed important enough to be included in three of the four Gospels, accounts of Jesus' life and ministry. Matthew, the disciple and former tax collector, was hosting a great banquet at his house for Jesus, along with a large crowd of tax collectors and other unsavory sorts. The Pharisees complained. Of course they did. Every party needs a poop. Asking why Jesus was dining and hanging out with these sinners, Jesus answered them as follows. It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. If the church is to be a welcoming, grace-filled infirmary that it's designed to be, rather than an exclusive enclave for the moral and virtuous. It's a shame that we so often act and are perceived as if we're the latter rather than the former. There is no advantage to clinging to these pretenses. We in the church are far more appealing and credible when we don't. One of the things I've always loved and valued most about grace is that we have, for the most part, leaned into the notion that we do not have our act together and hold such a confession to not only be self-evident, but hopeful, attractive, and life-giving. And though admitting one's abject spiritual poverty and desperate need might be a giant, depressing downer in the world's eyes, it offers great comfort and new life to those who actually know themselves to be sinners. Now, it's important to note that we can't make ourselves poor in spirit. It's not something we can do or become on our own. It's the work of God's Holy Spirit who convicts us of our sin and draws us to Jesus. But we can certainly cooperate with the Spirit. How we respond matters. We can remind ourselves through prayer, study, and worship that we are now in Jesus Christ not through anything we've done. When we embrace that defining fact that we are not Christ due to our being either moral or good, but because we've been forgiven, rescued, and redeemed, it unlocks the door to the magnificence of grace and grows our appetite to extend grace to others. Speaking only for myself, when I'm poor in spirit, there is a softening in my heart, a little more empathy and tolerance of others, a little less focused on others' deficiencies, a little more patient, a little more inclined to forgive. I'd like to close with one final remarkable and eye-opening parable from the book of Luke, which has such profound implications that I don't think it gets the attention that it deserves. Jesus was invited to dine at one of the Pharisees' houses. Learning of this, a woman from town who had led an immoral life brought perfume and stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping. Wetting his feet with her tears, she then wiped them with her hair, kissed, and poured perfume on them. The Pharisee was indignant, thinking to himself that if Jesus was truly a prophet, he would have known that the woman touching him was a sinner and how wrong this entire situation was. Knowing what his host was thinking, Jesus asked the Pharisee a question. He supposed the one who had the bigger debt canceled. You have judged correctly, Nor did she put oil on my head, but she has covered my feet with perfume. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little, loves little. Jesus then said to the woman, your sins are forgiven. Once again, the gospel turns everything we know on its head. It's not the upstanding and righteous who are most inclined and most able to love, but those who most appreciate the depth of their need for forgiveness, mercy, and grace, the poor in spirit. It literally is the gift that keeps on giving and the blessing that keeps on blessing. This moment in our culture, with all its acrimony and angst, presents an opportune time for us to offer something different, to truly be salt and light in a lost world that really just seems like it's thrashing about. In addition to being biblical and true, it's a lot more attractive and inviting to others when our lives reflect a healthy circumspection and wariness of our own virtue. And a well-founded confidence and well-placed trust in the righteousness and redemption offered through Jesus Christ. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Not only is poorness in spirit key to God's kingdom for us, it's the key to the kingdom for the world. There's a lot at stake. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your love. Thank you for the fact that we can stand before you without a claim, and you love us. That's what you expect. You're our God. You, your righteousness, your love, your grace and mercy are sufficient for us. Thank you for this morning. Pray that you'll use it to however you see fit. And I thank you for being merciful to me, a fool. Amen.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm DJ Hill. I'm a partner here at Grace along with Laura, my wife, and three daughters. Today's reading is from Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, verses 9 through 12. Two are better than one, because they have good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two can withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Thank you. Thank you, DJ. I was pleased to discover that you're literate. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This is the fourth part in our series called The Traits of Grace, where we're going through and we're just talking about the things and the aspects that make grace, grace, that make us who we are. Part of it is getting to pick on each other a little bit. And so this week is one that is, this is near and dear to all of our hearts. If this is, If you have been at Grace for any amount of time, then this is something that resonates deeply with you. It's something that characterizes us and who we are, and it's something that we choose over and over again in the way that we structure ourselves, in the way that we do things, and in the kind of church that we want to be. And so this morning, we get to talk about the fourth trait, which is that we are partners at Grace. We are partners. And we say that we don't have members at Grace, that we have partners instead, which is actually kind of funny to me that I'm such a stickler about having partners instead of members, because I've been doing vocational ministry 20 years. And one of the things I've always thought is kind of funny about the church is the way that we like to name stuff. Like we're super cool and we're coming up with new things. I was the small groups pastor at my previous church and I watched those things. First, when I was growing up, it was called Sunday school, right? And then in the 90s, we changed it to small groups. Now we're fancy. And then small groups weren't fancy enough, so we started calling them community groups or life groups or discipleship groups. And then there was this whole movement in the last couple of years to start house churches. And you're like, well, what's a house church? Like, well, you gather together and you kind of pray for each other and you talk about things you worship. I says, oh, it's like a small group. Like, no, no, no, house church. Well, what do you do on Sunday? Well, we go to big church together. Oh, so it's a small group. Like that's what we do. We like to rename things so that outsiders can't figure out what's going on in here. And it's really, it's just stupid. And I did it too. I was talking about this with my wife, Jen. And I was like, what are some other dumb church names that we've come up with over the years? Like on Sunday mornings, instead of calling it the service, we call it the gathering. And instead of calling it a sermon, we call it the talk, right? Because we're just trying to be cooler and more relevant in what we do. And she got on to me. She was like, you were guilty of this. She said, what was your ministry called in your first church? The first church I worked at was in Franklin County, Virginia, Rocky Mount, close to Smith Mountain Lake. And I had a buddy that started a church called Covenant Community Church. I believe it's still going. And we met in this old colonial home out in the middle of nowhere in the farmland of Franklin County, Virginia. We had about 30 people who came every week, which, by the way, we're about the same size as Grace is now based on the amount of families that stood up. We don't have space but for 30 people a week if you guys, if you families come every week. But I led a ministry. It was the student ministry, and I called it One because it was based on, I believe, Luke 15 where Jesus is talking to Mary and Martha, and he tells Mary, you need to worry about but one thing, and it's loving me. And so I called it One, which was aptly named because that's about how many kids I had per week on the Wednesday, right? And then I get to the big church with 200 kids in the middle school, and that was my ministry, and I called that Up and Out, right? Well, what's Up and Out? Well, it means love God, love others, love up, love up, love out. Oh, that's great. Well, who's it for? Well, it's for middle school. So it's middle school ministry? No, it's up and out. It's up and out, right? And this is what we do. We come up with dumb names for stuff and they're unnecessary and we don't need them and Grace is guilty of this too. I don't know if you know this, but if you haven't been going to Grace for a long time, you might not know that this is called Grace Hall. Now, I've never called it that, but the people who came before me call it that. This is an auditorium, and really, that's insulting to auditoriums. This is a big room with a pole in it, right? That's what this is. So I'm real big on just call it what it is. If it's Sunday school, call it Sunday school. If it's a small group, call it small group. But if it's ministry, call it ministry. So why am I such a stickler about, no, no, no, at Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. And I catch heck for this. I'll be talking to elders or leaders in the church or people who have been going here for a while and they'll be like, yeah, yeah, well, how many members do we have right now? Or what's the membership vote on that? Or are they a member of the church? I'm sorry, they're partners of the church. Like, we got you, buddy. We'll help you carry this load of calling things partners. And everybody kind of giggles at me that I'm a real dummy for insisting that we use the term partners. And I understand. I would make fun of me too if I were you. But let me tell you why I'm such a stickler about this word partner and why it really does define who and what we are at Grace and what we're trying to do. The first reason is not the main reason, but the first reason is the one that I repeat often. A lot of you can probably say this as well. You probably know how the sentence ends, but members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's one of the first reasons. At Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. Members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute, right? If you become a member of something, what do you become primarily concerned with? What are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this thing? If you joined BJ's, what are the rights and privileges I get? Costco, you get a dollar slice of pizza. That's a pretty good right and privilege. You join Northridge Country Club, what are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this place? Right? When you're a member, you kind of sit back and you go, well, what's in it for me? What do I get out of this? What can I consume? When you're a member, you expect a certain experience. You expect to consume a certain experience. And then when you can't consume it, you critique it. Until you do get to consume the experience you want. As a pastor, I don't really want a church full of members who consume an experience and then critique it when it's not what they want. We want partners who partner with us because partners tend to contribute. Partners take ownership and what they're partnered in and see it as their personal responsibility to see the success of this thing work out. And really, the more I thought about it this week, because we're going to talk about how this is true, but the more I thought about it this week, the more satisfied I was with understanding partners this way. Partners share the burden. That's what partners do. Partners share the burden in myriad ways. The greatest picture of partnership that I've seen in the Bible, and I love this picture in the Bible. I don't have any tattoos, not because I think they're sinful or something, but there's nothing I want to put on my body that I'm sure I'm going to want there in 20 years. So I haven't done anything yet. But if I were going to get one, it may very well be an image of this story. When I think about this story and this scene in the Bible for too long, I'll tear up. I'll start to cry. And I'm going to read this to you, and you're going to think, why is this dude tearing up at this story? Listen, first of all, the older I get, the more I tear up at. Jen and I are back onto watching the Great British Baking Show, and we cry at the end of every episode because we're so happy for Juergen that he gets to call his wife again. Like, we're so thrilled that we tear up, and then we look at each other, and we laugh. And the older I get, the more stuff I cry about. And if you want to judge me for that, I'll tell you right where you can put your judgment. But when I think about this passage and the picture here, it moves me to tears because of how powerful it is. So what's happening is we're in the book of Exodus. I'm going to read from chapter 17. And in the book of Exodus, God's children are wandering through the desert. They're being led by Moses. And a man named Amalek comes up against them with his army and he attacks the Israelite people. He attacks the Hebrew people. And so Moses sends his general, Joshua, out to battle. And he says, I want you to go and I want you to fight against Amalek. And I'm going to go up on the top of this hill and I'm going to hold my staff over my head. And when you're down there fighting and you look up at me, as long as my staff is up over my head, you will prevail. So go and fight. So Joshua does. He gathers the army and he goes and he fights. And this is what happens. We pick it up in verse 11. It's such an incredible picture. Moses says, go down there and you fight that battle. And I'm going to hold this staff over my head. And as long as I hold it up, you guys will prevail. But you know, holding a stick over your head burns the shoulders a little bit. It fatigues the muscles. And so every now and again, he had to shake it out. He got weary. He got tired. He couldn't hold it up. He couldn't carry that burden. And as he got weak, the men on the battlefield began to suffer. And so he had to find the strength and pick his hands back up again for as long as he could to carry that burden. And eventually Aaron and Hur, H-U-R, burden. The burden was too great for Moses. The responsibility was too much. It was too much for one person to handle. There's not a single person here who could have held that over their head for the duration of time that it would require for Joshua to defeat Amalek. And so he needed help because it was too much. And so God sent him partners to bracket his arms, to hold up the staff when he was too weak, to carry that burden when he couldn't. And it is, to me, one of the most poignant pictures in the Bible of community and friendship. And if I'm honest with you, I think that's exactly why it's in the Bible. Whenever you read anything in the Bible, you've got to ask yourself, why is this so important that God wanted me to know about this thousands of years later? Why this detail? Why this story? Why not just write Joshua defeated Amalek? Why not just write Amalek came up against the forces of Israel and God blessed Israel and Israel won? Why not just skip it and go on through? It doesn't matter. I'm sure they had plenty of skirmishes over the 40 years that they were in this desert that we don't know about it because they're not recorded in history. Why this one? I'm convinced. This is just me. I didn't learn this in seminary. Okay, this isn't gospel truth. But if you were to ask me, why is this in the Bible? It's because it's a picture of community. It's a picture of partnership. And it's to show us that there are times when we can't carry the burden on our own and we need people around us to bracket us and hold it up. There's times when the people who we love very much are weary and they can't hold the burden up anymore. And we come and we bracket them and we hold their hands up for them until their strength returns. It's such an incredible picture. And so at Grace, that's what we are. We are partners. We see and we notice when the burden gets too much. And we bracket and we put our hands on the people that we love and we help them carry the load until their strength returns. At Grace, we are partners. And so that word partner is so much deeper to me than a simple, clever replacement for member. That comparison, members consume and partners contribute, that's just the surface level of what a partner is at Grace. Partners carry the burden. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We partner in the things that God would have us do here. This starts at the staff level. We have staff meetings every Tuesday. And we talk about everything that everyone is doing. And no one carries their burden by themselves. We talk about when Summer Extreme is coming up, we talk about it in staff meeting. We begin talking about it in February and March and saying, Aaron, our children's pastor, Julie, what can we do to help you? How can you use us? The weeks leading up to Summer Extreme, I tell the staff, hey, we all work for Aaron. She's our boss. Whatever she needs the next couple weeks, that's what we do. When we're heading into the Christmas series and the Christmas service, we work for boy Aaron, worship leader Aaron, the bad Aaron. We work for him. For two, three weeks leading into that, what can we do? How can we help you? What do you need? We speak into everything that we do. What's going on in student ministry and how can we help? Before we do a series, we all talk into it. Before I do sermons, we all talk into them. We share the burden across the spectrum. And so we believe that trickles down to everyone in all that we do. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We don't just sit back and say, well, I hope the church is able to do that. Let's see. No, we jump in and see a personal responsibility. There was a great example a few minutes ago. I ran to the hallway after the children's dedication because I like to make sure that while I'm preaching, I don't need to use the restroom. I like to be 100% focused on you. So I ran over there to take care of business. And then I came back. And as I was in the hallway, it dawns on me, gosh, we've got a lot of babies being handed into that small space back there because we got child dedication today. I wonder if we're double staffed. And I looked at a lady who just happened to be standing in the hallway. She was just fodder. She came to attend the service this morning, and I looked at her and just presumptuously said, you might have to jump in that room this morning. She goes, yeah, no, I'm going to stick around and see. That's partnership. There's a need here. I'm a partner of the church. I'm going to step in and I'm going to help carry that. We're going to build a building. We have land we're looking to build. We need partners, which are not to stand back. I hope the church can do this, but actively, how do I partner with the church to make sure that this can happen? In our small groups, your small group leader asks a question, and it's a bad one. It's a dud, right? It's just a dead fish in the middle of the room. You're like, I don't know. I don't know how to answer this question. Your partner in ministry, bail them out, man. Say anything. Say what you're doing for dinner tomorrow. It doesn't matter. Just get the conversation going again. If Erin looks tired, if her hands look weary, if we see the same faces in those hallways and in that back room week in and week out, volunteer, step in, bracket, hold. We jump in. We are partners in ministry. We share the burden in what's happening here. We believe wholeheartedly in that. So at Grace, we are partners in ministry. More importantly than that, at Grace, we are partners in life. We partner with each other through all the seasons of life. One of the things that I've gotten to see more than ever in my position is the wisdom of Solomon when he writes in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that happens to you happens to everyone else. Every struggle that we walk through is shared by those who came before us and will come after us. And when I think about life and how I get to see these common struggles meted out through all the folks that God allows me to minister to, I just think of people coming out of college in their 20s. And that place where you are, where you're just trying to figure out, who am I? Can I get a job? I'm going to be homeless or live in my parents' basement forever. Can I figure this out? Who am I going to marry? Who am I going to meet? Do I want to build a family? Is that a thing that I want? And then you do get married and you're trying to figure out how can we make it together? What's going to happen here? And then maybe you build a family or maybe you start to build a career and you're just thinking about how do I take the next step? And you have people around you and you have all the same stressors. It's all the same stuff. How am I going to figure this out? How am I going to work out work-life balance? If I'm single, when am I going to meet the person that I want to spend my life with? If I'm married, is this the right person that I actually did want to spend my life with? Like all the things, right? And then you have kids and I'm standing up here and I don't have too many years as far as parenting is concerned on the people who were up here, but there's some with just brand new babies and I've got a six-year-old. I know that I don't know what's ahead of me, okay? So don't hear ignorant arrogance in this, but I also know that these folks over here that just have this tiny little baby and I've got my six-year-old, boy, there's a lot of space and stress to cover between six months and six years old. And so I know a little bit about what they face. And we know a little bit more about what to pray. And then those of you who have kids in high school or older, you know that I'm sitting at six years old and I'm going, gosh, I'm so stressed. And you're like, you don't know nothing. Shut up with your stress. You know what I wouldn't give to just lose an hour of sleep a night and know that my kids are okay? And then they go to college and then they get jobs. And then you look at your husband and your wife and you try to figure out, do we still like each other? Because we just ran a small business for 25 years. We were ships passing in the night trying to get things done. How do we figure out this marriage, right? And then it's not too long that you're empty nesters when you start to take care of your aging parents and all the challenges that are there and everything that awaits you doing that. There is nothing new under the sun. I have watched so many of my friends enter into that phase. And then you leave that phase and you get the joy of being a grandparent maybe. And then you start to age. And aging stinks. And you move into that phase. But in all of that, everything that you're experiencing where you are, all the folks who are older than you have walked through that. And all the folks who are younger than you will. And there is nothing new under the sun. And we face those things. And in the midst of those predictable cycles come the unpredictable diagnoses and loss and triumphs and promotions and surprises and tearful blessings. But it's all things that everyone else has experienced too. And so at grace, you should never walk through that alone. Whatever that is, whatever the fill in the blank is, if you're a part of grace, you should never walk through that alone. You should never, ever walk through parenthood alone, through trying to figure out what to do with this little human, you shouldn't feel like you're facing that alone. When your kids are in middle school, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you're single and you don't know if you're going to meet your person or not, that you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience tragedy, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience triumph and celebration, you shouldn't walk through that alone. Is there anything sadder than someone experiencing tremendous joy, getting the best news possible, and not having anyone to share it with? No, that's heartbreaking. You shouldn't walk through caring for your aging parents alone. You shouldn't walk through empty nesting alone. We shouldn't walk through any of that stuff alone. We were not designed to walk through it alone. That was not God's intent. We are partners in life. We walk with each other. And we have a friend whose strength is failing. And she doesn't have the strength to fight for her marriage anymore. She's done. It's hard. Her shoulders are tired. We come beside her. We get her a seat. And we bracket ourselves against her and we hold her hands until she has the strength again. We have friends who are parents and they've given up and they don't know what to do. We bracket them and we hold them up. We have a friend who's facing addiction or sin and they feel like giving up. Their arms are tired, and they just can't hold out anymore. We come alongside them. We press up against them, and we hold their hands up in the fight until their strength is restored to do it again. We are partners in life. I am convinced that one of God's greatest gifts is that of community and friendship. There is almost nothing in my life I hold more sacred than the people who I love, than the friends who are close to me, than the people who have come alongside me and held up my hands when I was too tired, than the people who I've stood beside and watched them regain their strength and stand back up. At Grace, we are partners, and that means we are partners in life. And here's the other thing I'll mention. I had a lunch with someone this week. And I found out that over COVID, one of them lost both of their parents. Another one of them had to put their parents into memory care and separate his parents. That's an incredible burden. And they've been carrying it alone. And I told them I was going to say this. Grace, don't walk alone. They didn't tell anybody. How can the church do what it needs to do if you carry all that yourself? If you sit there on the top of the hill, holding it up, struggling, crying, failing, knowing that it's all going to have to collapse. Tell us. Tell us. Let us come alongside. Let us hold you up. And this is where I would press in and chide you a little bit if you're a longtime grace person. At grace, and I would assume most places, we love to be, are anxious to be, excited to be, happy to be the person who stands in brackets. We will do this for you all day long. We will do this for you for as long as it takes until your strength is restored. We're happy to do that. We do not at all want to be the person here needing help. But this doesn't work if we don't let other people partner with us too. So get over yourselves, Grace. Let people help you. Let people be your partner too. Finally, we are partners in faith. We do not walk the spiritual journey alone. Most importantly, we're partners in faith. We come alongside one another and we help one another grow. We're going to talk more about this next week, how we can be partners in faith when we talk about how we are step takers. But at Grace, we are partners in faith. We come alongside one another. We foster one another's spiritual life. I saw somebody say this week or last that they are convinced, and I am too. I totally agreed with this, the longer they are in the Christian faith, the longer they are in this Christian life, the more they believe that it is simply about hanging on. It's simply about clinging to Jesus. That's why I think when Paul tells us in Ephesians 6 to put on the full armor of God, he says, put on the full armor of God, and he goes through all the things that you're supposed to put on so you can stand against the wiles of the devil. And then at the end, he says, and when you have stood firm, stand firm therefore. Just another one. When you have done it, when you fought the good fight, keep fighting, keep standing firm, keep clinging. In every list of Christian attributes, you will eventually find perseverance. Just hang on. Just cling to faith. I'm reminded of what Jesus says to John the Baptist when John the Baptist essentially says, hey, I'm pretty sure you're Jesus, but you've kind of let me down here because I'm going to lose my life in this prison. And Jesus says, yeah, you are. And blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. Blessed are those who still choose faith in me when I've let them down because their expectations of me were wrong. I'm reminded of when Jesus told the gathering of people that unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And all the crowds went, that dude's weird. And they left. And he looked at his disciples and he said, are you going to leave me too? And Peter says, you're Jesus. Where are we going to go? You don't make any sense to me. I don't want to cannibalize you. I'm not into that. But I also know who you are. Where else am I going to go? That's faith. We know Jesus. Where else are we going to go? Even when he mystifies us, even when it doesn't make sense, even when it's hard to figure out, even when we're faced with those situations where we go, how does a good God let stuff like this happen? We cling to faith. And sometimes our hands get tired. Sometimes clinging to faith is hard. And so we need godly people around us who love us and who love Jesus to hold our hands up for us and help us cling to faith when ours is failing. That prayer that's prayed, Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. When we pray that, you know how he helps you sometimes? By bringing friends in to encourage you. A phone call or a text or an email or a lunch. So most importantly, Grace, we are partners in faith. We help each other cling. We help each other thrive. We help each other strive. We help each other take steps towards Jesus. That's what we do. That's why I asked DJ to read a 300-fold cord. I want us to use our tremendous community and our tremendously deep friendships to be partners in ministry, to be partners in life, and to be partners in faith. And my closing encouragement would be that if you were one who feels like you don't have that yet, pray for it. Pursue it. Ask God for it. You'll find it. If you are one who does feel like you have this, and you do have good and rich and deep friendships here, please know that God did not give you that community just for you or the people who are already in it, but that the job of a good, godly, biblical community is to turn outwards and to say, who else needs what we got? Because it's pretty good. Who else can we partner with? So when I say at Grace we have partners, we don't have members, this is what I mean. And this is why I'm a stickler about it because I believe it's that important. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for who you are and what you've done for us. Lord, I pray that if there's somebody here who doesn't know you, who hasn't accepted Jesus as their Savior, that they would do that. God, I lift up once again these families that are represented today. Would their extended families partner with them in the raising of these children in godly homes? Would the friends of these mamas and daddies rally around them and raise their hands up when their arms are weary? For the people in this room and listening who are caring for aging parents, God, would you surround them with people to raise up their hands? God, for the folks here who need you, who are tired, in whatever it is, would you surround them with godly community? Would you surround them with partners who pick them up? And God, for those of us who need help, for those of us who are tired, for those of us who just don't know if we can hold it up anymore, would you give us the humility to reach out to our friends, to our community, and to our partners, and experience the life-giving goodness of your community, God. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm DJ Hill. I'm a partner here at Grace along with Laura, my wife, and three daughters. Today's reading is from Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, verses 9 through 12. Two are better than one, because they have good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two can withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Thank you. Thank you, DJ. I was pleased to discover that you're literate. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This is the fourth part in our series called The Traits of Grace, where we're going through and we're just talking about the things and the aspects that make grace, grace, that make us who we are. Part of it is getting to pick on each other a little bit. And so this week is one that is, this is near and dear to all of our hearts. If this is, If you have been at Grace for any amount of time, then this is something that resonates deeply with you. It's something that characterizes us and who we are, and it's something that we choose over and over again in the way that we structure ourselves, in the way that we do things, and in the kind of church that we want to be. And so this morning, we get to talk about the fourth trait, which is that we are partners at Grace. We are partners. And we say that we don't have members at Grace, that we have partners instead, which is actually kind of funny to me that I'm such a stickler about having partners instead of members, because I've been doing vocational ministry 20 years. And one of the things I've always thought is kind of funny about the church is the way that we like to name stuff. Like we're super cool and we're coming up with new things. I was the small groups pastor at my previous church and I watched those things. First, when I was growing up, it was called Sunday school, right? And then in the 90s, we changed it to small groups. Now we're fancy. And then small groups weren't fancy enough, so we started calling them community groups or life groups or discipleship groups. And then there was this whole movement in the last couple of years to start house churches. And you're like, well, what's a house church? Like, well, you gather together and you kind of pray for each other and you talk about things you worship. I says, oh, it's like a small group. Like, no, no, no, house church. Well, what do you do on Sunday? Well, we go to big church together. Oh, so it's a small group. Like that's what we do. We like to rename things so that outsiders can't figure out what's going on in here. And it's really, it's just stupid. And I did it too. I was talking about this with my wife, Jen. And I was like, what are some other dumb church names that we've come up with over the years? Like on Sunday mornings, instead of calling it the service, we call it the gathering. And instead of calling it a sermon, we call it the talk, right? Because we're just trying to be cooler and more relevant in what we do. And she got on to me. She was like, you were guilty of this. She said, what was your ministry called in your first church? The first church I worked at was in Franklin County, Virginia, Rocky Mount, close to Smith Mountain Lake. And I had a buddy that started a church called Covenant Community Church. I believe it's still going. And we met in this old colonial home out in the middle of nowhere in the farmland of Franklin County, Virginia. We had about 30 people who came every week, which, by the way, we're about the same size as Grace is now based on the amount of families that stood up. We don't have space but for 30 people a week if you guys, if you families come every week. But I led a ministry. It was the student ministry, and I called it One because it was based on, I believe, Luke 15 where Jesus is talking to Mary and Martha, and he tells Mary, you need to worry about but one thing, and it's loving me. And so I called it One, which was aptly named because that's about how many kids I had per week on the Wednesday, right? And then I get to the big church with 200 kids in the middle school, and that was my ministry, and I called that Up and Out, right? Well, what's Up and Out? Well, it means love God, love others, love up, love up, love out. Oh, that's great. Well, who's it for? Well, it's for middle school. So it's middle school ministry? No, it's up and out. It's up and out, right? And this is what we do. We come up with dumb names for stuff and they're unnecessary and we don't need them and Grace is guilty of this too. I don't know if you know this, but if you haven't been going to Grace for a long time, you might not know that this is called Grace Hall. Now, I've never called it that, but the people who came before me call it that. This is an auditorium, and really, that's insulting to auditoriums. This is a big room with a pole in it, right? That's what this is. So I'm real big on just call it what it is. If it's Sunday school, call it Sunday school. If it's a small group, call it small group. But if it's ministry, call it ministry. So why am I such a stickler about, no, no, no, at Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. And I catch heck for this. I'll be talking to elders or leaders in the church or people who have been going here for a while and they'll be like, yeah, yeah, well, how many members do we have right now? Or what's the membership vote on that? Or are they a member of the church? I'm sorry, they're partners of the church. Like, we got you, buddy. We'll help you carry this load of calling things partners. And everybody kind of giggles at me that I'm a real dummy for insisting that we use the term partners. And I understand. I would make fun of me too if I were you. But let me tell you why I'm such a stickler about this word partner and why it really does define who and what we are at Grace and what we're trying to do. The first reason is not the main reason, but the first reason is the one that I repeat often. A lot of you can probably say this as well. You probably know how the sentence ends, but members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's one of the first reasons. At Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. Members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute, right? If you become a member of something, what do you become primarily concerned with? What are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this thing? If you joined BJ's, what are the rights and privileges I get? Costco, you get a dollar slice of pizza. That's a pretty good right and privilege. You join Northridge Country Club, what are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this place? Right? When you're a member, you kind of sit back and you go, well, what's in it for me? What do I get out of this? What can I consume? When you're a member, you expect a certain experience. You expect to consume a certain experience. And then when you can't consume it, you critique it. Until you do get to consume the experience you want. As a pastor, I don't really want a church full of members who consume an experience and then critique it when it's not what they want. We want partners who partner with us because partners tend to contribute. Partners take ownership and what they're partnered in and see it as their personal responsibility to see the success of this thing work out. And really, the more I thought about it this week, because we're going to talk about how this is true, but the more I thought about it this week, the more satisfied I was with understanding partners this way. Partners share the burden. That's what partners do. Partners share the burden in myriad ways. The greatest picture of partnership that I've seen in the Bible, and I love this picture in the Bible. I don't have any tattoos, not because I think they're sinful or something, but there's nothing I want to put on my body that I'm sure I'm going to want there in 20 years. So I haven't done anything yet. But if I were going to get one, it may very well be an image of this story. When I think about this story and this scene in the Bible for too long, I'll tear up. I'll start to cry. And I'm going to read this to you, and you're going to think, why is this dude tearing up at this story? Listen, first of all, the older I get, the more I tear up at. Jen and I are back onto watching the Great British Baking Show, and we cry at the end of every episode because we're so happy for Juergen that he gets to call his wife again. Like, we're so thrilled that we tear up, and then we look at each other, and we laugh. And the older I get, the more stuff I cry about. And if you want to judge me for that, I'll tell you right where you can put your judgment. But when I think about this passage and the picture here, it moves me to tears because of how powerful it is. So what's happening is we're in the book of Exodus. I'm going to read from chapter 17. And in the book of Exodus, God's children are wandering through the desert. They're being led by Moses. And a man named Amalek comes up against them with his army and he attacks the Israelite people. He attacks the Hebrew people. And so Moses sends his general, Joshua, out to battle. And he says, I want you to go and I want you to fight against Amalek. And I'm going to go up on the top of this hill and I'm going to hold my staff over my head. And when you're down there fighting and you look up at me, as long as my staff is up over my head, you will prevail. So go and fight. So Joshua does. He gathers the army and he goes and he fights. And this is what happens. We pick it up in verse 11. It's such an incredible picture. Moses says, go down there and you fight that battle. And I'm going to hold this staff over my head. And as long as I hold it up, you guys will prevail. But you know, holding a stick over your head burns the shoulders a little bit. It fatigues the muscles. And so every now and again, he had to shake it out. He got weary. He got tired. He couldn't hold it up. He couldn't carry that burden. And as he got weak, the men on the battlefield began to suffer. And so he had to find the strength and pick his hands back up again for as long as he could to carry that burden. And eventually Aaron and Hur, H-U-R, burden. The burden was too great for Moses. The responsibility was too much. It was too much for one person to handle. There's not a single person here who could have held that over their head for the duration of time that it would require for Joshua to defeat Amalek. And so he needed help because it was too much. And so God sent him partners to bracket his arms, to hold up the staff when he was too weak, to carry that burden when he couldn't. And it is, to me, one of the most poignant pictures in the Bible of community and friendship. And if I'm honest with you, I think that's exactly why it's in the Bible. Whenever you read anything in the Bible, you've got to ask yourself, why is this so important that God wanted me to know about this thousands of years later? Why this detail? Why this story? Why not just write Joshua defeated Amalek? Why not just write Amalek came up against the forces of Israel and God blessed Israel and Israel won? Why not just skip it and go on through? It doesn't matter. I'm sure they had plenty of skirmishes over the 40 years that they were in this desert that we don't know about it because they're not recorded in history. Why this one? I'm convinced. This is just me. I didn't learn this in seminary. Okay, this isn't gospel truth. But if you were to ask me, why is this in the Bible? It's because it's a picture of community. It's a picture of partnership. And it's to show us that there are times when we can't carry the burden on our own and we need people around us to bracket us and hold it up. There's times when the people who we love very much are weary and they can't hold the burden up anymore. And we come and we bracket them and we hold their hands up for them until their strength returns. It's such an incredible picture. And so at Grace, that's what we are. We are partners. We see and we notice when the burden gets too much. And we bracket and we put our hands on the people that we love and we help them carry the load until their strength returns. At Grace, we are partners. And so that word partner is so much deeper to me than a simple, clever replacement for member. That comparison, members consume and partners contribute, that's just the surface level of what a partner is at Grace. Partners carry the burden. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We partner in the things that God would have us do here. This starts at the staff level. We have staff meetings every Tuesday. And we talk about everything that everyone is doing. And no one carries their burden by themselves. We talk about when Summer Extreme is coming up, we talk about it in staff meeting. We begin talking about it in February and March and saying, Aaron, our children's pastor, Julie, what can we do to help you? How can you use us? The weeks leading up to Summer Extreme, I tell the staff, hey, we all work for Aaron. She's our boss. Whatever she needs the next couple weeks, that's what we do. When we're heading into the Christmas series and the Christmas service, we work for boy Aaron, worship leader Aaron, the bad Aaron. We work for him. For two, three weeks leading into that, what can we do? How can we help you? What do you need? We speak into everything that we do. What's going on in student ministry and how can we help? Before we do a series, we all talk into it. Before I do sermons, we all talk into them. We share the burden across the spectrum. And so we believe that trickles down to everyone in all that we do. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We don't just sit back and say, well, I hope the church is able to do that. Let's see. No, we jump in and see a personal responsibility. There was a great example a few minutes ago. I ran to the hallway after the children's dedication because I like to make sure that while I'm preaching, I don't need to use the restroom. I like to be 100% focused on you. So I ran over there to take care of business. And then I came back. And as I was in the hallway, it dawns on me, gosh, we've got a lot of babies being handed into that small space back there because we got child dedication today. I wonder if we're double staffed. And I looked at a lady who just happened to be standing in the hallway. She was just fodder. She came to attend the service this morning, and I looked at her and just presumptuously said, you might have to jump in that room this morning. She goes, yeah, no, I'm going to stick around and see. That's partnership. There's a need here. I'm a partner of the church. I'm going to step in and I'm going to help carry that. We're going to build a building. We have land we're looking to build. We need partners, which are not to stand back. I hope the church can do this, but actively, how do I partner with the church to make sure that this can happen? In our small groups, your small group leader asks a question, and it's a bad one. It's a dud, right? It's just a dead fish in the middle of the room. You're like, I don't know. I don't know how to answer this question. Your partner in ministry, bail them out, man. Say anything. Say what you're doing for dinner tomorrow. It doesn't matter. Just get the conversation going again. If Erin looks tired, if her hands look weary, if we see the same faces in those hallways and in that back room week in and week out, volunteer, step in, bracket, hold. We jump in. We are partners in ministry. We share the burden in what's happening here. We believe wholeheartedly in that. So at Grace, we are partners in ministry. More importantly than that, at Grace, we are partners in life. We partner with each other through all the seasons of life. One of the things that I've gotten to see more than ever in my position is the wisdom of Solomon when he writes in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that happens to you happens to everyone else. Every struggle that we walk through is shared by those who came before us and will come after us. And when I think about life and how I get to see these common struggles meted out through all the folks that God allows me to minister to, I just think of people coming out of college in their 20s. And that place where you are, where you're just trying to figure out, who am I? Can I get a job? I'm going to be homeless or live in my parents' basement forever. Can I figure this out? Who am I going to marry? Who am I going to meet? Do I want to build a family? Is that a thing that I want? And then you do get married and you're trying to figure out how can we make it together? What's going to happen here? And then maybe you build a family or maybe you start to build a career and you're just thinking about how do I take the next step? And you have people around you and you have all the same stressors. It's all the same stuff. How am I going to figure this out? How am I going to work out work-life balance? If I'm single, when am I going to meet the person that I want to spend my life with? If I'm married, is this the right person that I actually did want to spend my life with? Like all the things, right? And then you have kids and I'm standing up here and I don't have too many years as far as parenting is concerned on the people who were up here, but there's some with just brand new babies and I've got a six-year-old. I know that I don't know what's ahead of me, okay? So don't hear ignorant arrogance in this, but I also know that these folks over here that just have this tiny little baby and I've got my six-year-old, boy, there's a lot of space and stress to cover between six months and six years old. And so I know a little bit about what they face. And we know a little bit more about what to pray. And then those of you who have kids in high school or older, you know that I'm sitting at six years old and I'm going, gosh, I'm so stressed. And you're like, you don't know nothing. Shut up with your stress. You know what I wouldn't give to just lose an hour of sleep a night and know that my kids are okay? And then they go to college and then they get jobs. And then you look at your husband and your wife and you try to figure out, do we still like each other? Because we just ran a small business for 25 years. We were ships passing in the night trying to get things done. How do we figure out this marriage, right? And then it's not too long that you're empty nesters when you start to take care of your aging parents and all the challenges that are there and everything that awaits you doing that. There is nothing new under the sun. I have watched so many of my friends enter into that phase. And then you leave that phase and you get the joy of being a grandparent maybe. And then you start to age. And aging stinks. And you move into that phase. But in all of that, everything that you're experiencing where you are, all the folks who are older than you have walked through that. And all the folks who are younger than you will. And there is nothing new under the sun. And we face those things. And in the midst of those predictable cycles come the unpredictable diagnoses and loss and triumphs and promotions and surprises and tearful blessings. But it's all things that everyone else has experienced too. And so at grace, you should never walk through that alone. Whatever that is, whatever the fill in the blank is, if you're a part of grace, you should never walk through that alone. You should never, ever walk through parenthood alone, through trying to figure out what to do with this little human, you shouldn't feel like you're facing that alone. When your kids are in middle school, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you're single and you don't know if you're going to meet your person or not, that you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience tragedy, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience triumph and celebration, you shouldn't walk through that alone. Is there anything sadder than someone experiencing tremendous joy, getting the best news possible, and not having anyone to share it with? No, that's heartbreaking. You shouldn't walk through caring for your aging parents alone. You shouldn't walk through empty nesting alone. We shouldn't walk through any of that stuff alone. We were not designed to walk through it alone. That was not God's intent. We are partners in life. We walk with each other. And we have a friend whose strength is failing. And she doesn't have the strength to fight for her marriage anymore. She's done. It's hard. Her shoulders are tired. We come beside her. We get her a seat. And we bracket ourselves against her and we hold her hands until she has the strength again. We have friends who are parents and they've given up and they don't know what to do. We bracket them and we hold them up. We have a friend who's facing addiction or sin and they feel like giving up. Their arms are tired, and they just can't hold out anymore. We come alongside them. We press up against them, and we hold their hands up in the fight until their strength is restored to do it again. We are partners in life. I am convinced that one of God's greatest gifts is that of community and friendship. There is almost nothing in my life I hold more sacred than the people who I love, than the friends who are close to me, than the people who have come alongside me and held up my hands when I was too tired, than the people who I've stood beside and watched them regain their strength and stand back up. At Grace, we are partners, and that means we are partners in life. And here's the other thing I'll mention. I had a lunch with someone this week. And I found out that over COVID, one of them lost both of their parents. Another one of them had to put their parents into memory care and separate his parents. That's an incredible burden. And they've been carrying it alone. And I told them I was going to say this. Grace, don't walk alone. They didn't tell anybody. How can the church do what it needs to do if you carry all that yourself? If you sit there on the top of the hill, holding it up, struggling, crying, failing, knowing that it's all going to have to collapse. Tell us. Tell us. Let us come alongside. Let us hold you up. And this is where I would press in and chide you a little bit if you're a longtime grace person. At grace, and I would assume most places, we love to be, are anxious to be, excited to be, happy to be the person who stands in brackets. We will do this for you all day long. We will do this for you for as long as it takes until your strength is restored. We're happy to do that. We do not at all want to be the person here needing help. But this doesn't work if we don't let other people partner with us too. So get over yourselves, Grace. Let people help you. Let people be your partner too. Finally, we are partners in faith. We do not walk the spiritual journey alone. Most importantly, we're partners in faith. We come alongside one another and we help one another grow. We're going to talk more about this next week, how we can be partners in faith when we talk about how we are step takers. But at Grace, we are partners in faith. We come alongside one another. We foster one another's spiritual life. I saw somebody say this week or last that they are convinced, and I am too. I totally agreed with this, the longer they are in the Christian faith, the longer they are in this Christian life, the more they believe that it is simply about hanging on. It's simply about clinging to Jesus. That's why I think when Paul tells us in Ephesians 6 to put on the full armor of God, he says, put on the full armor of God, and he goes through all the things that you're supposed to put on so you can stand against the wiles of the devil. And then at the end, he says, and when you have stood firm, stand firm therefore. Just another one. When you have done it, when you fought the good fight, keep fighting, keep standing firm, keep clinging. In every list of Christian attributes, you will eventually find perseverance. Just hang on. Just cling to faith. I'm reminded of what Jesus says to John the Baptist when John the Baptist essentially says, hey, I'm pretty sure you're Jesus, but you've kind of let me down here because I'm going to lose my life in this prison. And Jesus says, yeah, you are. And blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. Blessed are those who still choose faith in me when I've let them down because their expectations of me were wrong. I'm reminded of when Jesus told the gathering of people that unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And all the crowds went, that dude's weird. And they left. And he looked at his disciples and he said, are you going to leave me too? And Peter says, you're Jesus. Where are we going to go? You don't make any sense to me. I don't want to cannibalize you. I'm not into that. But I also know who you are. Where else am I going to go? That's faith. We know Jesus. Where else are we going to go? Even when he mystifies us, even when it doesn't make sense, even when it's hard to figure out, even when we're faced with those situations where we go, how does a good God let stuff like this happen? We cling to faith. And sometimes our hands get tired. Sometimes clinging to faith is hard. And so we need godly people around us who love us and who love Jesus to hold our hands up for us and help us cling to faith when ours is failing. That prayer that's prayed, Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. When we pray that, you know how he helps you sometimes? By bringing friends in to encourage you. A phone call or a text or an email or a lunch. So most importantly, Grace, we are partners in faith. We help each other cling. We help each other thrive. We help each other strive. We help each other take steps towards Jesus. That's what we do. That's why I asked DJ to read a 300-fold cord. I want us to use our tremendous community and our tremendously deep friendships to be partners in ministry, to be partners in life, and to be partners in faith. And my closing encouragement would be that if you were one who feels like you don't have that yet, pray for it. Pursue it. Ask God for it. You'll find it. If you are one who does feel like you have this, and you do have good and rich and deep friendships here, please know that God did not give you that community just for you or the people who are already in it, but that the job of a good, godly, biblical community is to turn outwards and to say, who else needs what we got? Because it's pretty good. Who else can we partner with? So when I say at Grace we have partners, we don't have members, this is what I mean. And this is why I'm a stickler about it because I believe it's that important. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for who you are and what you've done for us. Lord, I pray that if there's somebody here who doesn't know you, who hasn't accepted Jesus as their Savior, that they would do that. God, I lift up once again these families that are represented today. Would their extended families partner with them in the raising of these children in godly homes? Would the friends of these mamas and daddies rally around them and raise their hands up when their arms are weary? For the people in this room and listening who are caring for aging parents, God, would you surround them with people to raise up their hands? God, for the folks here who need you, who are tired, in whatever it is, would you surround them with godly community? Would you surround them with partners who pick them up? And God, for those of us who need help, for those of us who are tired, for those of us who just don't know if we can hold it up anymore, would you give us the humility to reach out to our friends, to our community, and to our partners, and experience the life-giving goodness of your community, God. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm DJ Hill. I'm a partner here at Grace along with Laura, my wife, and three daughters. Today's reading is from Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, verses 9 through 12. Two are better than one, because they have good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two can withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Thank you. Thank you, DJ. I was pleased to discover that you're literate. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This is the fourth part in our series called The Traits of Grace, where we're going through and we're just talking about the things and the aspects that make grace, grace, that make us who we are. Part of it is getting to pick on each other a little bit. And so this week is one that is, this is near and dear to all of our hearts. If this is, If you have been at Grace for any amount of time, then this is something that resonates deeply with you. It's something that characterizes us and who we are, and it's something that we choose over and over again in the way that we structure ourselves, in the way that we do things, and in the kind of church that we want to be. And so this morning, we get to talk about the fourth trait, which is that we are partners at Grace. We are partners. And we say that we don't have members at Grace, that we have partners instead, which is actually kind of funny to me that I'm such a stickler about having partners instead of members, because I've been doing vocational ministry 20 years. And one of the things I've always thought is kind of funny about the church is the way that we like to name stuff. Like we're super cool and we're coming up with new things. I was the small groups pastor at my previous church and I watched those things. First, when I was growing up, it was called Sunday school, right? And then in the 90s, we changed it to small groups. Now we're fancy. And then small groups weren't fancy enough, so we started calling them community groups or life groups or discipleship groups. And then there was this whole movement in the last couple of years to start house churches. And you're like, well, what's a house church? Like, well, you gather together and you kind of pray for each other and you talk about things you worship. I says, oh, it's like a small group. Like, no, no, no, house church. Well, what do you do on Sunday? Well, we go to big church together. Oh, so it's a small group. Like that's what we do. We like to rename things so that outsiders can't figure out what's going on in here. And it's really, it's just stupid. And I did it too. I was talking about this with my wife, Jen. And I was like, what are some other dumb church names that we've come up with over the years? Like on Sunday mornings, instead of calling it the service, we call it the gathering. And instead of calling it a sermon, we call it the talk, right? Because we're just trying to be cooler and more relevant in what we do. And she got on to me. She was like, you were guilty of this. She said, what was your ministry called in your first church? The first church I worked at was in Franklin County, Virginia, Rocky Mount, close to Smith Mountain Lake. And I had a buddy that started a church called Covenant Community Church. I believe it's still going. And we met in this old colonial home out in the middle of nowhere in the farmland of Franklin County, Virginia. We had about 30 people who came every week, which, by the way, we're about the same size as Grace is now based on the amount of families that stood up. We don't have space but for 30 people a week if you guys, if you families come every week. But I led a ministry. It was the student ministry, and I called it One because it was based on, I believe, Luke 15 where Jesus is talking to Mary and Martha, and he tells Mary, you need to worry about but one thing, and it's loving me. And so I called it One, which was aptly named because that's about how many kids I had per week on the Wednesday, right? And then I get to the big church with 200 kids in the middle school, and that was my ministry, and I called that Up and Out, right? Well, what's Up and Out? Well, it means love God, love others, love up, love up, love out. Oh, that's great. Well, who's it for? Well, it's for middle school. So it's middle school ministry? No, it's up and out. It's up and out, right? And this is what we do. We come up with dumb names for stuff and they're unnecessary and we don't need them and Grace is guilty of this too. I don't know if you know this, but if you haven't been going to Grace for a long time, you might not know that this is called Grace Hall. Now, I've never called it that, but the people who came before me call it that. This is an auditorium, and really, that's insulting to auditoriums. This is a big room with a pole in it, right? That's what this is. So I'm real big on just call it what it is. If it's Sunday school, call it Sunday school. If it's a small group, call it small group. But if it's ministry, call it ministry. So why am I such a stickler about, no, no, no, at Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. And I catch heck for this. I'll be talking to elders or leaders in the church or people who have been going here for a while and they'll be like, yeah, yeah, well, how many members do we have right now? Or what's the membership vote on that? Or are they a member of the church? I'm sorry, they're partners of the church. Like, we got you, buddy. We'll help you carry this load of calling things partners. And everybody kind of giggles at me that I'm a real dummy for insisting that we use the term partners. And I understand. I would make fun of me too if I were you. But let me tell you why I'm such a stickler about this word partner and why it really does define who and what we are at Grace and what we're trying to do. The first reason is not the main reason, but the first reason is the one that I repeat often. A lot of you can probably say this as well. You probably know how the sentence ends, but members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's one of the first reasons. At Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. Members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute, right? If you become a member of something, what do you become primarily concerned with? What are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this thing? If you joined BJ's, what are the rights and privileges I get? Costco, you get a dollar slice of pizza. That's a pretty good right and privilege. You join Northridge Country Club, what are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this place? Right? When you're a member, you kind of sit back and you go, well, what's in it for me? What do I get out of this? What can I consume? When you're a member, you expect a certain experience. You expect to consume a certain experience. And then when you can't consume it, you critique it. Until you do get to consume the experience you want. As a pastor, I don't really want a church full of members who consume an experience and then critique it when it's not what they want. We want partners who partner with us because partners tend to contribute. Partners take ownership and what they're partnered in and see it as their personal responsibility to see the success of this thing work out. And really, the more I thought about it this week, because we're going to talk about how this is true, but the more I thought about it this week, the more satisfied I was with understanding partners this way. Partners share the burden. That's what partners do. Partners share the burden in myriad ways. The greatest picture of partnership that I've seen in the Bible, and I love this picture in the Bible. I don't have any tattoos, not because I think they're sinful or something, but there's nothing I want to put on my body that I'm sure I'm going to want there in 20 years. So I haven't done anything yet. But if I were going to get one, it may very well be an image of this story. When I think about this story and this scene in the Bible for too long, I'll tear up. I'll start to cry. And I'm going to read this to you, and you're going to think, why is this dude tearing up at this story? Listen, first of all, the older I get, the more I tear up at. Jen and I are back onto watching the Great British Baking Show, and we cry at the end of every episode because we're so happy for Juergen that he gets to call his wife again. Like, we're so thrilled that we tear up, and then we look at each other, and we laugh. And the older I get, the more stuff I cry about. And if you want to judge me for that, I'll tell you right where you can put your judgment. But when I think about this passage and the picture here, it moves me to tears because of how powerful it is. So what's happening is we're in the book of Exodus. I'm going to read from chapter 17. And in the book of Exodus, God's children are wandering through the desert. They're being led by Moses. And a man named Amalek comes up against them with his army and he attacks the Israelite people. He attacks the Hebrew people. And so Moses sends his general, Joshua, out to battle. And he says, I want you to go and I want you to fight against Amalek. And I'm going to go up on the top of this hill and I'm going to hold my staff over my head. And when you're down there fighting and you look up at me, as long as my staff is up over my head, you will prevail. So go and fight. So Joshua does. He gathers the army and he goes and he fights. And this is what happens. We pick it up in verse 11. It's such an incredible picture. Moses says, go down there and you fight that battle. And I'm going to hold this staff over my head. And as long as I hold it up, you guys will prevail. But you know, holding a stick over your head burns the shoulders a little bit. It fatigues the muscles. And so every now and again, he had to shake it out. He got weary. He got tired. He couldn't hold it up. He couldn't carry that burden. And as he got weak, the men on the battlefield began to suffer. And so he had to find the strength and pick his hands back up again for as long as he could to carry that burden. And eventually Aaron and Hur, H-U-R, burden. The burden was too great for Moses. The responsibility was too much. It was too much for one person to handle. There's not a single person here who could have held that over their head for the duration of time that it would require for Joshua to defeat Amalek. And so he needed help because it was too much. And so God sent him partners to bracket his arms, to hold up the staff when he was too weak, to carry that burden when he couldn't. And it is, to me, one of the most poignant pictures in the Bible of community and friendship. And if I'm honest with you, I think that's exactly why it's in the Bible. Whenever you read anything in the Bible, you've got to ask yourself, why is this so important that God wanted me to know about this thousands of years later? Why this detail? Why this story? Why not just write Joshua defeated Amalek? Why not just write Amalek came up against the forces of Israel and God blessed Israel and Israel won? Why not just skip it and go on through? It doesn't matter. I'm sure they had plenty of skirmishes over the 40 years that they were in this desert that we don't know about it because they're not recorded in history. Why this one? I'm convinced. This is just me. I didn't learn this in seminary. Okay, this isn't gospel truth. But if you were to ask me, why is this in the Bible? It's because it's a picture of community. It's a picture of partnership. And it's to show us that there are times when we can't carry the burden on our own and we need people around us to bracket us and hold it up. There's times when the people who we love very much are weary and they can't hold the burden up anymore. And we come and we bracket them and we hold their hands up for them until their strength returns. It's such an incredible picture. And so at Grace, that's what we are. We are partners. We see and we notice when the burden gets too much. And we bracket and we put our hands on the people that we love and we help them carry the load until their strength returns. At Grace, we are partners. And so that word partner is so much deeper to me than a simple, clever replacement for member. That comparison, members consume and partners contribute, that's just the surface level of what a partner is at Grace. Partners carry the burden. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We partner in the things that God would have us do here. This starts at the staff level. We have staff meetings every Tuesday. And we talk about everything that everyone is doing. And no one carries their burden by themselves. We talk about when Summer Extreme is coming up, we talk about it in staff meeting. We begin talking about it in February and March and saying, Aaron, our children's pastor, Julie, what can we do to help you? How can you use us? The weeks leading up to Summer Extreme, I tell the staff, hey, we all work for Aaron. She's our boss. Whatever she needs the next couple weeks, that's what we do. When we're heading into the Christmas series and the Christmas service, we work for boy Aaron, worship leader Aaron, the bad Aaron. We work for him. For two, three weeks leading into that, what can we do? How can we help you? What do you need? We speak into everything that we do. What's going on in student ministry and how can we help? Before we do a series, we all talk into it. Before I do sermons, we all talk into them. We share the burden across the spectrum. And so we believe that trickles down to everyone in all that we do. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We don't just sit back and say, well, I hope the church is able to do that. Let's see. No, we jump in and see a personal responsibility. There was a great example a few minutes ago. I ran to the hallway after the children's dedication because I like to make sure that while I'm preaching, I don't need to use the restroom. I like to be 100% focused on you. So I ran over there to take care of business. And then I came back. And as I was in the hallway, it dawns on me, gosh, we've got a lot of babies being handed into that small space back there because we got child dedication today. I wonder if we're double staffed. And I looked at a lady who just happened to be standing in the hallway. She was just fodder. She came to attend the service this morning, and I looked at her and just presumptuously said, you might have to jump in that room this morning. She goes, yeah, no, I'm going to stick around and see. That's partnership. There's a need here. I'm a partner of the church. I'm going to step in and I'm going to help carry that. We're going to build a building. We have land we're looking to build. We need partners, which are not to stand back. I hope the church can do this, but actively, how do I partner with the church to make sure that this can happen? In our small groups, your small group leader asks a question, and it's a bad one. It's a dud, right? It's just a dead fish in the middle of the room. You're like, I don't know. I don't know how to answer this question. Your partner in ministry, bail them out, man. Say anything. Say what you're doing for dinner tomorrow. It doesn't matter. Just get the conversation going again. If Erin looks tired, if her hands look weary, if we see the same faces in those hallways and in that back room week in and week out, volunteer, step in, bracket, hold. We jump in. We are partners in ministry. We share the burden in what's happening here. We believe wholeheartedly in that. So at Grace, we are partners in ministry. More importantly than that, at Grace, we are partners in life. We partner with each other through all the seasons of life. One of the things that I've gotten to see more than ever in my position is the wisdom of Solomon when he writes in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that happens to you happens to everyone else. Every struggle that we walk through is shared by those who came before us and will come after us. And when I think about life and how I get to see these common struggles meted out through all the folks that God allows me to minister to, I just think of people coming out of college in their 20s. And that place where you are, where you're just trying to figure out, who am I? Can I get a job? I'm going to be homeless or live in my parents' basement forever. Can I figure this out? Who am I going to marry? Who am I going to meet? Do I want to build a family? Is that a thing that I want? And then you do get married and you're trying to figure out how can we make it together? What's going to happen here? And then maybe you build a family or maybe you start to build a career and you're just thinking about how do I take the next step? And you have people around you and you have all the same stressors. It's all the same stuff. How am I going to figure this out? How am I going to work out work-life balance? If I'm single, when am I going to meet the person that I want to spend my life with? If I'm married, is this the right person that I actually did want to spend my life with? Like all the things, right? And then you have kids and I'm standing up here and I don't have too many years as far as parenting is concerned on the people who were up here, but there's some with just brand new babies and I've got a six-year-old. I know that I don't know what's ahead of me, okay? So don't hear ignorant arrogance in this, but I also know that these folks over here that just have this tiny little baby and I've got my six-year-old, boy, there's a lot of space and stress to cover between six months and six years old. And so I know a little bit about what they face. And we know a little bit more about what to pray. And then those of you who have kids in high school or older, you know that I'm sitting at six years old and I'm going, gosh, I'm so stressed. And you're like, you don't know nothing. Shut up with your stress. You know what I wouldn't give to just lose an hour of sleep a night and know that my kids are okay? And then they go to college and then they get jobs. And then you look at your husband and your wife and you try to figure out, do we still like each other? Because we just ran a small business for 25 years. We were ships passing in the night trying to get things done. How do we figure out this marriage, right? And then it's not too long that you're empty nesters when you start to take care of your aging parents and all the challenges that are there and everything that awaits you doing that. There is nothing new under the sun. I have watched so many of my friends enter into that phase. And then you leave that phase and you get the joy of being a grandparent maybe. And then you start to age. And aging stinks. And you move into that phase. But in all of that, everything that you're experiencing where you are, all the folks who are older than you have walked through that. And all the folks who are younger than you will. And there is nothing new under the sun. And we face those things. And in the midst of those predictable cycles come the unpredictable diagnoses and loss and triumphs and promotions and surprises and tearful blessings. But it's all things that everyone else has experienced too. And so at grace, you should never walk through that alone. Whatever that is, whatever the fill in the blank is, if you're a part of grace, you should never walk through that alone. You should never, ever walk through parenthood alone, through trying to figure out what to do with this little human, you shouldn't feel like you're facing that alone. When your kids are in middle school, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you're single and you don't know if you're going to meet your person or not, that you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience tragedy, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience triumph and celebration, you shouldn't walk through that alone. Is there anything sadder than someone experiencing tremendous joy, getting the best news possible, and not having anyone to share it with? No, that's heartbreaking. You shouldn't walk through caring for your aging parents alone. You shouldn't walk through empty nesting alone. We shouldn't walk through any of that stuff alone. We were not designed to walk through it alone. That was not God's intent. We are partners in life. We walk with each other. And we have a friend whose strength is failing. And she doesn't have the strength to fight for her marriage anymore. She's done. It's hard. Her shoulders are tired. We come beside her. We get her a seat. And we bracket ourselves against her and we hold her hands until she has the strength again. We have friends who are parents and they've given up and they don't know what to do. We bracket them and we hold them up. We have a friend who's facing addiction or sin and they feel like giving up. Their arms are tired, and they just can't hold out anymore. We come alongside them. We press up against them, and we hold their hands up in the fight until their strength is restored to do it again. We are partners in life. I am convinced that one of God's greatest gifts is that of community and friendship. There is almost nothing in my life I hold more sacred than the people who I love, than the friends who are close to me, than the people who have come alongside me and held up my hands when I was too tired, than the people who I've stood beside and watched them regain their strength and stand back up. At Grace, we are partners, and that means we are partners in life. And here's the other thing I'll mention. I had a lunch with someone this week. And I found out that over COVID, one of them lost both of their parents. Another one of them had to put their parents into memory care and separate his parents. That's an incredible burden. And they've been carrying it alone. And I told them I was going to say this. Grace, don't walk alone. They didn't tell anybody. How can the church do what it needs to do if you carry all that yourself? If you sit there on the top of the hill, holding it up, struggling, crying, failing, knowing that it's all going to have to collapse. Tell us. Tell us. Let us come alongside. Let us hold you up. And this is where I would press in and chide you a little bit if you're a longtime grace person. At grace, and I would assume most places, we love to be, are anxious to be, excited to be, happy to be the person who stands in brackets. We will do this for you all day long. We will do this for you for as long as it takes until your strength is restored. We're happy to do that. We do not at all want to be the person here needing help. But this doesn't work if we don't let other people partner with us too. So get over yourselves, Grace. Let people help you. Let people be your partner too. Finally, we are partners in faith. We do not walk the spiritual journey alone. Most importantly, we're partners in faith. We come alongside one another and we help one another grow. We're going to talk more about this next week, how we can be partners in faith when we talk about how we are step takers. But at Grace, we are partners in faith. We come alongside one another. We foster one another's spiritual life. I saw somebody say this week or last that they are convinced, and I am too. I totally agreed with this, the longer they are in the Christian faith, the longer they are in this Christian life, the more they believe that it is simply about hanging on. It's simply about clinging to Jesus. That's why I think when Paul tells us in Ephesians 6 to put on the full armor of God, he says, put on the full armor of God, and he goes through all the things that you're supposed to put on so you can stand against the wiles of the devil. And then at the end, he says, and when you have stood firm, stand firm therefore. Just another one. When you have done it, when you fought the good fight, keep fighting, keep standing firm, keep clinging. In every list of Christian attributes, you will eventually find perseverance. Just hang on. Just cling to faith. I'm reminded of what Jesus says to John the Baptist when John the Baptist essentially says, hey, I'm pretty sure you're Jesus, but you've kind of let me down here because I'm going to lose my life in this prison. And Jesus says, yeah, you are. And blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. Blessed are those who still choose faith in me when I've let them down because their expectations of me were wrong. I'm reminded of when Jesus told the gathering of people that unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And all the crowds went, that dude's weird. And they left. And he looked at his disciples and he said, are you going to leave me too? And Peter says, you're Jesus. Where are we going to go? You don't make any sense to me. I don't want to cannibalize you. I'm not into that. But I also know who you are. Where else am I going to go? That's faith. We know Jesus. Where else are we going to go? Even when he mystifies us, even when it doesn't make sense, even when it's hard to figure out, even when we're faced with those situations where we go, how does a good God let stuff like this happen? We cling to faith. And sometimes our hands get tired. Sometimes clinging to faith is hard. And so we need godly people around us who love us and who love Jesus to hold our hands up for us and help us cling to faith when ours is failing. That prayer that's prayed, Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. When we pray that, you know how he helps you sometimes? By bringing friends in to encourage you. A phone call or a text or an email or a lunch. So most importantly, Grace, we are partners in faith. We help each other cling. We help each other thrive. We help each other strive. We help each other take steps towards Jesus. That's what we do. That's why I asked DJ to read a 300-fold cord. I want us to use our tremendous community and our tremendously deep friendships to be partners in ministry, to be partners in life, and to be partners in faith. And my closing encouragement would be that if you were one who feels like you don't have that yet, pray for it. Pursue it. Ask God for it. You'll find it. If you are one who does feel like you have this, and you do have good and rich and deep friendships here, please know that God did not give you that community just for you or the people who are already in it, but that the job of a good, godly, biblical community is to turn outwards and to say, who else needs what we got? Because it's pretty good. Who else can we partner with? So when I say at Grace we have partners, we don't have members, this is what I mean. And this is why I'm a stickler about it because I believe it's that important. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for who you are and what you've done for us. Lord, I pray that if there's somebody here who doesn't know you, who hasn't accepted Jesus as their Savior, that they would do that. God, I lift up once again these families that are represented today. Would their extended families partner with them in the raising of these children in godly homes? Would the friends of these mamas and daddies rally around them and raise their hands up when their arms are weary? For the people in this room and listening who are caring for aging parents, God, would you surround them with people to raise up their hands? God, for the folks here who need you, who are tired, in whatever it is, would you surround them with godly community? Would you surround them with partners who pick them up? And God, for those of us who need help, for those of us who are tired, for those of us who just don't know if we can hold it up anymore, would you give us the humility to reach out to our friends, to our community, and to our partners, and experience the life-giving goodness of your community, God. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm DJ Hill. I'm a partner here at Grace along with Laura, my wife, and three daughters. Today's reading is from Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, verses 9 through 12. Two are better than one, because they have good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two can withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Thank you. Thank you, DJ. I was pleased to discover that you're literate. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This is the fourth part in our series called The Traits of Grace, where we're going through and we're just talking about the things and the aspects that make grace, grace, that make us who we are. Part of it is getting to pick on each other a little bit. And so this week is one that is, this is near and dear to all of our hearts. If this is, If you have been at Grace for any amount of time, then this is something that resonates deeply with you. It's something that characterizes us and who we are, and it's something that we choose over and over again in the way that we structure ourselves, in the way that we do things, and in the kind of church that we want to be. And so this morning, we get to talk about the fourth trait, which is that we are partners at Grace. We are partners. And we say that we don't have members at Grace, that we have partners instead, which is actually kind of funny to me that I'm such a stickler about having partners instead of members, because I've been doing vocational ministry 20 years. And one of the things I've always thought is kind of funny about the church is the way that we like to name stuff. Like we're super cool and we're coming up with new things. I was the small groups pastor at my previous church and I watched those things. First, when I was growing up, it was called Sunday school, right? And then in the 90s, we changed it to small groups. Now we're fancy. And then small groups weren't fancy enough, so we started calling them community groups or life groups or discipleship groups. And then there was this whole movement in the last couple of years to start house churches. And you're like, well, what's a house church? Like, well, you gather together and you kind of pray for each other and you talk about things you worship. I says, oh, it's like a small group. Like, no, no, no, house church. Well, what do you do on Sunday? Well, we go to big church together. Oh, so it's a small group. Like that's what we do. We like to rename things so that outsiders can't figure out what's going on in here. And it's really, it's just stupid. And I did it too. I was talking about this with my wife, Jen. And I was like, what are some other dumb church names that we've come up with over the years? Like on Sunday mornings, instead of calling it the service, we call it the gathering. And instead of calling it a sermon, we call it the talk, right? Because we're just trying to be cooler and more relevant in what we do. And she got on to me. She was like, you were guilty of this. She said, what was your ministry called in your first church? The first church I worked at was in Franklin County, Virginia, Rocky Mount, close to Smith Mountain Lake. And I had a buddy that started a church called Covenant Community Church. I believe it's still going. And we met in this old colonial home out in the middle of nowhere in the farmland of Franklin County, Virginia. We had about 30 people who came every week, which, by the way, we're about the same size as Grace is now based on the amount of families that stood up. We don't have space but for 30 people a week if you guys, if you families come every week. But I led a ministry. It was the student ministry, and I called it One because it was based on, I believe, Luke 15 where Jesus is talking to Mary and Martha, and he tells Mary, you need to worry about but one thing, and it's loving me. And so I called it One, which was aptly named because that's about how many kids I had per week on the Wednesday, right? And then I get to the big church with 200 kids in the middle school, and that was my ministry, and I called that Up and Out, right? Well, what's Up and Out? Well, it means love God, love others, love up, love up, love out. Oh, that's great. Well, who's it for? Well, it's for middle school. So it's middle school ministry? No, it's up and out. It's up and out, right? And this is what we do. We come up with dumb names for stuff and they're unnecessary and we don't need them and Grace is guilty of this too. I don't know if you know this, but if you haven't been going to Grace for a long time, you might not know that this is called Grace Hall. Now, I've never called it that, but the people who came before me call it that. This is an auditorium, and really, that's insulting to auditoriums. This is a big room with a pole in it, right? That's what this is. So I'm real big on just call it what it is. If it's Sunday school, call it Sunday school. If it's a small group, call it small group. But if it's ministry, call it ministry. So why am I such a stickler about, no, no, no, at Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. And I catch heck for this. I'll be talking to elders or leaders in the church or people who have been going here for a while and they'll be like, yeah, yeah, well, how many members do we have right now? Or what's the membership vote on that? Or are they a member of the church? I'm sorry, they're partners of the church. Like, we got you, buddy. We'll help you carry this load of calling things partners. And everybody kind of giggles at me that I'm a real dummy for insisting that we use the term partners. And I understand. I would make fun of me too if I were you. But let me tell you why I'm such a stickler about this word partner and why it really does define who and what we are at Grace and what we're trying to do. The first reason is not the main reason, but the first reason is the one that I repeat often. A lot of you can probably say this as well. You probably know how the sentence ends, but members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's one of the first reasons. At Grace, we have partners, we don't have members. Members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute, right? If you become a member of something, what do you become primarily concerned with? What are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this thing? If you joined BJ's, what are the rights and privileges I get? Costco, you get a dollar slice of pizza. That's a pretty good right and privilege. You join Northridge Country Club, what are the rights and privileges afforded me as a member of this place? Right? When you're a member, you kind of sit back and you go, well, what's in it for me? What do I get out of this? What can I consume? When you're a member, you expect a certain experience. You expect to consume a certain experience. And then when you can't consume it, you critique it. Until you do get to consume the experience you want. As a pastor, I don't really want a church full of members who consume an experience and then critique it when it's not what they want. We want partners who partner with us because partners tend to contribute. Partners take ownership and what they're partnered in and see it as their personal responsibility to see the success of this thing work out. And really, the more I thought about it this week, because we're going to talk about how this is true, but the more I thought about it this week, the more satisfied I was with understanding partners this way. Partners share the burden. That's what partners do. Partners share the burden in myriad ways. The greatest picture of partnership that I've seen in the Bible, and I love this picture in the Bible. I don't have any tattoos, not because I think they're sinful or something, but there's nothing I want to put on my body that I'm sure I'm going to want there in 20 years. So I haven't done anything yet. But if I were going to get one, it may very well be an image of this story. When I think about this story and this scene in the Bible for too long, I'll tear up. I'll start to cry. And I'm going to read this to you, and you're going to think, why is this dude tearing up at this story? Listen, first of all, the older I get, the more I tear up at. Jen and I are back onto watching the Great British Baking Show, and we cry at the end of every episode because we're so happy for Juergen that he gets to call his wife again. Like, we're so thrilled that we tear up, and then we look at each other, and we laugh. And the older I get, the more stuff I cry about. And if you want to judge me for that, I'll tell you right where you can put your judgment. But when I think about this passage and the picture here, it moves me to tears because of how powerful it is. So what's happening is we're in the book of Exodus. I'm going to read from chapter 17. And in the book of Exodus, God's children are wandering through the desert. They're being led by Moses. And a man named Amalek comes up against them with his army and he attacks the Israelite people. He attacks the Hebrew people. And so Moses sends his general, Joshua, out to battle. And he says, I want you to go and I want you to fight against Amalek. And I'm going to go up on the top of this hill and I'm going to hold my staff over my head. And when you're down there fighting and you look up at me, as long as my staff is up over my head, you will prevail. So go and fight. So Joshua does. He gathers the army and he goes and he fights. And this is what happens. We pick it up in verse 11. It's such an incredible picture. Moses says, go down there and you fight that battle. And I'm going to hold this staff over my head. And as long as I hold it up, you guys will prevail. But you know, holding a stick over your head burns the shoulders a little bit. It fatigues the muscles. And so every now and again, he had to shake it out. He got weary. He got tired. He couldn't hold it up. He couldn't carry that burden. And as he got weak, the men on the battlefield began to suffer. And so he had to find the strength and pick his hands back up again for as long as he could to carry that burden. And eventually Aaron and Hur, H-U-R, burden. The burden was too great for Moses. The responsibility was too much. It was too much for one person to handle. There's not a single person here who could have held that over their head for the duration of time that it would require for Joshua to defeat Amalek. And so he needed help because it was too much. And so God sent him partners to bracket his arms, to hold up the staff when he was too weak, to carry that burden when he couldn't. And it is, to me, one of the most poignant pictures in the Bible of community and friendship. And if I'm honest with you, I think that's exactly why it's in the Bible. Whenever you read anything in the Bible, you've got to ask yourself, why is this so important that God wanted me to know about this thousands of years later? Why this detail? Why this story? Why not just write Joshua defeated Amalek? Why not just write Amalek came up against the forces of Israel and God blessed Israel and Israel won? Why not just skip it and go on through? It doesn't matter. I'm sure they had plenty of skirmishes over the 40 years that they were in this desert that we don't know about it because they're not recorded in history. Why this one? I'm convinced. This is just me. I didn't learn this in seminary. Okay, this isn't gospel truth. But if you were to ask me, why is this in the Bible? It's because it's a picture of community. It's a picture of partnership. And it's to show us that there are times when we can't carry the burden on our own and we need people around us to bracket us and hold it up. There's times when the people who we love very much are weary and they can't hold the burden up anymore. And we come and we bracket them and we hold their hands up for them until their strength returns. It's such an incredible picture. And so at Grace, that's what we are. We are partners. We see and we notice when the burden gets too much. And we bracket and we put our hands on the people that we love and we help them carry the load until their strength returns. At Grace, we are partners. And so that word partner is so much deeper to me than a simple, clever replacement for member. That comparison, members consume and partners contribute, that's just the surface level of what a partner is at Grace. Partners carry the burden. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We partner in the things that God would have us do here. This starts at the staff level. We have staff meetings every Tuesday. And we talk about everything that everyone is doing. And no one carries their burden by themselves. We talk about when Summer Extreme is coming up, we talk about it in staff meeting. We begin talking about it in February and March and saying, Aaron, our children's pastor, Julie, what can we do to help you? How can you use us? The weeks leading up to Summer Extreme, I tell the staff, hey, we all work for Aaron. She's our boss. Whatever she needs the next couple weeks, that's what we do. When we're heading into the Christmas series and the Christmas service, we work for boy Aaron, worship leader Aaron, the bad Aaron. We work for him. For two, three weeks leading into that, what can we do? How can we help you? What do you need? We speak into everything that we do. What's going on in student ministry and how can we help? Before we do a series, we all talk into it. Before I do sermons, we all talk into them. We share the burden across the spectrum. And so we believe that trickles down to everyone in all that we do. And so at Grace, we partner in ministry. We don't just sit back and say, well, I hope the church is able to do that. Let's see. No, we jump in and see a personal responsibility. There was a great example a few minutes ago. I ran to the hallway after the children's dedication because I like to make sure that while I'm preaching, I don't need to use the restroom. I like to be 100% focused on you. So I ran over there to take care of business. And then I came back. And as I was in the hallway, it dawns on me, gosh, we've got a lot of babies being handed into that small space back there because we got child dedication today. I wonder if we're double staffed. And I looked at a lady who just happened to be standing in the hallway. She was just fodder. She came to attend the service this morning, and I looked at her and just presumptuously said, you might have to jump in that room this morning. She goes, yeah, no, I'm going to stick around and see. That's partnership. There's a need here. I'm a partner of the church. I'm going to step in and I'm going to help carry that. We're going to build a building. We have land we're looking to build. We need partners, which are not to stand back. I hope the church can do this, but actively, how do I partner with the church to make sure that this can happen? In our small groups, your small group leader asks a question, and it's a bad one. It's a dud, right? It's just a dead fish in the middle of the room. You're like, I don't know. I don't know how to answer this question. Your partner in ministry, bail them out, man. Say anything. Say what you're doing for dinner tomorrow. It doesn't matter. Just get the conversation going again. If Erin looks tired, if her hands look weary, if we see the same faces in those hallways and in that back room week in and week out, volunteer, step in, bracket, hold. We jump in. We are partners in ministry. We share the burden in what's happening here. We believe wholeheartedly in that. So at Grace, we are partners in ministry. More importantly than that, at Grace, we are partners in life. We partner with each other through all the seasons of life. One of the things that I've gotten to see more than ever in my position is the wisdom of Solomon when he writes in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that happens to you happens to everyone else. Every struggle that we walk through is shared by those who came before us and will come after us. And when I think about life and how I get to see these common struggles meted out through all the folks that God allows me to minister to, I just think of people coming out of college in their 20s. And that place where you are, where you're just trying to figure out, who am I? Can I get a job? I'm going to be homeless or live in my parents' basement forever. Can I figure this out? Who am I going to marry? Who am I going to meet? Do I want to build a family? Is that a thing that I want? And then you do get married and you're trying to figure out how can we make it together? What's going to happen here? And then maybe you build a family or maybe you start to build a career and you're just thinking about how do I take the next step? And you have people around you and you have all the same stressors. It's all the same stuff. How am I going to figure this out? How am I going to work out work-life balance? If I'm single, when am I going to meet the person that I want to spend my life with? If I'm married, is this the right person that I actually did want to spend my life with? Like all the things, right? And then you have kids and I'm standing up here and I don't have too many years as far as parenting is concerned on the people who were up here, but there's some with just brand new babies and I've got a six-year-old. I know that I don't know what's ahead of me, okay? So don't hear ignorant arrogance in this, but I also know that these folks over here that just have this tiny little baby and I've got my six-year-old, boy, there's a lot of space and stress to cover between six months and six years old. And so I know a little bit about what they face. And we know a little bit more about what to pray. And then those of you who have kids in high school or older, you know that I'm sitting at six years old and I'm going, gosh, I'm so stressed. And you're like, you don't know nothing. Shut up with your stress. You know what I wouldn't give to just lose an hour of sleep a night and know that my kids are okay? And then they go to college and then they get jobs. And then you look at your husband and your wife and you try to figure out, do we still like each other? Because we just ran a small business for 25 years. We were ships passing in the night trying to get things done. How do we figure out this marriage, right? And then it's not too long that you're empty nesters when you start to take care of your aging parents and all the challenges that are there and everything that awaits you doing that. There is nothing new under the sun. I have watched so many of my friends enter into that phase. And then you leave that phase and you get the joy of being a grandparent maybe. And then you start to age. And aging stinks. And you move into that phase. But in all of that, everything that you're experiencing where you are, all the folks who are older than you have walked through that. And all the folks who are younger than you will. And there is nothing new under the sun. And we face those things. And in the midst of those predictable cycles come the unpredictable diagnoses and loss and triumphs and promotions and surprises and tearful blessings. But it's all things that everyone else has experienced too. And so at grace, you should never walk through that alone. Whatever that is, whatever the fill in the blank is, if you're a part of grace, you should never walk through that alone. You should never, ever walk through parenthood alone, through trying to figure out what to do with this little human, you shouldn't feel like you're facing that alone. When your kids are in middle school, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you're single and you don't know if you're going to meet your person or not, that you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience tragedy, you shouldn't walk through that alone. When you experience triumph and celebration, you shouldn't walk through that alone. Is there anything sadder than someone experiencing tremendous joy, getting the best news possible, and not having anyone to share it with? No, that's heartbreaking. You shouldn't walk through caring for your aging parents alone. You shouldn't walk through empty nesting alone. We shouldn't walk through any of that stuff alone. We were not designed to walk through it alone. That was not God's intent. We are partners in life. We walk with each other. And we have a friend whose strength is failing. And she doesn't have the strength to fight for her marriage anymore. She's done. It's hard. Her shoulders are tired. We come beside her. We get her a seat. And we bracket ourselves against her and we hold her hands until she has the strength again. We have friends who are parents and they've given up and they don't know what to do. We bracket them and we hold them up. We have a friend who's facing addiction or sin and they feel like giving up. Their arms are tired, and they just can't hold out anymore. We come alongside them. We press up against them, and we hold their hands up in the fight until their strength is restored to do it again. We are partners in life. I am convinced that one of God's greatest gifts is that of community and friendship. There is almost nothing in my life I hold more sacred than the people who I love, than the friends who are close to me, than the people who have come alongside me and held up my hands when I was too tired, than the people who I've stood beside and watched them regain their strength and stand back up. At Grace, we are partners, and that means we are partners in life. And here's the other thing I'll mention. I had a lunch with someone this week. And I found out that over COVID, one of them lost both of their parents. Another one of them had to put their parents into memory care and separate his parents. That's an incredible burden. And they've been carrying it alone. And I told them I was going to say this. Grace, don't walk alone. They didn't tell anybody. How can the church do what it needs to do if you carry all that yourself? If you sit there on the top of the hill, holding it up, struggling, crying, failing, knowing that it's all going to have to collapse. Tell us. Tell us. Let us come alongside. Let us hold you up. And this is where I would press in and chide you a little bit if you're a longtime grace person. At grace, and I would assume most places, we love to be, are anxious to be, excited to be, happy to be the person who stands in brackets. We will do this for you all day long. We will do this for you for as long as it takes until your strength is restored. We're happy to do that. We do not at all want to be the person here needing help. But this doesn't work if we don't let other people partner with us too. So get over yourselves, Grace. Let people help you. Let people be your partner too. Finally, we are partners in faith. We do not walk the spiritual journey alone. Most importantly, we're partners in faith. We come alongside one another and we help one another grow. We're going to talk more about this next week, how we can be partners in faith when we talk about how we are step takers. But at Grace, we are partners in faith. We come alongside one another. We foster one another's spiritual life. I saw somebody say this week or last that they are convinced, and I am too. I totally agreed with this, the longer they are in the Christian faith, the longer they are in this Christian life, the more they believe that it is simply about hanging on. It's simply about clinging to Jesus. That's why I think when Paul tells us in Ephesians 6 to put on the full armor of God, he says, put on the full armor of God, and he goes through all the things that you're supposed to put on so you can stand against the wiles of the devil. And then at the end, he says, and when you have stood firm, stand firm therefore. Just another one. When you have done it, when you fought the good fight, keep fighting, keep standing firm, keep clinging. In every list of Christian attributes, you will eventually find perseverance. Just hang on. Just cling to faith. I'm reminded of what Jesus says to John the Baptist when John the Baptist essentially says, hey, I'm pretty sure you're Jesus, but you've kind of let me down here because I'm going to lose my life in this prison. And Jesus says, yeah, you are. And blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. Blessed are those who still choose faith in me when I've let them down because their expectations of me were wrong. I'm reminded of when Jesus told the gathering of people that unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And all the crowds went, that dude's weird. And they left. And he looked at his disciples and he said, are you going to leave me too? And Peter says, you're Jesus. Where are we going to go? You don't make any sense to me. I don't want to cannibalize you. I'm not into that. But I also know who you are. Where else am I going to go? That's faith. We know Jesus. Where else are we going to go? Even when he mystifies us, even when it doesn't make sense, even when it's hard to figure out, even when we're faced with those situations where we go, how does a good God let stuff like this happen? We cling to faith. And sometimes our hands get tired. Sometimes clinging to faith is hard. And so we need godly people around us who love us and who love Jesus to hold our hands up for us and help us cling to faith when ours is failing. That prayer that's prayed, Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. When we pray that, you know how he helps you sometimes? By bringing friends in to encourage you. A phone call or a text or an email or a lunch. So most importantly, Grace, we are partners in faith. We help each other cling. We help each other thrive. We help each other strive. We help each other take steps towards Jesus. That's what we do. That's why I asked DJ to read a 300-fold cord. I want us to use our tremendous community and our tremendously deep friendships to be partners in ministry, to be partners in life, and to be partners in faith. And my closing encouragement would be that if you were one who feels like you don't have that yet, pray for it. Pursue it. Ask God for it. You'll find it. If you are one who does feel like you have this, and you do have good and rich and deep friendships here, please know that God did not give you that community just for you or the people who are already in it, but that the job of a good, godly, biblical community is to turn outwards and to say, who else needs what we got? Because it's pretty good. Who else can we partner with? So when I say at Grace we have partners, we don't have members, this is what I mean. And this is why I'm a stickler about it because I believe it's that important. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for who you are and what you've done for us. Lord, I pray that if there's somebody here who doesn't know you, who hasn't accepted Jesus as their Savior, that they would do that. God, I lift up once again these families that are represented today. Would their extended families partner with them in the raising of these children in godly homes? Would the friends of these mamas and daddies rally around them and raise their hands up when their arms are weary? For the people in this room and listening who are caring for aging parents, God, would you surround them with people to raise up their hands? God, for the folks here who need you, who are tired, in whatever it is, would you surround them with godly community? Would you surround them with partners who pick them up? And God, for those of us who need help, for those of us who are tired, for those of us who just don't know if we can hold it up anymore, would you give us the humility to reach out to our friends, to our community, and to our partners, and experience the life-giving goodness of your community, God. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life, all over my life. I see promises in fulfillment. All over my life. All over my life. Help me remember when I'm weak. Fear may come, but fear will lead. You lead my heart to victory. You are my strength, and you always will be. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. All over my life. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life, all over my life. See the cross, the empty grave, the evidence of your goodness. Jesus. I see your promises in fulfillment all over my life, all over my life, yeah. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life. Yeah, you're all around us. So why should I fear? The evidence is here. Why should I fear? Oh, the evidence is here. I searched the world, but it couldn't fill me. Melted deep rays, treasures of fame were never enough. Then you came along and put me back together. And every desire is now satisfied here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you. There's nothing better than you. Oh, there's nothing, nothing is better than you. Come on, tell them. To show you my weakness My failures and flaws Lord, you've seen them all And you still call me friend Cause the God of the mountains Is the God of the valleys There's not a place Your mercy and grace won't find me again. Oh Come on. Tell them now. Come on, choir. Oh, there's nothing better than you. Nothing. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. You're the only one who can. Somebody give a praise in this house. I don't think we're finished yet. Come on. Come on, one more can. You're the only one who can. You're the only one who can. Jesus, you're the only one. Come on, give Him one more shout of praise. When all I see is the battle, you see my victory. When all I see is the mountain, you see a mountain moon. And as I walk through the shadow, your love surrounds me. There's nothing to fear now, for I am safe with you. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees, with my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs for you. Thank you, God. God, you see the end to tell. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees. With my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs to you. And every fear I lay at your feet. I'll sing through the night. Oh God, the power of our God. You shine in the shadow. You win every battle. Nothing can stand against the power of our God. In all mighty fortunes, you go before us. Nothing can stand against the power of our God We wanted to let you know that our mission here at Grace is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. One of the best ways to communicate with us here at Grace is through our connection cards. If you would like to speak to a pastor at Grace, if you have any prayer requests for our prayer team and our elders, or if you're not receiving our Grace Vine weekly emails, this would be a great way to fill it out and let us know. If you're watching with us online, you can click the link below and submit the connection card there. Or if you're here with us at Grace, the connection card is in the seat back pocket in front of you. Just be sure to drop it on your way out in the box next to the doors. Thanks so much for joining us this morning and we hope that this service is a blessing to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here at Grace Raleigh. I'd like to ask you to stand. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace, and it's great having people here in the room. It's great having people at home joining in with us. I thought that this morning we could start off with the scripture of John 3.16, that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Come all you sinners Come find his mercy Come to the table He will satisfy Taste of his goodness Find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us. Whoever believes in Him will live forever. bring all your failures bring your addictions come lay them down at the foot of the cross Jesus is waiting there with hope in our hearts For God so loved the world praise god praise god from whom all blessings Praise Him, praise Him For the wonders of His love For God so loved the world that He gave us His one and only Son to save The power of hell forever defeated Now it is well, I'm walking in freedom Oh God so loved, God so loved the world Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Come lay them down at the foot of the cross. Jesus is waiting. God so loved the world. Amen. God sent his son. They called him Jesus. He came to love, heal, and forgive. He lived and died. To buy my pardon. An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. he lives all fear is gone because i know he holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives And then one day I'll cross that river I'll fight my spine No war with me And then as death Gives way to victory I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know He lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone Because I know He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives. And life is worth the living just because He lives. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all can have a seat for a moment. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It is fabulous to see your smiling faces in here. And welcome to those of you that have joined us online. It is a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning, Welcome to the world for this beautiful sunny weather because in two weeks, the mission committee will be here to gather all of the goodies that you choose to bring. So if you go to Grace Raleigh's events page, you will find a list of things that the mission committee is looking for for the Interfaith Food Shuttle. You will buy those. And then on either that Friday or either that, I'm sorry, that Saturday or that Sunday, you can drive through. The hours are listed on the screen. You can drive through. They will come out to your car. They will pick it up. They will bring it inside, and they will take care of it. So all you have to do is go to the grocery. And I guess these days you could even have it delivered to your house. So that is fabulous. And speaking of driving by and dropping off, if you are the parent of a 6th grader through 12th grader, today is the day you get to drive by and push them out of the car. Woo-hoo! We are so excited to announce that Grace Students is back up and running live and in person. Kyle will be here tonight in all of his fun. And we have the cool thing happening too that he's live streaming the service. So if for some reason your 6th through 12th grader can't be in the building tonight, no problem. Email Kyle, kyle at graceralee.org. And he has all the information and the links that you need to be able to be attached to the live stream and join in that way. They're now going to start into a routine of being in person one week, meeting online together the next week in person, and you get the idea. But email Kyle for any information that you guys might need. So thank you again for coming, for being a part of Grace Raleigh thisbbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody here. This is as full as the church has been since last February. That's crazy. Man, you guys, apparently, we've been going through Ecclesiastes. Y'all love depression and hopelessness. So thanks for showing up to that. You're like, I got to get out of the house now. Maybe that's what I needed to do the whole time, which is make you really, really sad. So you had to come see people. This is great. If you're still joining us at home, we're so grateful for that. This is the third part in our series called Vapor, where we're moving through the book of Ecclesiastes. We've said the whole time that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. And what's really fun is that this is the joyful sermon. This is the one, this is the good news. This is the one where we celebrate. We only did two songs up front because we want to end praising God together, and he gave us sunshine to do this. So it seems that the weather is matching the rhythm of the series, and I think that that's fantastic. In the first week, we started out and we talked about this idea of a hevel or vapor or smoke, and we concluded that Solomon would argue that a vast majority of Americans are wasting their life, right? Which means a vast majority of us are probably investing our life pursuing things that ultimately we can't grab onto or vapor or smoke. They're here one day and they're gone the next. And so that really left us with this question at the end of that week, is there a worthwhile investment of our lives? And if you have notes, you see that at the top of your notes. I think that's been a question that's been lingering in the series. Is there really a worthwhile investment of my life or is it all just a waste of time? Is everyone here just, we're all just chasing vapor? And I think that there's a good answer to that question, but last week we answered it a little bit, but we stumbled into another harsh reality. The harsh reality that even if we pursue wisdom with our life, even if we're obedient, the godliest of the godly, that does not insulate us from pain. Our godliness doesn't protect us from grief, right? And so what we learned by looking at that beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy. There's a time for grieving and there's a time for healing and there's a time to be hurt. There's a time to live and there's a time to die. Like we saw that passage. And what we learned is that pain is not punitive. God's not tightening the screws on us to punish us. Pain is the result of a fallen world, right? And that the harsh reality that Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes is that no matter what we do, we're going to hurt. No matter how godly we are, there will be seasons of mourning in our life. And so that leaves us, I think, with another really difficult question. Can I ever hope for true happiness? Can I ever, on this side of eternity, grasp onto something that isn't Hevel or vapor or smoke? Can I grasp onto a joy that is immutable and unchangeable, that is resistant to circumstances in life, that even as the storms come, I can still find myself in seasons of joyfulness and contentment? Is it even possible to do those things? And I think those are the two big questions that we bring into this week. Is it possible to pursue anything that really matters? And is it possible to grab onto anything that looks like actual true contentment and joy? And the answer to those questions, I think, is yes. And Solomon answers those questions multiple times in Ecclesiastes. I think in four separate passages, he addresses those with the exact same answer. Four different times, he gives this answer, and I love this answer. I think there's so much bound up in his choice to answer the questions in this way. But like I said, he says it in four separate times. I'm going to read you two of them so that you can get a sense. They're in your notes. If you have them, they'll be on the screen if you're following along at home. But here's what he writes in Ecclesiastes, Solomon repeats this idea. That at the end of the day, what's left for us to do is enjoy our toil, enjoy our food and drink, and honor our God. The end of the book, he ends. The end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. We talked about that last week. And it's important that as we look through what I think is kind of this formula for contentment, that we understand that when he's talking about eating and drinking, when we see eating and drinking in the Bible, that is almost always a reference to a communal activity. Eating and drinking is inherently communal. The Bible rarely talks about eating for sustenance, right? It rarely talks about food as this way to be healthy. It always talks about food and bread and gathering around a table as a form of community. And so when he says that there's nothing for man to do except to find joy in what he does and to eat and to drink. What he means is when we look around the table, when we have our meals, if we love the people who are around us, that's good. That's a gift from God. We go out to eat, we're eating with our friends, and we look around and we have genuine affection, we enjoy these people. That's a gift from God. When you look around your table and you have family there and you love that family. Now listen, we're all parts of families. We know that love isn't just sing song and fairy tales all the time. Sometimes it's hard, but at the end of the day, if you know that I love you and you love me, then that's a gift from God. And so when he's talking about food and drink, he's really referencing community. And then when he talks about toil, enjoying your toil, I have a men's group that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6.30. Anybody can join us if you want to. Just email me. Well, the more the merrier there. And we were talking about this word toil. And to a room full of men, it means career, right? It means work. It means what's your job? But Solomon uses that word a lot more broadly than that in Ecclesiastes. And the word toil really doesn't refer to your job or your career as much as it refers to the activities that you have set aside for that day, the productivity of that day, whatever it is you're going to do. Because we have some men in the group who are retired. If it's only about work, career, then they have no shot at happiness, right? They better get back to it. But really, it's broader than that. It really means, Toyo, what do you have set for yourself today? What productivity are you going to engage in today? And then in this verse, he says that we should do good. And he defines doing good as honoring God with our life, fearing God and keeping his commandments. And it's with these understandings that I kind of arrive at this conclusion of kind of Solomon's equation for contented joy and apex happiness. And I really do think it's this. People you love plus tasks you enjoy plus honoring God equals apex happiness. Listen to me. If when you eat, if as you move through your day, you look around and the people in your life bring you joy, and when you wake up, you're looking forward to the things that you're going to do in that day. Maybe not everything, but the point of the day brings you joy. And you're honoring God with your life. If those things are true of you, then I want you to know this morning, you are apex happy. It doesn't get better than that. Sometimes our problem is just that we can't see it. But I'm telling you, man, if you wake up every day and you get to have breakfast with your family or you go out to lunch with some people at work that you enjoy or you look forward to seeing some friends at small group or something like that, if you look around at your community and you're surrounded by people you love and you look at your days and God has given you something to put your hand to that you enjoy, that gives you a sense of purpose, that helps you become who he's created you to be and use your gifts and abilities to point people to Jesus as you move throughout your days, if that's what you get to do and you're honoring God as you do those things, then listen to me, you are experiencing apex happiness in your life. And I think that we get it so messed up sometimes. We do all the things that Solomon talked about in the first two chapters, and we chase all the things. We run out there and we chase all the success and all the relationships and all the money and all the fulfillment and all the pleasure and all the stuff that's out there. When really what's true is God has already given us everything we need for joy. God has already provided in our lives everything we need for joy. And listen, if you don't have those things, if you look around, you're like, I don't like any of the people in my life right now. If you don't have a fulfillment in your job, if you're not honoring God with your life, then guess what? Those things are attainable. Those things aren't out there and forever away. Those things are attainable. They're right around you. God gives us everything we need for joy within our reach. That's why I brought this chair today. This chair here is my chair from my house. This is my chair in my living room. This chair sits in the corner of our living room, and opposite me is we have a little sectional couch. There's other people who sit in this chair sometimes, but for the most part, it's me. When I sit in this chair, I get to watch dance recitals. I get to watch Lily come in with her friends, and they sing Elsa to me. And I pretend to care about Elsa. I get to watch dumb little magic tricks. We went to some restaurant and they gave her some pot with a magnet on the bottom and there's a plant that comes out of the wand and she comes in and she does the abracadabra, the whatever, and then she pulls it out and for the 37th time, I'm amazed by this magic trick, right? I sit in this chair and Jen sits on the couch and we talk about our days. We talk about what's hard and we talk about what's fun. From this chair, when someone rings the doorbell, if I angle my head just right, I can see down the hallway to the front door and I can see the little face that's there to come play with Lily. If they're all over, I can look this way out the window and I can look at them all, all the neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline that we got to get for her. In the mornings when I'm doing life right and I'm downstairs reading like I'm supposed to, at about 6.45, 7 o'clock, I can look up the stairs and see Lily up there and motion her down to come sit in my lap and tell me what she's going to do that day. When we have friends over, which I love to do, eventually we end up in our living room and we sit around and we talk and we giggle and we laugh. In the pandemic, I worked from this chair. I set up a little table right here and I do my Zoom calls and I argue with the elders and that's pure joy except for Chris Lata. I love working from that table. I can see all the things that bring me the most joy from this chair. And if I go out there chasing joy, if I go out there trying to track everything down, what am I going to do? Buy a new house for this chair These are from old David. If this church grows to 2,000 people and I get to feel what that feels like, do my conversations with my family and friends get any better from sitting in this chair? No, man. This is it. And sometimes it's not the chair, right? Sometimes it's the kitchen. Sometimes it's when I get to cook dinner and Jen sits on the stool and we talk about our days. Sometimes it's the mornings when Ruby and Lily are on the bed and I'm in the chair in the corner of that room and we're all talking, just enjoying our times. But here's what I know. I can go out there chasing whatever I want to chase. But my times of most profound joy come when I'm right there. They come when I'm around the people that I love the most. They come when I'm soaking in the blessings that God has given me. And this is what we need to pay attention to. Solomon tells us these are God's gifts to us. If people in your life that you love, who love you, they're God's gift to you. Drink them in. Hug them more. Tell them more that you care about them. Tell them more that you're grateful for them. Tell them more that they are a gift from God in your life. You have a thing to do every day that you like to put your hand to, whether it's raising kids or volunteering somewhere or spending time in your neighborhood or going to work or looking forward to seeing your friends or whatever it is. You have things that God has given you that make you productive, that let you feel like you are living out His intended will for you? That's His gift for you. That work, that toil, that's His gift. It's designed for you. And then if we honor God, His invitation to honor Him is His gift to us because He knows that when we live a life honoring Him, we live a life of fewer regrets. We live a life of deeper gratitude. We live a life with a deeper desire for Jesus if we'll just revel in his gifts. This helps me make sense of the Honduran children I saw at one time. For years of my life, I would go down to Honduras with some regularity to take teams down to visit a pastor named Israel Gonzalez. Israel is one of my heroes. The things that he's done for the kingdom are unbelievable. And he is based in a city in central Honduras called, called, uh, Swatopeke. He and his wife have set up a free clinic there. He has a church there. And then from that church, what they do is they organize these goodwill parties and they bring teams down and you get together hot dogs and little tchotchke gifts and you go up into the hillsides. There's mountains surrounding Ciguatapeque and you go up into the mountainside and you go to these villages and he throws these goodwill parties and he hopes that by doing this, these villages that are deeply Catholic, but Catholic in such a way that shuts them off to faith rather than turns them on to faith. And so they're lost communities. And he goes and he throws these parties, and by throwing these goodwill parties, they invite him into the community to plant a church. He's planted 14 churches that way, last I checked. And I would go on these parties. And you go up into these mountains surrounding Suwatopec into a village. And that's not derogatory. It's literally a village. Homes are built of mud and wood, makeshift roofs, one or two rooms, literally dirt poor. I've had the opportunity in my life to be in a fair amount of other countries and to see poverty on multiple continents. Honduras is just about the worst. But yet when we would go there, we would get out and there would always be these children there. And these children would have the biggest, goofiest grins on their face ever. They were so joyful, and they would laugh, and they would play, and they were happy to see you, and it never got wiped off of their face. And I always wondered, kid, how can you be so happy? Don't you know you don't have a Barbie house? Don't you know you don't have a PlayStation? Don't you know your soccer ball stinks? Those kids had it figured out, man. They had people around them who loved them. They had things to do each day that they looked forward to. And they hadn't lived enough life to carry the weight of what it is to not honor God with our choices. They were walking in apex happiness. And I carry all my American wealth down there and privilege, and I look at them and I'm jealous. Because they figured out something that we haven't. And I just think that there is this profound truth that everything that we need is right there within our grasp. We don't have to run around out there chasing vapor and Hevel. God has given us these gifts already. And in that truth, in that truth that everything we need for joy is within our grasp? We answer those two questions we started with. Is there a pursuit that's actually worth investing my life in? Yes. The people you love, the tasks that give you purpose, and honoring God. You want to live a life that matters? You want to get to the end of it and wonder if it's all vapor? Or not have to wonder that? Then invest your life in the people that you love and the tasks that God has ordained for you. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that we should do good works, that we should walk in them. Walk in those good works that God intended you for and honor God with the choices that you make. Those are worthwhile pursuits. You will get to the end of your life if you pursue those things and know that it was a life well lived. And he actually doubles down on this idea of pursuing relationships with other people. I don't have a lot of time to spend here on it, but again, this is a passage that I can't just skip over as we go through the book of Ecclesiastes. He doubles down on this idea of having more folks in our life when he writes this has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon doesn't take a lot of time to tell you to invest in a lot of things in Ecclesiastes. If you've been reading along with us, he doesn't tell you to do a lot of stuff there. He just kind of tells you, hey, this stuff's a waste of time. You should honor God. And then he tells you how we got to that conclusion. But here he stops and makes sure you understand the value of having people in your life who love you, who you love in return. And he sets up life as this struggle, this fight, because it is a struggle and a fight to choose to honor God with our lives. It is a struggle and a fight to keep our marriages healthy. It is a struggle and a fight to direct our kids in the right way, to love our families well, to share our faith, to be evangelists in our community, and to make disciples of the people who are around us. That's hard. And Solomon says, if you try to do this alone, woe to you when you fall and you have no one to pick you up. Woe to you when addiction creeps in and there's no one you can tell. Woe to you when doubts creep into your faith and there's no one you can talk to. How hard it must be for you when your marriage gets rocky and there's no one to fight for it. If there's two, he says, you've got a fighting chance. If there's three, that's not quickly broken. We need people in our lives to fight for us. We need to fight for the people in our lives. It seems to be a big value to us. That will help us ensure that we always have people to eat and drink with that we love and enjoy. So I thought it was worth pointing out Solomon's emphasis on this. The other question that remained from the previous weeks is, can I ever hope for true happiness? Yes. Yes, because here's the thing. If the bad things in Ecclesiastes 3 are true, then so are the good ones. Last week, I read the passage and I said, listen, pain is coming for all of us. It's going to hurt. We're going to mourn. We're going to grieve. No one gets to dodge that based on our godliness. It's going to happen to all of us. We will walk through hard times, but here's the reality. If that's true, then the flip side is true. If the bad things are true, then God says we will walk through seasons where we experience the good things. Look at the good things. There is a time to be born, to plant, to heal, to build up, to laugh, to dance, to gather things together, to embrace, to keep, to sow, to speak. A time for love and a time for peace. If we're going to have to walk through hard times, there's going to be good ones too. And I just think that the blessing from Ecclesiastes is this. It hits us with some hard realities. It's stark. It's unflinching. Hey, most of us are wasting our lives. And no matter what you do to invest it well, you're going to hurt. Those are hard truths. But I've said the whole time that if we can accept them on the other side is this joy that is waiting for us. And this is the joy. The joy is, yes, there's big things going on that we can't control. But in the midst of all that stuff that we can't control, God gives us these gifts, these moments of joy, these pockets to lean into where we celebrate him, where we're grateful for him, and we acknowledge those things as gifts. And I just think that if we accept the difficult realities from this book, then we can start to look for these little pockets of joy in our life, and they will bring us such more fulfillment than if we just move through them waiting to get to the next thing. At our house, we do a thing called Breakfast Sammy Saturday, all right? I like a good breakfast sandwich. I know it's hard to tell by looking at me, but I like a good, I put butter down, I toast the bread, I do the eggs, I do some bacon, do some cheese on there, and then I put it all together on the blackstone, cut it in half, and the good egg bleeds out onto it. It's all the goodness, and then you dip your sandwich in there. It's the best. I love breakfast Sammy Saturdays. You guys are not enthusiastic enough about this. You need breakfast Sammy Saturdays in your life. Well, I'll just let you guys sign up. Come over to the house. I'll make them for you. We love it. But it's just kind of a thing that I do. I like it. I make one for Jen and Lily, and they kind of eat half of theirs. I'm more excited about it than anybody else. But then one day, Lily brought this home from preschool, and it made me cry right on the spot. That's breakfast Sammy Saturday. She drew my griddle. She put food on it. Apparently, I make pizza there. And she brought it home to me. Now, the thing about this is, it was an assignment at preschool. She was told, just make whatever you want. It's an art project. And she made breakfast Sammy Saturday. And she brought it home to me. And she said, look, Daddy. And she told me what it was. I started crying right there on the spot. I got these big old alligator tears in my eyes looking at Jen. What a cool thing. And sure, life's going to be hard. She's going to be a teenager. She's five now, so she's kind of maxed out on cuteness, and now it's just hyper sometimes. But even though I know that there's hard times ahead, even though I know she won't always appreciate things like Breakfast Sammy Saturday, I know she does now. And I know that that's a gift from my God. And I know that what Ecclesiastes says is the best thing I can possibly do is to drink deeply of that. The best thing we can possibly do is find joy in these moments that God allows. We don't know how long we'll have them. I was talking with a friend last night who's got a new infant. And he said every time he gets up with the infant in the middle of the night and holds her, that it's a privilege. Because he doesn't know when that last time's going to be. And that's the truth of it. I think that we have so many pockets of joy in our life every day. If we have people that we love, if we have something to do that we appreciate, if we're choosing to honor God with our life. And I think that because we're so busy chasing vapor, sometimes we miss these sweet little moments that can all be had right here if we're just paying enough attention. That's why I think on the other side of these realities awaits for us this profound joy. And I think that when we realize that, that when we realize that God has designed these things to bring us happiness in our life, that what's really important is if we don't believe in a God, if we're atheistic in our worldview, then that's it. The joy terminates in those moments. That's all we have. But if we are a spiritual people who believe that God designed these things and these blessings in our life to make himself evident in our life, then our joy doesn't terminate in the moment. It turns into exuberant praise. It reminds us that we have a God that designed this for us. And the other part is, and this is incredible, that the joy that we're experiencing in that moment is only a glimpse of the eternity that he's designed for us and won for us with Jesus, which is what we're going to come back and talk about next week, is how these things are glimpses to the eternity that Jesus has already won for us. So in a few minutes, the band is going to come, and we've saved two fun, exuberant songs to praise God together. And while we do that, I want to encourage you to keep those two thoughts in your head. What are the things that I can see from my chair? What are the joys that God has given me that are within my reach from places that I already have in my life? What are the things that maybe I'm missing because I'm chasing stuff that I don't need? And then let's reflect on the reality that there is coming an eternity where that's all we experience. It's no more just pockets. It's reality. And that is something for us all to celebrate. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so very good to us. You've given us so much. Lord, I pray that we would be grateful for those blessings. I pray that you would steep us in profound gratitude for the things that we have, that you would show us what we need and what we don't. God, if there is somebody here or who can hear my voice, who doesn't have people in their life that they love, God, would you bring that to them? Would you provide that community for them even here at Grace? Would you give them the courage to slip up their hand in some way, to fill out some sheet, or to send some email, or make some phone call, or some text, and help them engage with relationships that matter to them. God, if there are people who don't have something they enjoy in their days, would you give them the courage to find that? Show them how you designed them and what you created them for. God, if we are not honoring you with our lives, I pray that you would give us the courage to do that. Let us praise you exuberantly, God, for the joys that you have given us in our lives. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, Nate. Let's all stand up. guitar solo Our God, firm foundation Our rock, the only solid ground Let's lift his name. you are the only king forever you are victorious Unmatched in all your wisdom In love and justice you will reign and every knee will bow we bring our expectations our hope is anchored in your name the name of jesus Jesus you are the only king forever forevermore you are victorious We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. You are the only king forever. Mighty God, we lift you higher. You are the only king forever. Forevermore, you are the only king forever Forevermore, you are victorious. He is doing great things See what our Savior has done See how His love overcomes he has done great things. We dance in your freedom, awake and alive. Oh Jesus, our Savior, your name lifted high be faithful forever more you have done great things and I know you will do it again for your promise is yes and amen you will do great things God you do great things Oh Oh you have done great things you've done great things every captive and break every chain oh god You have done great things. You have done great things. Oh God, you guys here today. God bless. Have a great week. Thank you. Come all you weary, come all you thirsty, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Well, come all you sinners, come find His mercy. Come to the table, He will satisfy. Taste of His goodness, find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us, His one and only Son to save us. If you never believed in Him, you'll live forever. Here we go. We'll live forever. God so loved the world. Praise God. Praise God. From whom all blessings flow. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. His amazing love. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us Whoever believes in Him Will live forever Oh, the power of hell Forever defeated Now it is well I'm walking in freedom For God so loved the world. Amen. You are here, moving in our midst. I worship you. I worship you. You are here, working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are here. Working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are way maker. Miracle worker. Promise keeper. Light in the darkness. darkness my god that is who you are Jesus. Jesus I worship you. I worship you. You're mending every heart. You are here and you are mending every heart. I worship you. I worship you. You are here and you are way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light're the way maker. Yeah, sing it again. Oh, that is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. Yes, even when. Come on. You never stop. You're the way maker. Oh, that is who you are. Oh, it's who you are, my Jesus. Miracle worker. That is who you are. is above depression. His name is above loneliness. Oh, His name is above disease. His name is above cancer. His name is above every other name. That is who you are. Jesus. oh i know that is who you are When darkness tries to roll over my bones When sorrow comes to pain is all I know, oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. I am not captive to the light. I'm not afraid to leave my past behind. Oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. Oh, I'm standing. There's power in your name. Power in your name. There's power that can break off every chain. There's power that can empty out a grave. There's resurrection power that can save. is Thank you. I'm standing in your love. I count on one thing. The same God that never fails will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. The same God who's never late is working you're working Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy. My heart is heavy God that never fails. Will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. This ain't God who's never late. He's working all things out. You're working all things out. Oh, yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will. For all my days. Oh, yes, I will. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all names that nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all Thank you. The name of all names. That nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise. To glorify, glorify the name of our names. That nothing can stand against. Oh yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Come let us bow at his feet. He has done great things..

I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life, all over my life. I see promises in fulfillment. All over my life. All over my life. Help me remember when I'm weak. Fear may come, but fear will lead. You lead my heart to victory. You are my strength, and you always will be. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. All over my life. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life, all over my life. See the cross, the empty grave, the evidence of your goodness. Jesus. I see your promises in fulfillment all over my life, all over my life, yeah. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life. Yeah, you're all around us. So why should I fear? The evidence is here. Why should I fear? Oh, the evidence is here. I searched the world, but it couldn't fill me. Melted deep rays, treasures of fame were never enough. Then you came along and put me back together. And every desire is now satisfied here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you. There's nothing better than you. Oh, there's nothing, nothing is better than you. Come on, tell them. To show you my weakness My failures and flaws Lord, you've seen them all And you still call me friend Cause the God of the mountains Is the God of the valleys There's not a place Your mercy and grace won't find me again. Oh Come on. Tell them now. Come on, choir. Oh, there's nothing better than you. Nothing. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. You're the only one who can. Somebody give a praise in this house. I don't think we're finished yet. Come on. Come on, one more can. You're the only one who can. You're the only one who can. Jesus, you're the only one. Come on, give Him one more shout of praise. When all I see is the battle, you see my victory. When all I see is the mountain, you see a mountain moon. And as I walk through the shadow, your love surrounds me. There's nothing to fear now, for I am safe with you. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees, with my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs for you. Thank you, God. God, you see the end to tell. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees. With my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs to you. And every fear I lay at your feet. I'll sing through the night. Oh God, the power of our God. You shine in the shadow. You win every battle. Nothing can stand against the power of our God. In all mighty fortunes, you go before us. Nothing can stand against the power of our God We wanted to let you know that our mission here at Grace is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. One of the best ways to communicate with us here at Grace is through our connection cards. If you would like to speak to a pastor at Grace, if you have any prayer requests for our prayer team and our elders, or if you're not receiving our Grace Vine weekly emails, this would be a great way to fill it out and let us know. If you're watching with us online, you can click the link below and submit the connection card there. Or if you're here with us at Grace, the connection card is in the seat back pocket in front of you. Just be sure to drop it on your way out in the box next to the doors. Thanks so much for joining us this morning and we hope that this service is a blessing to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here at Grace Raleigh. I'd like to ask you to stand. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace, and it's great having people here in the room. It's great having people at home joining in with us. I thought that this morning we could start off with the scripture of John 3.16, that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Come all you sinners Come find his mercy Come to the table He will satisfy Taste of his goodness Find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us. Whoever believes in Him will live forever. bring all your failures bring your addictions come lay them down at the foot of the cross Jesus is waiting there with hope in our hearts For God so loved the world praise god praise god from whom all blessings Praise Him, praise Him For the wonders of His love For God so loved the world that He gave us His one and only Son to save The power of hell forever defeated Now it is well, I'm walking in freedom Oh God so loved, God so loved the world Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Come lay them down at the foot of the cross. Jesus is waiting. God so loved the world. Amen. God sent his son. They called him Jesus. He came to love, heal, and forgive. He lived and died. To buy my pardon. An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. he lives all fear is gone because i know he holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives And then one day I'll cross that river I'll fight my spine No war with me And then as death Gives way to victory I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know He lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone Because I know He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives. And life is worth the living just because He lives. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all can have a seat for a moment. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It is fabulous to see your smiling faces in here. And welcome to those of you that have joined us online. It is a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning, Welcome to the world for this beautiful sunny weather because in two weeks, the mission committee will be here to gather all of the goodies that you choose to bring. So if you go to Grace Raleigh's events page, you will find a list of things that the mission committee is looking for for the Interfaith Food Shuttle. You will buy those. And then on either that Friday or either that, I'm sorry, that Saturday or that Sunday, you can drive through. The hours are listed on the screen. You can drive through. They will come out to your car. They will pick it up. They will bring it inside, and they will take care of it. So all you have to do is go to the grocery. And I guess these days you could even have it delivered to your house. So that is fabulous. And speaking of driving by and dropping off, if you are the parent of a 6th grader through 12th grader, today is the day you get to drive by and push them out of the car. Woo-hoo! We are so excited to announce that Grace Students is back up and running live and in person. Kyle will be here tonight in all of his fun. And we have the cool thing happening too that he's live streaming the service. So if for some reason your 6th through 12th grader can't be in the building tonight, no problem. Email Kyle, kyle at graceralee.org. And he has all the information and the links that you need to be able to be attached to the live stream and join in that way. They're now going to start into a routine of being in person one week, meeting online together the next week in person, and you get the idea. But email Kyle for any information that you guys might need. So thank you again for coming, for being a part of Grace Raleigh thisbbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody here. This is as full as the church has been since last February. That's crazy. Man, you guys, apparently, we've been going through Ecclesiastes. Y'all love depression and hopelessness. So thanks for showing up to that. You're like, I got to get out of the house now. Maybe that's what I needed to do the whole time, which is make you really, really sad. So you had to come see people. This is great. If you're still joining us at home, we're so grateful for that. This is the third part in our series called Vapor, where we're moving through the book of Ecclesiastes. We've said the whole time that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. And what's really fun is that this is the joyful sermon. This is the one, this is the good news. This is the one where we celebrate. We only did two songs up front because we want to end praising God together, and he gave us sunshine to do this. So it seems that the weather is matching the rhythm of the series, and I think that that's fantastic. In the first week, we started out and we talked about this idea of a hevel or vapor or smoke, and we concluded that Solomon would argue that a vast majority of Americans are wasting their life, right? Which means a vast majority of us are probably investing our life pursuing things that ultimately we can't grab onto or vapor or smoke. They're here one day and they're gone the next. And so that really left us with this question at the end of that week, is there a worthwhile investment of our lives? And if you have notes, you see that at the top of your notes. I think that's been a question that's been lingering in the series. Is there really a worthwhile investment of my life or is it all just a waste of time? Is everyone here just, we're all just chasing vapor? And I think that there's a good answer to that question, but last week we answered it a little bit, but we stumbled into another harsh reality. The harsh reality that even if we pursue wisdom with our life, even if we're obedient, the godliest of the godly, that does not insulate us from pain. Our godliness doesn't protect us from grief, right? And so what we learned by looking at that beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy. There's a time for grieving and there's a time for healing and there's a time to be hurt. There's a time to live and there's a time to die. Like we saw that passage. And what we learned is that pain is not punitive. God's not tightening the screws on us to punish us. Pain is the result of a fallen world, right? And that the harsh reality that Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes is that no matter what we do, we're going to hurt. No matter how godly we are, there will be seasons of mourning in our life. And so that leaves us, I think, with another really difficult question. Can I ever hope for true happiness? Can I ever, on this side of eternity, grasp onto something that isn't Hevel or vapor or smoke? Can I grasp onto a joy that is immutable and unchangeable, that is resistant to circumstances in life, that even as the storms come, I can still find myself in seasons of joyfulness and contentment? Is it even possible to do those things? And I think those are the two big questions that we bring into this week. Is it possible to pursue anything that really matters? And is it possible to grab onto anything that looks like actual true contentment and joy? And the answer to those questions, I think, is yes. And Solomon answers those questions multiple times in Ecclesiastes. I think in four separate passages, he addresses those with the exact same answer. Four different times, he gives this answer, and I love this answer. I think there's so much bound up in his choice to answer the questions in this way. But like I said, he says it in four separate times. I'm going to read you two of them so that you can get a sense. They're in your notes. If you have them, they'll be on the screen if you're following along at home. But here's what he writes in Ecclesiastes, Solomon repeats this idea. That at the end of the day, what's left for us to do is enjoy our toil, enjoy our food and drink, and honor our God. The end of the book, he ends. The end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. We talked about that last week. And it's important that as we look through what I think is kind of this formula for contentment, that we understand that when he's talking about eating and drinking, when we see eating and drinking in the Bible, that is almost always a reference to a communal activity. Eating and drinking is inherently communal. The Bible rarely talks about eating for sustenance, right? It rarely talks about food as this way to be healthy. It always talks about food and bread and gathering around a table as a form of community. And so when he says that there's nothing for man to do except to find joy in what he does and to eat and to drink. What he means is when we look around the table, when we have our meals, if we love the people who are around us, that's good. That's a gift from God. We go out to eat, we're eating with our friends, and we look around and we have genuine affection, we enjoy these people. That's a gift from God. When you look around your table and you have family there and you love that family. Now listen, we're all parts of families. We know that love isn't just sing song and fairy tales all the time. Sometimes it's hard, but at the end of the day, if you know that I love you and you love me, then that's a gift from God. And so when he's talking about food and drink, he's really referencing community. And then when he talks about toil, enjoying your toil, I have a men's group that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6.30. Anybody can join us if you want to. Just email me. Well, the more the merrier there. And we were talking about this word toil. And to a room full of men, it means career, right? It means work. It means what's your job? But Solomon uses that word a lot more broadly than that in Ecclesiastes. And the word toil really doesn't refer to your job or your career as much as it refers to the activities that you have set aside for that day, the productivity of that day, whatever it is you're going to do. Because we have some men in the group who are retired. If it's only about work, career, then they have no shot at happiness, right? They better get back to it. But really, it's broader than that. It really means, Toyo, what do you have set for yourself today? What productivity are you going to engage in today? And then in this verse, he says that we should do good. And he defines doing good as honoring God with our life, fearing God and keeping his commandments. And it's with these understandings that I kind of arrive at this conclusion of kind of Solomon's equation for contented joy and apex happiness. And I really do think it's this. People you love plus tasks you enjoy plus honoring God equals apex happiness. Listen to me. If when you eat, if as you move through your day, you look around and the people in your life bring you joy, and when you wake up, you're looking forward to the things that you're going to do in that day. Maybe not everything, but the point of the day brings you joy. And you're honoring God with your life. If those things are true of you, then I want you to know this morning, you are apex happy. It doesn't get better than that. Sometimes our problem is just that we can't see it. But I'm telling you, man, if you wake up every day and you get to have breakfast with your family or you go out to lunch with some people at work that you enjoy or you look forward to seeing some friends at small group or something like that, if you look around at your community and you're surrounded by people you love and you look at your days and God has given you something to put your hand to that you enjoy, that gives you a sense of purpose, that helps you become who he's created you to be and use your gifts and abilities to point people to Jesus as you move throughout your days, if that's what you get to do and you're honoring God as you do those things, then listen to me, you are experiencing apex happiness in your life. And I think that we get it so messed up sometimes. We do all the things that Solomon talked about in the first two chapters, and we chase all the things. We run out there and we chase all the success and all the relationships and all the money and all the fulfillment and all the pleasure and all the stuff that's out there. When really what's true is God has already given us everything we need for joy. God has already provided in our lives everything we need for joy. And listen, if you don't have those things, if you look around, you're like, I don't like any of the people in my life right now. If you don't have a fulfillment in your job, if you're not honoring God with your life, then guess what? Those things are attainable. Those things aren't out there and forever away. Those things are attainable. They're right around you. God gives us everything we need for joy within our reach. That's why I brought this chair today. This chair here is my chair from my house. This is my chair in my living room. This chair sits in the corner of our living room, and opposite me is we have a little sectional couch. There's other people who sit in this chair sometimes, but for the most part, it's me. When I sit in this chair, I get to watch dance recitals. I get to watch Lily come in with her friends, and they sing Elsa to me. And I pretend to care about Elsa. I get to watch dumb little magic tricks. We went to some restaurant and they gave her some pot with a magnet on the bottom and there's a plant that comes out of the wand and she comes in and she does the abracadabra, the whatever, and then she pulls it out and for the 37th time, I'm amazed by this magic trick, right? I sit in this chair and Jen sits on the couch and we talk about our days. We talk about what's hard and we talk about what's fun. From this chair, when someone rings the doorbell, if I angle my head just right, I can see down the hallway to the front door and I can see the little face that's there to come play with Lily. If they're all over, I can look this way out the window and I can look at them all, all the neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline that we got to get for her. In the mornings when I'm doing life right and I'm downstairs reading like I'm supposed to, at about 6.45, 7 o'clock, I can look up the stairs and see Lily up there and motion her down to come sit in my lap and tell me what she's going to do that day. When we have friends over, which I love to do, eventually we end up in our living room and we sit around and we talk and we giggle and we laugh. In the pandemic, I worked from this chair. I set up a little table right here and I do my Zoom calls and I argue with the elders and that's pure joy except for Chris Lata. I love working from that table. I can see all the things that bring me the most joy from this chair. And if I go out there chasing joy, if I go out there trying to track everything down, what am I going to do? Buy a new house for this chair These are from old David. If this church grows to 2,000 people and I get to feel what that feels like, do my conversations with my family and friends get any better from sitting in this chair? No, man. This is it. And sometimes it's not the chair, right? Sometimes it's the kitchen. Sometimes it's when I get to cook dinner and Jen sits on the stool and we talk about our days. Sometimes it's the mornings when Ruby and Lily are on the bed and I'm in the chair in the corner of that room and we're all talking, just enjoying our times. But here's what I know. I can go out there chasing whatever I want to chase. But my times of most profound joy come when I'm right there. They come when I'm around the people that I love the most. They come when I'm soaking in the blessings that God has given me. And this is what we need to pay attention to. Solomon tells us these are God's gifts to us. If people in your life that you love, who love you, they're God's gift to you. Drink them in. Hug them more. Tell them more that you care about them. Tell them more that you're grateful for them. Tell them more that they are a gift from God in your life. You have a thing to do every day that you like to put your hand to, whether it's raising kids or volunteering somewhere or spending time in your neighborhood or going to work or looking forward to seeing your friends or whatever it is. You have things that God has given you that make you productive, that let you feel like you are living out His intended will for you? That's His gift for you. That work, that toil, that's His gift. It's designed for you. And then if we honor God, His invitation to honor Him is His gift to us because He knows that when we live a life honoring Him, we live a life of fewer regrets. We live a life of deeper gratitude. We live a life with a deeper desire for Jesus if we'll just revel in his gifts. This helps me make sense of the Honduran children I saw at one time. For years of my life, I would go down to Honduras with some regularity to take teams down to visit a pastor named Israel Gonzalez. Israel is one of my heroes. The things that he's done for the kingdom are unbelievable. And he is based in a city in central Honduras called, called, uh, Swatopeke. He and his wife have set up a free clinic there. He has a church there. And then from that church, what they do is they organize these goodwill parties and they bring teams down and you get together hot dogs and little tchotchke gifts and you go up into the hillsides. There's mountains surrounding Ciguatapeque and you go up into the mountainside and you go to these villages and he throws these goodwill parties and he hopes that by doing this, these villages that are deeply Catholic, but Catholic in such a way that shuts them off to faith rather than turns them on to faith. And so they're lost communities. And he goes and he throws these parties, and by throwing these goodwill parties, they invite him into the community to plant a church. He's planted 14 churches that way, last I checked. And I would go on these parties. And you go up into these mountains surrounding Suwatopec into a village. And that's not derogatory. It's literally a village. Homes are built of mud and wood, makeshift roofs, one or two rooms, literally dirt poor. I've had the opportunity in my life to be in a fair amount of other countries and to see poverty on multiple continents. Honduras is just about the worst. But yet when we would go there, we would get out and there would always be these children there. And these children would have the biggest, goofiest grins on their face ever. They were so joyful, and they would laugh, and they would play, and they were happy to see you, and it never got wiped off of their face. And I always wondered, kid, how can you be so happy? Don't you know you don't have a Barbie house? Don't you know you don't have a PlayStation? Don't you know your soccer ball stinks? Those kids had it figured out, man. They had people around them who loved them. They had things to do each day that they looked forward to. And they hadn't lived enough life to carry the weight of what it is to not honor God with our choices. They were walking in apex happiness. And I carry all my American wealth down there and privilege, and I look at them and I'm jealous. Because they figured out something that we haven't. And I just think that there is this profound truth that everything that we need is right there within our grasp. We don't have to run around out there chasing vapor and Hevel. God has given us these gifts already. And in that truth, in that truth that everything we need for joy is within our grasp? We answer those two questions we started with. Is there a pursuit that's actually worth investing my life in? Yes. The people you love, the tasks that give you purpose, and honoring God. You want to live a life that matters? You want to get to the end of it and wonder if it's all vapor? Or not have to wonder that? Then invest your life in the people that you love and the tasks that God has ordained for you. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that we should do good works, that we should walk in them. Walk in those good works that God intended you for and honor God with the choices that you make. Those are worthwhile pursuits. You will get to the end of your life if you pursue those things and know that it was a life well lived. And he actually doubles down on this idea of pursuing relationships with other people. I don't have a lot of time to spend here on it, but again, this is a passage that I can't just skip over as we go through the book of Ecclesiastes. He doubles down on this idea of having more folks in our life when he writes this has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon doesn't take a lot of time to tell you to invest in a lot of things in Ecclesiastes. If you've been reading along with us, he doesn't tell you to do a lot of stuff there. He just kind of tells you, hey, this stuff's a waste of time. You should honor God. And then he tells you how we got to that conclusion. But here he stops and makes sure you understand the value of having people in your life who love you, who you love in return. And he sets up life as this struggle, this fight, because it is a struggle and a fight to choose to honor God with our lives. It is a struggle and a fight to keep our marriages healthy. It is a struggle and a fight to direct our kids in the right way, to love our families well, to share our faith, to be evangelists in our community, and to make disciples of the people who are around us. That's hard. And Solomon says, if you try to do this alone, woe to you when you fall and you have no one to pick you up. Woe to you when addiction creeps in and there's no one you can tell. Woe to you when doubts creep into your faith and there's no one you can talk to. How hard it must be for you when your marriage gets rocky and there's no one to fight for it. If there's two, he says, you've got a fighting chance. If there's three, that's not quickly broken. We need people in our lives to fight for us. We need to fight for the people in our lives. It seems to be a big value to us. That will help us ensure that we always have people to eat and drink with that we love and enjoy. So I thought it was worth pointing out Solomon's emphasis on this. The other question that remained from the previous weeks is, can I ever hope for true happiness? Yes. Yes, because here's the thing. If the bad things in Ecclesiastes 3 are true, then so are the good ones. Last week, I read the passage and I said, listen, pain is coming for all of us. It's going to hurt. We're going to mourn. We're going to grieve. No one gets to dodge that based on our godliness. It's going to happen to all of us. We will walk through hard times, but here's the reality. If that's true, then the flip side is true. If the bad things are true, then God says we will walk through seasons where we experience the good things. Look at the good things. There is a time to be born, to plant, to heal, to build up, to laugh, to dance, to gather things together, to embrace, to keep, to sow, to speak. A time for love and a time for peace. If we're going to have to walk through hard times, there's going to be good ones too. And I just think that the blessing from Ecclesiastes is this. It hits us with some hard realities. It's stark. It's unflinching. Hey, most of us are wasting our lives. And no matter what you do to invest it well, you're going to hurt. Those are hard truths. But I've said the whole time that if we can accept them on the other side is this joy that is waiting for us. And this is the joy. The joy is, yes, there's big things going on that we can't control. But in the midst of all that stuff that we can't control, God gives us these gifts, these moments of joy, these pockets to lean into where we celebrate him, where we're grateful for him, and we acknowledge those things as gifts. And I just think that if we accept the difficult realities from this book, then we can start to look for these little pockets of joy in our life, and they will bring us such more fulfillment than if we just move through them waiting to get to the next thing. At our house, we do a thing called Breakfast Sammy Saturday, all right? I like a good breakfast sandwich. I know it's hard to tell by looking at me, but I like a good, I put butter down, I toast the bread, I do the eggs, I do some bacon, do some cheese on there, and then I put it all together on the blackstone, cut it in half, and the good egg bleeds out onto it. It's all the goodness, and then you dip your sandwich in there. It's the best. I love breakfast Sammy Saturdays. You guys are not enthusiastic enough about this. You need breakfast Sammy Saturdays in your life. Well, I'll just let you guys sign up. Come over to the house. I'll make them for you. We love it. But it's just kind of a thing that I do. I like it. I make one for Jen and Lily, and they kind of eat half of theirs. I'm more excited about it than anybody else. But then one day, Lily brought this home from preschool, and it made me cry right on the spot. That's breakfast Sammy Saturday. She drew my griddle. She put food on it. Apparently, I make pizza there. And she brought it home to me. Now, the thing about this is, it was an assignment at preschool. She was told, just make whatever you want. It's an art project. And she made breakfast Sammy Saturday. And she brought it home to me. And she said, look, Daddy. And she told me what it was. I started crying right there on the spot. I got these big old alligator tears in my eyes looking at Jen. What a cool thing. And sure, life's going to be hard. She's going to be a teenager. She's five now, so she's kind of maxed out on cuteness, and now it's just hyper sometimes. But even though I know that there's hard times ahead, even though I know she won't always appreciate things like Breakfast Sammy Saturday, I know she does now. And I know that that's a gift from my God. And I know that what Ecclesiastes says is the best thing I can possibly do is to drink deeply of that. The best thing we can possibly do is find joy in these moments that God allows. We don't know how long we'll have them. I was talking with a friend last night who's got a new infant. And he said every time he gets up with the infant in the middle of the night and holds her, that it's a privilege. Because he doesn't know when that last time's going to be. And that's the truth of it. I think that we have so many pockets of joy in our life every day. If we have people that we love, if we have something to do that we appreciate, if we're choosing to honor God with our life. And I think that because we're so busy chasing vapor, sometimes we miss these sweet little moments that can all be had right here if we're just paying enough attention. That's why I think on the other side of these realities awaits for us this profound joy. And I think that when we realize that, that when we realize that God has designed these things to bring us happiness in our life, that what's really important is if we don't believe in a God, if we're atheistic in our worldview, then that's it. The joy terminates in those moments. That's all we have. But if we are a spiritual people who believe that God designed these things and these blessings in our life to make himself evident in our life, then our joy doesn't terminate in the moment. It turns into exuberant praise. It reminds us that we have a God that designed this for us. And the other part is, and this is incredible, that the joy that we're experiencing in that moment is only a glimpse of the eternity that he's designed for us and won for us with Jesus, which is what we're going to come back and talk about next week, is how these things are glimpses to the eternity that Jesus has already won for us. So in a few minutes, the band is going to come, and we've saved two fun, exuberant songs to praise God together. And while we do that, I want to encourage you to keep those two thoughts in your head. What are the things that I can see from my chair? What are the joys that God has given me that are within my reach from places that I already have in my life? What are the things that maybe I'm missing because I'm chasing stuff that I don't need? And then let's reflect on the reality that there is coming an eternity where that's all we experience. It's no more just pockets. It's reality. And that is something for us all to celebrate. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so very good to us. You've given us so much. Lord, I pray that we would be grateful for those blessings. I pray that you would steep us in profound gratitude for the things that we have, that you would show us what we need and what we don't. God, if there is somebody here or who can hear my voice, who doesn't have people in their life that they love, God, would you bring that to them? Would you provide that community for them even here at Grace? Would you give them the courage to slip up their hand in some way, to fill out some sheet, or to send some email, or make some phone call, or some text, and help them engage with relationships that matter to them. God, if there are people who don't have something they enjoy in their days, would you give them the courage to find that? Show them how you designed them and what you created them for. God, if we are not honoring you with our lives, I pray that you would give us the courage to do that. Let us praise you exuberantly, God, for the joys that you have given us in our lives. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, Nate. Let's all stand up. guitar solo Our God, firm foundation Our rock, the only solid ground Let's lift his name. you are the only king forever you are victorious Unmatched in all your wisdom In love and justice you will reign and every knee will bow we bring our expectations our hope is anchored in your name the name of jesus Jesus you are the only king forever forevermore you are victorious We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. You are the only king forever. Mighty God, we lift you higher. You are the only king forever. Forevermore, you are the only king forever Forevermore, you are victorious. He is doing great things See what our Savior has done See how His love overcomes he has done great things. We dance in your freedom, awake and alive. Oh Jesus, our Savior, your name lifted high be faithful forever more you have done great things and I know you will do it again for your promise is yes and amen you will do great things God you do great things Oh Oh you have done great things you've done great things every captive and break every chain oh god You have done great things. You have done great things. Oh God, you guys here today. God bless. Have a great week. Thank you. Come all you weary, come all you thirsty, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Well, come all you sinners, come find His mercy. Come to the table, He will satisfy. Taste of His goodness, find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us, His one and only Son to save us. If you never believed in Him, you'll live forever. Here we go. We'll live forever. God so loved the world. Praise God. Praise God. From whom all blessings flow. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. His amazing love. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us Whoever believes in Him Will live forever Oh, the power of hell Forever defeated Now it is well I'm walking in freedom For God so loved the world. Amen. You are here, moving in our midst. I worship you. I worship you. You are here, working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are here. Working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are way maker. Miracle worker. Promise keeper. Light in the darkness. darkness my god that is who you are Jesus. Jesus I worship you. I worship you. You're mending every heart. You are here and you are mending every heart. I worship you. I worship you. You are here and you are way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light're the way maker. Yeah, sing it again. Oh, that is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. Yes, even when. Come on. You never stop. You're the way maker. Oh, that is who you are. Oh, it's who you are, my Jesus. Miracle worker. That is who you are. is above depression. His name is above loneliness. Oh, His name is above disease. His name is above cancer. His name is above every other name. That is who you are. Jesus. oh i know that is who you are When darkness tries to roll over my bones When sorrow comes to pain is all I know, oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. I am not captive to the light. I'm not afraid to leave my past behind. Oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. Oh, I'm standing. There's power in your name. Power in your name. There's power that can break off every chain. There's power that can empty out a grave. There's resurrection power that can save. is Thank you. I'm standing in your love. I count on one thing. The same God that never fails will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. The same God who's never late is working you're working Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy. My heart is heavy God that never fails. Will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. This ain't God who's never late. He's working all things out. You're working all things out. Oh, yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will. For all my days. Oh, yes, I will. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all names that nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all Thank you. The name of all names. That nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise. To glorify, glorify the name of our names. That nothing can stand against. Oh yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Come let us bow at his feet. He has done great things..