Galatians

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. I'm Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. You guys, it's a holiday weekend. I mean, for the love of Peter, you're supposed to be out doing fun stuff. You chose to come to church. I am so thrilled about that. So it's good to see all of you, and thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. This is the third part of our series, Lessons from the Gym. As a disclaimer in that video, I've had a lot of people asking me, like, why do you think you're too good for turn lanes? Okay, here's what was happening in that video, is the shot was supposed to be, Nate, let me, this is, Steve was filming this, he says, Nate, let me get a shot of you exiting the gym, like pulling away, like that's the shot that we need to get. So I'm like, okay, good. So I pull out of the gym, and then I let him get a shot of that for as long as he could, driving down the road, and then just cut into the parking lot real quick to go pick him back up and not strand him. And what does he do but put that in the video and make me look like a degenerate? So thanks, Steve. But that's the story. I do actually abide by some, not all, but some traffic laws that make sense. All right. For the first couple of weeks that we've been in this series, we've been looking at what we're calling lessons from the gym and talking about getting spiritually healthy, right? Pursuing spiritual health in our lives. And as I've thought about it, what we've really been doing and what I've really been bringing to you is as you pursue spiritual health in your life, here are some things that I'd like for you to consider or to be aware of. And so the first week we said, here's five things that I want to tell you on your first day as you begin to pursue spiritual health. And then the next week, what I said was, listen, you can't do this alone. So those were things that were really descriptive to you of what does it take to be spiritual, like what do I need to know to be spiritually healthy? And so for the next two weeks, for this week and next week, I want to begin to answer the question, okay, what does it really mean to pursue spiritual health? What does it really require of me? What does it take to get there? And this whole time, I've been doing a parallel between pursuing physical health at the gym or working out or whatever it is we do to care for ourselves physically and paralleling that with our pursuit of spiritual health. And so as I got into the gym and began to pursue this physical health, there's a couple of things that became apparent to me. To go to the gym, to wake up one day and decide to go for a jog, to do push-ups, to buy a Beachbody DVD and try to do that, to do whatever it is you decide to do to get into the physical shape you want to get into, implicit in doing that, implicit in going to the gym, implicit in going for a jog, is this admission that I care about my physical health, right? If you don't care at all about your physical health and you don't go to the gym, you don't do the workout, you don't do the jog. You just eat the cinnamon rolls and sit on the couch. That's what you do. But to do any of those things, implicit in that action is an admission that physical health is important to me. And so when I went to the gym, everybody there is saying being physically healthy matters to me. The other thing is, as you go and you decide you want to be physically healthy, there are myriad goals within physical health, right? Everybody's got the before picture, and then we're all shooting for the after picture. We've got the before with the gut hanging out, we're wearing the t-shirt, we look like an overstuffed sausage. We've got that deal, and then we've got the after picture in our head, whatever it is that we're going for. And to some people, like, get in the gym and some people like they're in it, they're in it for the competitions. Like they are, they like go to competitions, they are lifting weights, they have figured out ways to isolate an exercise to get one strand of their triceps so that when they rub baby oil on it, it's really going to pop at the competition. Like that's their deal and that's their goal, which is also my goal. I'm very close. But that's what they want to do, right? They're in it for the competition. Others just, they just want to, like me, I just wanted to look good in a t-shirt. Like I just wanted to be able to put on a t-shirt, feel confidence without seeing my man gut. I'd love to be able to take Lily swimming and take my shirt off in front of other people and not be embarrassed about myself. Like that's pretty much it for me. Other people, they want to look good, but they want to be built, but not too built, you know. And others, when they start to get healthy, it's really not the way, it's really not about the way they look at all. It's about performance for them. They want to do a marathon or triathlon or whatever it is. And so for them, it's really about getting the body to be disciplined to do what it's supposed to do. And so people can have all kinds of different goals for their physical health, right? But whatever your goal is for your physical health, whatever you want the after picture to look like, there's actually a portion of the scientific community that has defined health for you. Whatever you want to look like, whatever you want your after picture to look like, whatever your reason was for going into the gym, if your goal is to be healthy, the scientific community has actually given you guidelines on what that health looks like, right? They're like, there's guidelines for BMI, for our body mass index, and for fat percentage. There's guidelines for what our cholesterol should be. There's guidelines for what our heart rate should be, our resting heart rate should be, for what our blood pressure should be. And really, whatever's going on outside of those indicators is fine and good, but if we're talking about health, there's actually some guidelines that dictate for us whether or not we are truly healthy. Because we can look fit and not be able to run a mile, and we can be cardiovascularly healthy but have some weakness in some other areas. So it's actually good to have a standard of physical health regardless of what our goals are for it. And in the same way, I think pursuing spiritual health parallels all of that really well. To me, to be in church in January, to be listening to this on a podcast or watching it online, implicit in the decision to do that, implicit in your decision to get up this morning to shower, which I hope you did, and then come here. And if you have kids, the hassle of getting them up and getting them ready for the early service. To do that, implicit in that is, hey, I care about my spiritual health. It could be a lot. It could be a little. But implicit in your attendance here is spiritual health matters to you. Implicit in listening to sermons online is the idea that spiritual health matters to you. And it could have mattered for a very long time. This could be an ongoing thing to you. This January is no different than last January or dozens before that. Or it could be a new initiative. But what I think is true of everyone in the room is that we are saying with our attendance that spiritual health matters to us. Now, there could be a difference in our spiritual goals. If we think about it as a before picture, this is what I looked like last year. This is what I looked like before I began to prioritize my spiritual health. And this is what I'd like to do now. There really is a wide range of goals that we could have. We could say, listen, I just want to be a good mom. I just want to exist in the house with my kids without losing my mind at them. That's what I want to be able to do. I'm just looking for a little bit of peace. Maybe it's my life has just felt so crazy that I just need some peace. I want to feel a connection with God. Maybe it's just things haven't been going my way for a while, and I just want to get some clarity about this. Maybe it's things have been going great and I want to begin to live a life out of this feeling of gratitude. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe we think I want to get plugged into a small group. I want to meet other people. I'd love for God to use me in ways in other people's life. I'd love to be involved in ministry in a volunteer capacity or even in a professional capacity. That's what I want to do. I'd love to be an elder of the church. I see these people that I admire, and I want to do that. Maybe we've got big, huge spiritual goals. Maybe we've got very modest spiritual goals, but we all have them, and I would say they're all good, at least as a starting place. But it got me to thinking, does the Bible, like the scientific community offers to those who are pursuing physical health some guidelines for what it actually looks like to be healthy, does the Bible offer similar guidelines to us for what it means to be spiritually healthy? And if it does, what are they? And I actually think that the Bible does this. Regardless of what your goals are, just to be a good spouse or a good co-worker or a good church partner or beyond that, regardless of what your goals are, does the Bible give to us standards that really define for us what spiritual health looks like, and I think that it does that. In the Bible, Old and New Testament, it talks a lot about this idea of bearing fruit, that if we're healthy, if we're good and we're vibrant, we will bear fruit. The book of Psalms was written by a guy named King David. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. Jesus is going to sit on his throne one day. The flag flying over Israel now bears his star. He's an important dude. And he wrote the longest book in the Bible, Psalms, which is actually a collection of five different books. And in the Psalms are basically journal entries from David. Worship songs, times when he was sad, times when he was joyful, times when he, blessed are those who do not invest their time with people who don't love Jesus and love them, like what we talked about last week. But if we will delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, if we will pursue him in spiritual health, then we will be like a tree planted by streams of water. We will yield our fruit in season, and all that we do, we will prosper. We will yield fruit if we follow the Lord. So then the question becomes, okay, what does that fruit look like? And I think that answer is twofold, and we find it in the New Testament. If we're going to ask ourselves, what does it look like to bear fruit, to be spiritually healthy to a place where we are bearing fruit, what does that look like? Well, Paul answers this question in the book of Galatians. I talk about Paul a lot. He was a really influential Christian. He planted churches, and then he wrote letters back to the churches. And one of the churches he planted was in Galatia. And he wrote a letter back to them that became the book of Galatians in our New Testament. And in the fifth chapter, there's this really famous, and you will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And so, to that question of what does it look like to bear fruit, what does it look like to be spiritually healthy, well, it means that we're going to bear fruit. Well, what kind of fruit are we going to bear? Well, Paul tells us in Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think of that as character. So to answer the question first, if we are going to be spiritually healthy, what is an indicator of that? Well, our character is an indicator of that. As a matter of fact, I think this is such a good diagnostic tool that within churches there's always this question, am I really saved? How do I really know if I know Jesus? How do I really know if I'm going to heaven? And I say, well, Ephesians tells us that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a deposit on our salvation, that God's going to make good on this promise. And we can tell if we have the Holy Spirit in our life by whether or not we bear the fruit that Paul lists out in Galatians chapter 5. So I would tell you, if you want to know whether or not you know Jesus, look at the wake of your life over the past three to five years and ask yourself the question, are those things growing in my life? Are those eight, nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those things growing in my life? Are those nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those increasing in my life, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Are those increasing in my life? Am I growing in those areas? If you're not, it doesn't do you any good to lie to yourself about it. I think it does us a lot of good to get on our knees and pray about it. But if we're going to ask that question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? Well, we have to ask ourselves, am I bearing fruit? I think there's twofold ways that we bear that fruit. And the first is to be growing in our character as outlined in Galatians 5.22. The other way we see ourselves bearing fruit based on scripture is found in a lot of places, but I'm going to look at John 15, where Jesus says, and I've talked about this in recent weeks, I am the tree, essentially, I am the tree and you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. And in this instance, he's talking to the disciples. And when he's saying bearing much fruit, what he means is you will produce a lot of ministry. There will be people who are closer to me, closer to Jesus, as a result of you being in their life. And so biblically, to bear fruit means to grow in character and to grow our personal ministries. Does that make sense? And what that means is, can I look at my life, at the wake of my life, and point to individuals who would say, because that person is in my life, because I've been in PTA with them, because I work with them, because I played on the same tennis team as them, because I served in church with them, because I'm in a run group with them, because they are my friend. I am closer to Jesus because of them. If people would look at you and say that, then that is fruit. So when we ask the question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The answer is, well, it means that we will bear fruit. And what does it look like to bear fruit? Well, it looks like we're growing in our character and we're growing in our ministry, okay? That's what that looks like. So as we define spiritual health this morning and say, what does it mean to pursue spiritual health? That's what we're going after. The after picture before is, I'm not doing that stuff. I need to grow in my character. I need to grow in my ministry. The after picture is I am bearing fruit, both in character and impact. So as I'm at the gym and I'm thinking about this idea of physical health, what it means to pursue physical health, one of the things I realized is I think I had committed at first to go three days a week. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to go three days a week. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I'm only going to do the stuff I want to do, and hopefully I get sweaty, and then I'll sit in the steam room, and then I'll go back to the house. That's what I'm going to do. But as I'm looking around at the people there, the people who look really healthy, and I'm thinking, I hope I can look like that. That's good for me. That's what I want to be, right? As I'm looking at those people, one of the things that occurred to me is, and it's really the thought for this week, is my goodness, what I see in them at the gym has a lot more to do with what they do at the gym. It has a lot more to do with what they do outside of the gym than what they do in it. You see? I'm looking at them going, man, their commitment to health is a lot more than 60 to 90 minutes three days a week. Their commitment to health is a lot more than coming into the gym and throwing up some weight and getting on a treadmill. And those of you who have pursued physical health before, you know that this is true. It takes a lot more. There's not just one thing that you can do. You can't just go to the gym three days a week and then do whatever you want to outside of the gym and get physically healthy. It doesn't take very long when you're valuing your physical health to realize that to get physically healthy, it really takes a holistic commitment to this health. If you're going to go to the gym and exercise or run or whatever it is you're going to do, at some point or another, you have to become at least moderately familiar with exercise science. You've got to know what the exercises are doing to your body when you do them. If you just repeat the same ones over and over and over again, you're not going to get physically healthy on a grand scale. You're just not. You're just going to have really big arms from doing curls. That's it. You've got to learn a little bit of exercise science, what it means to mix in some cardio. You have to learn to value that even though you don't want to. You have to learn what it means to eat right, not just healthily, but to eat right so that when you're at the gym, you're actually burning the stuff you want to burn off and not muscle, right? You have to learn that stuff. If you want to get physically healthy, then you have to be committed to eating right. You have to be committed to a diet. I would sometimes go to the gym in the afternoons, and that would impact the way that I ate lunch. I'd have a lunch meeting, and I'd want to eat something big and fun and filling, and realize I can't swim with that in my gut, so I've got to eat a wrap. Darn it. I have to eat fruit right now. But then I would actually feel decent later. So it begins to dictate all the things you do. You begin to think more holistically. You don't just eat to lose weight, but you eat to actually fuel yourself and get healthy. So you have to make a commitment to that. You make a commitment to sleep because you understand that the way that I sleep and the way that I rest really impacts the way that I'm able to perform when I'm trying to get healthy. And then sometimes to get healthy, and this is the hard part, means that you have to let go of something you really love, right? Any of you guys ever been to the doctor and they told you, all right, listen, here's the issue and you need to get better and if you want to get better, you got to chill out on the red meat red meat. That would be a tough one. I know that's coming. Both of my grandfathers on either side of the family had passed away from heart issues. So I'm really cruising for a bruising here if I keep it up with all the meat. I know that. At some point I'm going to have to give that up. I have found I'm a sucker for baked goods. I can be on quite the streak, and then some well-meaning jerk brings some stuff to, I'm just messing around about jerk. It's really sweet, sweet people bring stuff to the office, and I'm like, oh man, I really need to eat that right now. You know, like, and then staff members will mess with me, and they'll come and they'll put it on my desk, because they know that I'm a sucker for it, and I'm going to eat it. Like, I love that stuff, but sometimes getting physically healthy means giving up things that you really love, but it takes a holistic commitment, right? It doesn't just happen in the gym. And I think similarly, when we make a decision in our life and in our hearts that we want to pursue spiritual health, one of the things that we sometimes do is reduce that pursuit to a commitment to things like church and small group. And we don't intentionally reduce it to this, but we just start like anybody else does. Somebody says, I want to get physically healthy, and so they go, okay, I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start running and pursuing prioritized physical health there. I'm going to make this important. And so they take a couple steps to make it important, but as you get into it, what you realize is, oh my gosh, this is not going to cut it. I really need to be entirely, like I need to be bought all the way in on this, or I'm never going to actually get healthy. And it works the same way spiritually. I think a lot of us make decisions to pursue spiritual health, and then as a follow-through on that decision, we go, I'm going to attend church more regularly. I'm going to try to listen to worship music in the car. I'm going to try to go to small group. I'm going to get involved in serving at the church. And as I think about those things, those are good things. But I wonder, is that enough? If we're serious about getting spiritually healthy, is that commitment, I'm going to go to church more, I'm going to sign up for a small group, I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to do that. Is that commitment really enough to bring about holistic spiritual health in our life? And I think there's a passage that actually answers this question. It's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It's in 2 Peter chapter 1. It'll be up on the screen in a minute when I start reading it. There's a Bible in front of you if you'd like to look at it yourself there. But it's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Peter was like the leader of the disciples. And 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, as these disciples are popping up all over Asia Minor, Peter writes a letter. And the idea of this letter is for it to be circulated from church to church as he encourages them in their spiritual growth and their pursuit of spiritual health. And in the first chapter of the second letter that he wrote, that we call 2 Peter, he gives us what I think is a roadmap to spiritual health. He says, if you want to be spiritually healthy, then here's what you need to do. So I want us to look at this list together, verses 5, 6, and 7, and understand that this is really a roadmap to spiritual health. Here we go. For this very reason, Peter writes, make every effort. Another translation says, with all diligence. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. And virtue with knowledge. And knowledge with self-control. And self-control with steadfastness or perseverance, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. Now, as an aside on this passage, this is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside on this, one of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is really so simple. Jesus, when he comes on the scene, he boils all the do's and the don'ts and the things that we get worked up about down to two very simple commandments, love God and love others. And so the greatest of these, Paul tells us, of all attributes is love, and that's what we're supposed to pursue. And so part of us goes, okay, this is great. I just have to focus on loving other people and I will fulfill the law. Me and God will be good. And that's true. But what Peter says is you cannot possibly love until you've mastered brotherly affection. You cannot possibly master brotherly affection until you have mastered godliness. And you can't master that until you've mastered what comes before that, perseverance and all the rest, so that there's actually building blocks to even be capable of loving. We don't start at love, we work to it. That's an aside, but I think it's an interesting part about this passage. And so I would ask you, if these, faith, virtue, or integrity, knowledge, learning more about God and the Bible, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection and love, if those are the characteristics that we should pursue, he says make every effort to add to this characteristic, this characteristic. If those are the characteristics that we are to dedicate our life to pursuing that result in spiritual health, I would ask you, can you pursue those on a Sunday morning? If you just come to church every week, can you pursue these things? If you go to church and you add to that a small group and you add to that serving and that's your Jesus time, that's your God time, that's your spiritual health time during the week, can you build these characteristics in your life? Or as you read through those and think through the mechanics of pursuing them, does it sound like those need to be on your heart and on your mind every day? Do you think it's possible to come to church once a week, to go to our small group on Tuesday night, to serve once a month or twice a month when we're supposed to serve, and then go through the rest of our weeks like God's not a priority, to go through the rest of our weeks like he's almost an afterthought, to just wake up in the morning whenever our job requires us to wake up, to encounter the stress at our job as it comes to us, to maybe every now and again pray for our food before the meal, and then talk about spiritual things when it comes up. And if we're being honest, most of us get into a habit and into a cycle where that is really our spiritual effort. If that is true of us, is it possible to develop these characteristics in increasing measure in our lives? Does it sound like we are being obedient to what Paul tells us to do in Thessalonians where he says rejoice always and pray without ceasing? See, what I think is if we're going to be spiritually healthy, it requires a holistic commitment with our whole life. We can't just go to the gym three days a week and expect to get healthy. Do you see? That's the first step. But if we're actually serious about our spiritual health, and remember, even being here and listening to me, implicit in that action is that to some degree or another, my spiritual health matters to me. And what I want to tell you this morning is, if it really does, and if you really want to bear fruit, and if you really want to be spiritually healthy, then what it requires of you is a holistic spiritual commitment from your whole life to pursue the health that God outlines for you. It requires waking up in the morning and intentionally pursuing the presence of God, spending time in his word and spending time in prayer. It requires putting people around you who love you and who love Jesus. It requires being able to get to a place where you understand God's word and you grow in knowledge so that you can teach it. You at least have some sort of moderate understanding of how the Bible ties together. It is hard work to get spiritually healthy, but I think a lot of us live in this place where we can pursue spiritual health with a minimal commitment. And what I think Peter is telling us is it does not work that way. We have got to be holistically committed to spiritual health. We can't half-heartedly pursue it. And when people do this at the gym, we see what happens, right? I've been at the gym and I've seen these, it's usually dudes who, they can throw up a ton of weight, man. Like they get over there bench pressing and I'm like, yo, don't mess with that guy. Like they can really throw it up there. They're squatting all kinds of stuff. They got thighs the size of my waist. Like they're some big old dudes. But you can also look at them and you can go, but they don't really seem healthy. They had a bigger gut than me. They're strong. They're good at the gym. They're not healthy, right? I think this happens in church too. They're good at church. They know their Bible. But, man, there's some stuff about them. I don't know if they're healthy. They're kind of jerks. I don't know if I see fruit. I mean, they're good at church. Like, man, they are a killer in Bible study. You ask them a question, they know the answer. But I don't know if that's what I want to look like. Right? And so I wonder this. If you're in a place right now in your life where the after picture doesn't look like what you want it to look like, your spiritual health doesn't look like what you'd like it to look like, you would not look at where you are spiritually and say, this is where I wanted to be. And to me, to be a Christian is to have at least multiple seasons in your life where you look at yourself and you think in your heart and you know it. And this is so true of me. This has been true of me more times in my life and for more of a portion of my life than I even want to admit. But when I think about where I am spiritually, what I tend to think is, man, I should be so much further along. I should be past this now. And if you've ever thought that too, and we would sit where we are right now and say, you know what, I'm not spiritually where I'd like to be. I wonder if it's because we've just been going to the gym three days a week. I wonder if it's because we've just tried to half-heart it. And we haven't ever really made a holistic effort to being spiritually healthy. I wonder if it's because we know that there's something that we really like. And we want to be healthy, but we don't want to give that up. Some of us are still hanging on to that red meat. Right? But here's the thing, and this is why I love Peter. And this is why I love this passage. There's a promise at the end of this passage. Do you know what happens if you'll commit yourself to being spiritually healthy? If you'll radically change your priorities and make the holistic commitment to spiritual health? Look at what happens in verse 8, and I love this verse. It says, Isn't that great? If these qualities are yours and are increasing, if you will lean into these qualities, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive. If you lean into these qualities, if you pursue them with your whole heart, if you will commit to holistic spiritual health and do what it takes to allow God to work in your heart, to bring you closer to him, then Peter promises you that you will bear fruit. Your character will change. You will produce the fruit of the Spirit. And even, I think, more importantly than that, more impactful than that, more rewarding than that, is if you pursue these, then he guarantees you that when you get to the twilight of your life and you begin to look back on all the things that God did in you and through you, that what you will see in your wake is people who would point to you and say, I am closer to Jesus because you existed in my life. Isn't that what we want? All the other crap aside that we pursue with our life and that we put effort into, what could matter more than getting to the end of our life and being able to say what Paul said, that I have been poured out like a drink offering? What could possibly matter more than being able to look at the wake of our life over the decades and know in our heart that there are people who would point to us and say, I am closer to the Father because that person existed in my life. What could be more important to pursue than that? And Peter says, if you will make a commitment to pursuing spiritual health by making every effort to make these characteristics true of you, then I will promise you that one day as you look back on your life, you will see a wake of ministry and impact and character there that will lead to a fulfilling life. I promise you it is not wasted effort. I promise you it will not return null and void. I promise you this is the best possible way to invest your life. So I would just challenge you this morning by asking you, is it possible that your spiritual health isn't where you want it to be? Because in whole or in part, we've reduced that pursuit to going to the gym three days a week. And is your spiritual health worth making a life-altering, holistic commitment to the pursuit of it? I've been saying since the beginning of the year, I hope this is the year that you move closer to Jesus than you ever have. And a big part of that is, what are you willing to do to pursue it? Let's pray, and then I'm going to call the ushers forward for the offering. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for the way that you love us. God, we are so grateful that you meet us in our effort, that you meet us in our cry to be closer to you, and that you do the hard work for us. Father, I pray that we would commit, that we wouldn't make a half-hearted effort towards you, but that we would offer our entire selves to you, that we would follow this roadmap that you lay out in 2 Peter. God, I pray that the people of this church would be people who bear fruit in ministry, who grow in their character. Let us not be a church who simply goes to the gym. Whatever stands between us and health, Father, I pray that you would give us the courage to get it out of the way. Let us be people who know you and are fruitful in that knowledge. It's in your Son's name I pray. Amen.