Genesis

Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service is over. I echo the gratitude of Kyle for our decorating squad that made this look like maybe the best looking stage we've ever had. And please take advantage of the photo booth out there if you are one who likes photo booths. Welcome to our December series. I'm very excited about it. We've had this planned for a while. I'm looking forward to what I get to share with you over the course of the next month. And if you guys are going to be singing like that in December, I'm going to shorten the sermons and we're going to add in more songs because that was fantastic. This year, the Christmas series is called Twas the Night. We are looking at the story of Christmas, the classic story of Christmas. We'll spend every week in a different portion of Luke chapter 2. So if you have a Bible this morning, as I've been encouraging you to bring them and go through the sermons with me. Please go ahead and open those up to Luke chapter 2. If you don't have a Bible, it's in the seat back in front of you. But we're going to be spending the next four Sundays in Luke chapter 2 and looking at the Christmas story from the perspective of different people involved in the story. This morning, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the innkeeper and from one of my favorite people in the story, Simeon. And you'll see why when we get there. But in the story, Luke chapter two, where the Christmas story is, and just so you know, that's like the traditional, like peanutsanuts Christmas, that's where it comes from, Luke 2. That's the classic Christmas passage. So that's why we're going to be there for these next four weeks. In the passage, the innkeeper is mentioned kind of indirectly. We don't get words from, we presume him could be her. I don't want to be misogynistic in who I think owns inns in ancient, but hunches is probably a guy and Mary and Joseph are traveling to Jerusalem for a religious festival. They have to go. The law says they have to go. It's for a census and Jerusalem. I don't know if you've thought about this. Why the heck would you Jerusalem is three days journey fromareth, averaging about eight to 10 hours a day on foot. We presume that Mary was on a donkey if they could afford such luxuries. She's clearly very pregnant because she pops when she gets there. Okay. So like she is on the verge of pregnant or giving birth. She's very, very pregnant. That's a different thing. And you got to imagine it's stressful. Y'all grow up. And then this might be the first clip of me that blows up on YouTube. Good job. It's nice for everyone to have goals. Anyways, they're going to Jerusalem. It's eight to 10 hours a day on foot. It's got to be very stressful. They don't know where they're going to stay. They probably don't have a lot of means. And so they get there and they're scrambling for a room. They're scrambling for a place to stay. They go to the innkeeper. The innkeeper famously says there's no room in the inn. And then he makes space for them in a manger. And I can't imagine the stress of Joseph as he's trying to arrange all this stuff and get everything squared away. But the inn keeper doesn't make room for them. He says, we have some room for you in the manger, which whenever we think of manger, and this is just for my own personal fun, I do this year and Jen my wife hates it when I do I like to ruin different elements of people's Christmas traditions when we look at the nativity scene and it's the stable with like the Spanish moss coming down that's probably not accurate it could be accurate but it probably isn't it was probably inside of a shallow cave in a cliffside or a hillside there in Bethlehem. Probably wasn't a nice stable. But anyways, I digress. He lets them stay in the manger. And the innkeeper, the Christmas story doesn't have too many villains. The innkeeper is about the closest thing to a villain we have besides, of course, Herod, who comes at the end of the Christmas story. And he's the villain because he doesn't make room for Jesus. But I would say two things, one later, but one thing right here to support him. He did make room for Jesus. It's just that the innkeeper offered Jesus the margins. He offered him the margins. I'm not going to kick anybody out of the room for you. I'm not going to make some space. I'm not going to invite you into my own house. I'm not going to divide up one of the rooms. I'm not going to talk to the other innkeepers and see what we can do. I'll give you a space that's very convenient for me. The innkeeper invites Jesus into the margins. And this is wild because what he should have done this is the Messiah Emmanuel God with us his people have been waiting for him for thousands of years they've been pining for him and praying for him and passed down a desire for Jesus generation after generation each generation has carried the torch of hope waiting for the Messiah to arrive the prophecies go all the way back to Genesis 12 and Abraham, and they know the prophecies. The innkeeper, whether he fully believes them or not, has grown up in an environment and in a culture so saturated with these prophecies that he knows it. And the Messiah is coming, and he has arrived. What he should have done is gone to the VIP suite and flung the door open and said, hey, buddy, go kick rocks. Get out of here. Go hit the bricks. You're out. Messiah's here. Emmanuel has arrived. He gets the suite, and we're going to kick in the continental breakfast with an omelet bar because Jesus is here. But that's not what he does. He doesn't disrupt anything. He doesn't make his life more difficult. He says, here, here's a margin for you to slide into. And in this way, I feel like a lot of us, all of us at points, can relate to the innkeeper. When Jesus shows up, when he offers himself, when he asks to be led into our heart, when he asks to be Lord of our life, when he gives us an opportunity to serve, when he asks us for a bit of devotion. When he asks us to set our alarm early to spend time with him. When he asks us for the next step of obedience and faithfulness with him. When he asks us to just trust him and his standards over ourselves and our standards. I think so often when Jesus shows up in our life, we, like the innkeeper, simply offer him the margins. Jesus, I'm going to fit you into places where I don't have to adjust anything. I'll pray to you, but I'm going to do it before meals when other people are around so I can appear pious and holy. But you and I know that's the only time I've prayed in the last three days. Yeah, I'll give you car rides for worship, Jesus. But only when the podcast I normally listen to or the music I normally like has gone stale. Yeah, Jesus, I'll go to church. But I'll go to church when I'm in town and it's convenient and my things didn't happen in my Saturday that makes it prohibitive for me to get up on Sunday. I'll give you those Sundays, God, but I'm not going to like rush back from the beach to fellowship with my church. I'm going to give you the margins. I'll give occasionally to a compelling thing, but I'm not going to make it uncomfortable for myself and give regularly in a habitual way because of the generosity that you teach me. I'll forgive people when it doesn't hurt me, but if I'm really mad, then I'm sorry, Jesus, you can't have that forgiveness for them. I think in so many ways, so many small aspects, when Jesus shows up in our life and asks to be invited in, we give him the margins where it's easiest, where it's the least inconvenient. When what we should do, what we should do when Jesus shows up and he asks for parts of our life, he asks to be let into our life, he asks for our obedience and our trust and our worship and our devotion and our love and our affection. When he asks for those things, what we should do is thunder into our VIP suite and kick out whatever's currently ruling and be like, go pound sand, buddy. Jesus is here. Emmanuel, God with us. The guy who died on the cross for me and then rose again on the third day and is coming back to get me and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. That guy's here, so you are out. That's what we should do. And so I think it begs the question, and I know that the phrasing here is ridiculous, but you'll understand the question. What is in your VIP suite? Who or what is in the most important rooms in your life? Who's occupying the space that Jesus deserves, but we're not willing to kick them or it out? What is holding you back from inviting Jesus not into the margins of your life, but in every bit of your life. Who is in your VIP suite? Now, if you're like me, you have a bunch of those. It's difficult to pinpoint one thing, a person, or affection that I have in my life that is the sole thing keeping Jesus from occupying all of my life. But if I had to guess what one of yours was, I bet in the top three for everyone in this room is comfort. Isn't it, North Raleigh? We're pretty comfortable people. We have things like we like them. We've organized our life like we like it. We've organized our faith like we like it. We've organized our politics like we like it. We've organized our priorities like we like it. We've put our money in the places that we like. We are a comfortable people. And when Jesus begins to poke at our comfort, I think we tend to say, sorry, buddy, room's full. I have a manger, if you're interested. The couch in my bonus room is surprisingly sleepable, Jesus. You're going to love it in there. But you're not getting in the master bedroom. I think comfort is one of our predominant idols. Comfort in how we think. When Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, the message of the Bible, when God starts to challenge the way that we think, some of the traditional norms that we've clung to to make things make sense, we kind of push back on that and be like, I'm not really open to new information, Jesus thinks. I need you to fit where I've put you. When Jesus' message starts to run up against our politics and our philosophies, sometimes we stop listening to Jesus in favor of what we always thought, and we say, there's no room for you there, Jesus. Sorry, I need you to fit into this box. When he starts asking for our finances, when he starts asking for our priorities, for our schedule, when he starts asking for our forgiveness, when he starts asking for the way that we do business, when he starts asking for transparency and honesty and vulnerability, when he starts asking us to be a good friend to someone who's hurting and it makes us uncomfortable. I think so often we choose comfort over obedience. And so I think that for many of us, comfort is what sits in that space of highest value in our life. And we'll make room for Jesus. We'll just do it like the innkeeper and tuck him away in the bonus room. And this is important because when we juxtapose the innkeeper's reception of Jesus with that of Simeon. We see a totally different story. And I didn't bring you here this morning to beat you up about being the innkeeper because I'm talking to myself. That's me. That's what I do. If you do that too, join me in my conviction. If you don't do that, do that. Pray for the rest of us heathens in the room. But for those of us who do, let's look at, learn from, and be humbled by the response of Simeon in Luke chapter 2. Now, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Simeon. But most of what we need to know is actually in this passage. So if you have a Bible, look at Luke chapter 2. I'm going to begin in verse 25 and read through verse 32. Luke writes this. Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple. And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, listen to this, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of the innkeeper. The innkeeper says, oh, Jesus is here. Let me see where I can conveniently fit you. Simeon's response, I would sum up this way. I have seen Jesus. Nothing else matters. I have seen Jesus. Nothing else matters. I can die happy. I don't care about anything else. Simeon doesn't clean out the VIP room. He cleans out the entire hotel, the whole inn, done. Everybody kick rocks. Jesus is coming in. He gets all the omelets. He gets all the things. He's here. He ushers him right in. He says, I've seen Jesus. Literally nothing else matters. The difference between his response and the innkeeper's response is mind-blowing. And we learn why Simeon has this response in the text. All the clues are there. It says he was righteous and devout. He was committed to God. He was committed to prayer. He was committed to the pursuit of Jesus. And I love the phrase that Luke includes in there to describe what Simeon had been praying for. Did you catch it? He had been praying for the consolation of Israel. That's such a good phrase and descriptor of who Jesus was, particularly to the ancient Hebrew mind. He was the consolation of Israel. See, I mentioned earlier that the innkeeper had grown up in a culture that was so steeped in religious understanding that he knew how far back the generational prophecies went about the Messiah that was going to arrive. And Simeon knew that too. And I have a whole sermon that I do just on the zeal of Simeon. I've actually done it twice here at Grace. And we look at how Simeon was the torch keeper. He was the torch bearer for his generation, waiting and looking and watching and wanting for the Messiah. And how that wait goes all the way back to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, where God promises that one of the descendants of Abraham will come and will bless the whole earth. And then the Old Testament is a story of waiting for that Messiah, of watching for him. And the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they watched. Is he here? Is it going to be one of these grandsons of Abraham? Is the Messiah come? No, he's not come. And then Moses comes around. Is it Moses? And they watch Moses lead God's people and bring them out of slavery and bring down the Ten Commandments and be God's spokesperson to his people. Is it Moses? Is he going to save us? No, it's not Moses. And then they go through the judges. Is it one of the judges? No. Is it one of the kings? Certainly it's David. No. But God renews his promise and renews their hope in 2 Samuel chapter 7. And then they watch the kings and hope maybe it's one of the kings that will rescue us. No, it's not one of the kings. But every generation after finding that no continues to pass forward the torch from grandfather to grandson to carry the torch of hope into the next generation waiting and watching and longing for the Messiah. And then they go into exile in Babylon and Assyria, and they cling to this torch of hope. And then they begin to wander back and reconstruct and rebuild Israel, and they cling to hope. And then they enter this period where God doesn't speak called the 400 years of silence, and they cling to hope. And then somewhere, some Jewish father or grandfather has a grandson named Simeon, and they start to tell them about the hope that they carried through the generations that one day they will see the Messiah. And Simeon commits to prayer. Father, let me see him. Father, let me see him. Father, bring your Christ. Bring your Messiah. Bring the consolation of Israel, the hope of all the generations. Simeon is now the torchbearer. And in that ardent praying and in that searching, God answers his prayers. And he says, I promise you that you will not pass away before you hold the Christ. So when he finally sees Jesus, it says that his parents brought Jesus in and Simeon went and scooped up the baby. I don't know what was said, hopefully words, hopefully he didn't just rip an eight-day-old infant out of Mary's arms, but he just went and he took that baby. And he prayed over that baby. And then he said, I can die now, God, because he's held that baby. And then if you keep reading, he blesses Mary and Joseph and tells them what they have, confirms for them what the angels have said. He was so ready to meet Jesus that when he finally did, he flung everything out and he said, I've met Jesus. Nothing else matters. And so this is where it's probably worthwhile to point out that the innkeeper does get a really bum rap. Because truth be told, the innkeeper didn't know that was Jesus. It was just a young couple. They needed space. I don't have any. And so him not making room for them isn't maybe as egregious of a sin as it would seem. But it's a helpful vehicle for us to understand the contrast. And we know who Jesus is. We've heard of him. We've been told of him. And so if we really want to look at the difference between how Jesus was received by the innkeeper and how he was received by Simeon, then I think that we have to conclude that our response to Jesus is proportional to our awareness of him. Our response to Jesus when he shows up, when he arrives in an opportunity of service, when he arrives in someone bringing us a hug when we need it, when he arrives an opportunity to be that hug when someone else needs it, when he arrives in conviction, when he arrives in asking for our affection, when he arrives in asking for our devotion, when Jesus arrives in our life. When he speaks into our life. Our response to that voice of Christ, I believe, is directly proportional to our general awareness of him. What we have in Simeon is someone who had prayerfully sought him out his entire life. He had devoted his life to pursuing Christ. Let me see him. Let me see him. Let me see him. And it's not lost on me. And I think this is so important. Do you understand that besides Mary Magdalene, Mary, his mother, maybe Joseph and John the Baptist, that the only other person in Jesus's life to acknowledge who he was and what he really came to do before he died on the cross was Simeon. Everybody else in Jesus's life, when they met him, they said, you can't be the guy. You're not the Messiah. You didn't come how we expected you to come. You're not saying the things we expect you to say. You're not being who we expect you to be. You're not performing the miracles we expect you to perform. You're not a king like we expected you to be the king. So you're not the Messiah. We reject you. Simeon was a man of such faith, such piety, such devotion, such closeness to God. He didn't need Jesus to say a word or do a thing. He recognized him when he saw him. And he said, I can die happy. That kind of awareness, that kind of recognition of who Jesus is only comes through prayer, only comes through devotion, only comes through an earnest desire to see him and to know him and to be exposed to him. I believe that Simeon saw who Jesus was because God heard his prayers. God saw his devotion. He was pleading with the Lord, let me see him, let me see him, let me see him. And God answered those prayers and gave him a unique vision and a unique reception of Jesus despite no one else in his life knowing who he was. And two of the people who knew who Jesus was had to be told by an angel before he got there. Simeon knew. How did Simeon know? Because he lived a life of devotion and pursuit of Jesus. Because he carried the torch that was passed to him by the previous generations. And he made it his ardent desire to know him, to see him, and to recognize him. And I believe that our ability to respond to Jesus with the zeal of Simeon operates in direct proportion to our desire for that Jesus, to our awareness of him. There's no reason in the world the innkeeper couldn't have been on the same page and been like Simeon, devout and devoted and righteous and prayerful. He simply wasn't. And so when Jesus showed up, he kicked him to a cave. Simeon says, I can die happy, nothing else matters. When I started developing the sermon, I thought the question that we would be driving to and that I would pose to you at the end was, am I the innkeeper or am I Simeon? In my life, the way that I respond to Jesus, am I and have I been more like the innkeeper making space for him in the margins or am I and have I been more like Simeon celebrating him, anticipating him, praying for him, praying to see him and receive him with an open-hearted humility? Am I more like the innkeeper or am I more like Simeon? But as I got into the sermon and it started to kind of, sometimes the sermon will write itself if you just pull the thread the right way. As it started to kind of write itself, I realized that question, that's not the right question. So if you take notes, do that. Cross out the question. That's a stupid question. That's a stupid question because no one in here is going, I'm Simeon. I've done it. No more zeal than me. And the reality of it is, the people in the room who are the most like Simeon are the ones who feel the most like the innkeeper right now because that's how spiritual humility and maturity works. Isn't that right, Jen? No, I'm just messing around. That's a silly question. Because of course we would all answer, yeah, I tend to be more like the innkeeper. Yeah, I tend to just kind of make room for him in the comfortable margins. Instead of taking the steps of obedience that he wants from me. I tend to just kind of passively celebrate him instead of enthusiastically welcoming him. And when we see the zeal of Simeon, and I don't think we can overstate it, his ability to see the Messiah for who he was because of his open-handed humility and his approach to God. That we all know we need to be more like Simeon. So the real question then becomes, and the one that I would leave you with is this, how can I dethrone comfort and pursue Jesus in order to receive him with the zeal of Simeon? That's a better question for you to ask yourself. How can I first, how can I dethrone comfort? What are the things that Jesus is asking me for that I can finally kick out of the VIP suite and put him in there? Is it waking up 30 minutes earlier? Is he asking for your mornings? Here's a hint. Yes. He wants our mornings. Does he want our car rides? Yeah. Does he want our runs and our workouts? Yeah. Does he want our relationships with our coworkers? He does. Does he want us to be a more loving spouse? Yes. Does he want us to be more patient parent? Yeah. Does he want us to remember the grace that he offers us and so offer that to others? Yes. We know what Jesus asks of us. What comfort do we need to dethrone? Not being as accepted by the people in our life that matter to us. Taking steps of obedience and we're not sure where they lead. Allowing ourselves to rethink things even though that makes it scary for us. What comfort is impeding our pursuit of Christ? And then, once we figure out what comfort is there that is prohibiting Jesus from occupying the space he needs to occupy, how can we pursue Jesus? Really pursue him. Really ardently pray for him. So that when we see him, and when he calls for things and asks for things, we receive that and offer that as zealously as Simeon does. We pray for him every day. That's easy. Every morning, Jesus, if you arrive today, help me see you. If you arrive in an opportunity to serve, let me see it. If you arrive in a person who needs you, let me see it. If someone arrives in my life who's you've sent to encourage me, let me see it. We had a situation in our house recently where we were discouraged and we were discouraged about a couple of different things. And we had this talk about it at night. And the very next day, every single thing that we said that was discouraging, God addressed in a gracious way and gave us joy in that area of our life. So at the end of the day, we looked at each other and we said, let's not miss Jesus here because he showed up today and he showed us, I care about this and I care about this and I care about this and I care about you. So ask God, God, help me see you when you show up. Help me obey you when you ask. Help me celebrate you this season. Help me not get so headlong into plans and parties and gifts and decorations that I miss you this season. Jesus, help me see you. Make every day a pursuit of him. And we'll start to become more like Simeon than the innkeeper. And if we do that, if we'll pursue Jesus like Simeon this Christmas, I can promise you, you will have a far more rich Christmas. You will see little things that matter every day. Your spirit will be blessed every day. You will notice people to pray for and be a blessing to them every day. When we see the gifts and the movement of Jesus all through the season, and we see them because we've asked our God to open our eyes to those things. So as we go into December and we usher in all the things, let us have the zeal and the pursuit of Simeon and make space for Jesus in our lives wherever he wants to stay. Let's pray. Jesus, we love you. And God, we sing a song sometimes. It says our affection and our devotion we pour out at the feet of Jesus. Lord, I pray that that would be true. That we would love you and love you well. Father, where we are choosing comfort over obedience, would you show us? Would we see it? Would we care? And would we invite you in? Lord, attune our hearts and our eyes and our minds and our ears to see you, to hear you, to recognize you when you show up in our lives. Not just this Christmas season, God, but moving forward. And would we ultimately be a people who receive you and celebrate you like your servant Simeon. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service is over. I echo the gratitude of Kyle for our decorating squad that made this look like maybe the best looking stage we've ever had. And please take advantage of the photo booth out there if you are one who likes photo booths. Welcome to our December series. I'm very excited about it. We've had this planned for a while. I'm looking forward to what I get to share with you over the course of the next month. And if you guys are going to be singing like that in December, I'm going to shorten the sermons and we're going to add in more songs because that was fantastic. This year, the Christmas series is called Twas the Night. We are looking at the story of Christmas, the classic story of Christmas. We'll spend every week in a different portion of Luke chapter 2. So if you have a Bible this morning, as I've been encouraging you to bring them and go through the sermons with me. Please go ahead and open those up to Luke chapter 2. If you don't have a Bible, it's in the seat back in front of you. But we're going to be spending the next four Sundays in Luke chapter 2 and looking at the Christmas story from the perspective of different people involved in the story. This morning, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the innkeeper and from one of my favorite people in the story, Simeon. And you'll see why when we get there. But in the story, Luke chapter two, where the Christmas story is, and just so you know, that's like the traditional, like peanutsanuts Christmas, that's where it comes from, Luke 2. That's the classic Christmas passage. So that's why we're going to be there for these next four weeks. In the passage, the innkeeper is mentioned kind of indirectly. We don't get words from, we presume him could be her. I don't want to be misogynistic in who I think owns inns in ancient, but hunches is probably a guy and Mary and Joseph are traveling to Jerusalem for a religious festival. They have to go. The law says they have to go. It's for a census and Jerusalem. I don't know if you've thought about this. Why the heck would you Jerusalem is three days journey fromareth, averaging about eight to 10 hours a day on foot. We presume that Mary was on a donkey if they could afford such luxuries. She's clearly very pregnant because she pops when she gets there. Okay. So like she is on the verge of pregnant or giving birth. She's very, very pregnant. That's a different thing. And you got to imagine it's stressful. Y'all grow up. And then this might be the first clip of me that blows up on YouTube. Good job. It's nice for everyone to have goals. Anyways, they're going to Jerusalem. It's eight to 10 hours a day on foot. It's got to be very stressful. They don't know where they're going to stay. They probably don't have a lot of means. And so they get there and they're scrambling for a room. They're scrambling for a place to stay. They go to the innkeeper. The innkeeper famously says there's no room in the inn. And then he makes space for them in a manger. And I can't imagine the stress of Joseph as he's trying to arrange all this stuff and get everything squared away. But the inn keeper doesn't make room for them. He says, we have some room for you in the manger, which whenever we think of manger, and this is just for my own personal fun, I do this year and Jen my wife hates it when I do I like to ruin different elements of people's Christmas traditions when we look at the nativity scene and it's the stable with like the Spanish moss coming down that's probably not accurate it could be accurate but it probably isn't it was probably inside of a shallow cave in a cliffside or a hillside there in Bethlehem. Probably wasn't a nice stable. But anyways, I digress. He lets them stay in the manger. And the innkeeper, the Christmas story doesn't have too many villains. The innkeeper is about the closest thing to a villain we have besides, of course, Herod, who comes at the end of the Christmas story. And he's the villain because he doesn't make room for Jesus. But I would say two things, one later, but one thing right here to support him. He did make room for Jesus. It's just that the innkeeper offered Jesus the margins. He offered him the margins. I'm not going to kick anybody out of the room for you. I'm not going to make some space. I'm not going to invite you into my own house. I'm not going to divide up one of the rooms. I'm not going to talk to the other innkeepers and see what we can do. I'll give you a space that's very convenient for me. The innkeeper invites Jesus into the margins. And this is wild because what he should have done this is the Messiah Emmanuel God with us his people have been waiting for him for thousands of years they've been pining for him and praying for him and passed down a desire for Jesus generation after generation each generation has carried the torch of hope waiting for the Messiah to arrive the prophecies go all the way back to Genesis 12 and Abraham, and they know the prophecies. The innkeeper, whether he fully believes them or not, has grown up in an environment and in a culture so saturated with these prophecies that he knows it. And the Messiah is coming, and he has arrived. What he should have done is gone to the VIP suite and flung the door open and said, hey, buddy, go kick rocks. Get out of here. Go hit the bricks. You're out. Messiah's here. Emmanuel has arrived. He gets the suite, and we're going to kick in the continental breakfast with an omelet bar because Jesus is here. But that's not what he does. He doesn't disrupt anything. He doesn't make his life more difficult. He says, here, here's a margin for you to slide into. And in this way, I feel like a lot of us, all of us at points, can relate to the innkeeper. When Jesus shows up, when he offers himself, when he asks to be led into our heart, when he asks to be Lord of our life, when he gives us an opportunity to serve, when he asks us for a bit of devotion. When he asks us to set our alarm early to spend time with him. When he asks us for the next step of obedience and faithfulness with him. When he asks us to just trust him and his standards over ourselves and our standards. I think so often when Jesus shows up in our life, we, like the innkeeper, simply offer him the margins. Jesus, I'm going to fit you into places where I don't have to adjust anything. I'll pray to you, but I'm going to do it before meals when other people are around so I can appear pious and holy. But you and I know that's the only time I've prayed in the last three days. Yeah, I'll give you car rides for worship, Jesus. But only when the podcast I normally listen to or the music I normally like has gone stale. Yeah, Jesus, I'll go to church. But I'll go to church when I'm in town and it's convenient and my things didn't happen in my Saturday that makes it prohibitive for me to get up on Sunday. I'll give you those Sundays, God, but I'm not going to like rush back from the beach to fellowship with my church. I'm going to give you the margins. I'll give occasionally to a compelling thing, but I'm not going to make it uncomfortable for myself and give regularly in a habitual way because of the generosity that you teach me. I'll forgive people when it doesn't hurt me, but if I'm really mad, then I'm sorry, Jesus, you can't have that forgiveness for them. I think in so many ways, so many small aspects, when Jesus shows up in our life and asks to be invited in, we give him the margins where it's easiest, where it's the least inconvenient. When what we should do, what we should do when Jesus shows up and he asks for parts of our life, he asks to be let into our life, he asks for our obedience and our trust and our worship and our devotion and our love and our affection. When he asks for those things, what we should do is thunder into our VIP suite and kick out whatever's currently ruling and be like, go pound sand, buddy. Jesus is here. Emmanuel, God with us. The guy who died on the cross for me and then rose again on the third day and is coming back to get me and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. That guy's here, so you are out. That's what we should do. And so I think it begs the question, and I know that the phrasing here is ridiculous, but you'll understand the question. What is in your VIP suite? Who or what is in the most important rooms in your life? Who's occupying the space that Jesus deserves, but we're not willing to kick them or it out? What is holding you back from inviting Jesus not into the margins of your life, but in every bit of your life. Who is in your VIP suite? Now, if you're like me, you have a bunch of those. It's difficult to pinpoint one thing, a person, or affection that I have in my life that is the sole thing keeping Jesus from occupying all of my life. But if I had to guess what one of yours was, I bet in the top three for everyone in this room is comfort. Isn't it, North Raleigh? We're pretty comfortable people. We have things like we like them. We've organized our life like we like it. We've organized our faith like we like it. We've organized our politics like we like it. We've organized our priorities like we like it. We've put our money in the places that we like. We are a comfortable people. And when Jesus begins to poke at our comfort, I think we tend to say, sorry, buddy, room's full. I have a manger, if you're interested. The couch in my bonus room is surprisingly sleepable, Jesus. You're going to love it in there. But you're not getting in the master bedroom. I think comfort is one of our predominant idols. Comfort in how we think. When Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, the message of the Bible, when God starts to challenge the way that we think, some of the traditional norms that we've clung to to make things make sense, we kind of push back on that and be like, I'm not really open to new information, Jesus thinks. I need you to fit where I've put you. When Jesus' message starts to run up against our politics and our philosophies, sometimes we stop listening to Jesus in favor of what we always thought, and we say, there's no room for you there, Jesus. Sorry, I need you to fit into this box. When he starts asking for our finances, when he starts asking for our priorities, for our schedule, when he starts asking for our forgiveness, when he starts asking for the way that we do business, when he starts asking for transparency and honesty and vulnerability, when he starts asking us to be a good friend to someone who's hurting and it makes us uncomfortable. I think so often we choose comfort over obedience. And so I think that for many of us, comfort is what sits in that space of highest value in our life. And we'll make room for Jesus. We'll just do it like the innkeeper and tuck him away in the bonus room. And this is important because when we juxtapose the innkeeper's reception of Jesus with that of Simeon. We see a totally different story. And I didn't bring you here this morning to beat you up about being the innkeeper because I'm talking to myself. That's me. That's what I do. If you do that too, join me in my conviction. If you don't do that, do that. Pray for the rest of us heathens in the room. But for those of us who do, let's look at, learn from, and be humbled by the response of Simeon in Luke chapter 2. Now, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Simeon. But most of what we need to know is actually in this passage. So if you have a Bible, look at Luke chapter 2. I'm going to begin in verse 25 and read through verse 32. Luke writes this. Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple. And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, listen to this, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of the innkeeper. The innkeeper says, oh, Jesus is here. Let me see where I can conveniently fit you. Simeon's response, I would sum up this way. I have seen Jesus. Nothing else matters. I have seen Jesus. Nothing else matters. I can die happy. I don't care about anything else. Simeon doesn't clean out the VIP room. He cleans out the entire hotel, the whole inn, done. Everybody kick rocks. Jesus is coming in. He gets all the omelets. He gets all the things. He's here. He ushers him right in. He says, I've seen Jesus. Literally nothing else matters. The difference between his response and the innkeeper's response is mind-blowing. And we learn why Simeon has this response in the text. All the clues are there. It says he was righteous and devout. He was committed to God. He was committed to prayer. He was committed to the pursuit of Jesus. And I love the phrase that Luke includes in there to describe what Simeon had been praying for. Did you catch it? He had been praying for the consolation of Israel. That's such a good phrase and descriptor of who Jesus was, particularly to the ancient Hebrew mind. He was the consolation of Israel. See, I mentioned earlier that the innkeeper had grown up in a culture that was so steeped in religious understanding that he knew how far back the generational prophecies went about the Messiah that was going to arrive. And Simeon knew that too. And I have a whole sermon that I do just on the zeal of Simeon. I've actually done it twice here at Grace. And we look at how Simeon was the torch keeper. He was the torch bearer for his generation, waiting and looking and watching and wanting for the Messiah. And how that wait goes all the way back to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, where God promises that one of the descendants of Abraham will come and will bless the whole earth. And then the Old Testament is a story of waiting for that Messiah, of watching for him. And the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they watched. Is he here? Is it going to be one of these grandsons of Abraham? Is the Messiah come? No, he's not come. And then Moses comes around. Is it Moses? And they watch Moses lead God's people and bring them out of slavery and bring down the Ten Commandments and be God's spokesperson to his people. Is it Moses? Is he going to save us? No, it's not Moses. And then they go through the judges. Is it one of the judges? No. Is it one of the kings? Certainly it's David. No. But God renews his promise and renews their hope in 2 Samuel chapter 7. And then they watch the kings and hope maybe it's one of the kings that will rescue us. No, it's not one of the kings. But every generation after finding that no continues to pass forward the torch from grandfather to grandson to carry the torch of hope into the next generation waiting and watching and longing for the Messiah. And then they go into exile in Babylon and Assyria, and they cling to this torch of hope. And then they begin to wander back and reconstruct and rebuild Israel, and they cling to hope. And then they enter this period where God doesn't speak called the 400 years of silence, and they cling to hope. And then somewhere, some Jewish father or grandfather has a grandson named Simeon, and they start to tell them about the hope that they carried through the generations that one day they will see the Messiah. And Simeon commits to prayer. Father, let me see him. Father, let me see him. Father, bring your Christ. Bring your Messiah. Bring the consolation of Israel, the hope of all the generations. Simeon is now the torchbearer. And in that ardent praying and in that searching, God answers his prayers. And he says, I promise you that you will not pass away before you hold the Christ. So when he finally sees Jesus, it says that his parents brought Jesus in and Simeon went and scooped up the baby. I don't know what was said, hopefully words, hopefully he didn't just rip an eight-day-old infant out of Mary's arms, but he just went and he took that baby. And he prayed over that baby. And then he said, I can die now, God, because he's held that baby. And then if you keep reading, he blesses Mary and Joseph and tells them what they have, confirms for them what the angels have said. He was so ready to meet Jesus that when he finally did, he flung everything out and he said, I've met Jesus. Nothing else matters. And so this is where it's probably worthwhile to point out that the innkeeper does get a really bum rap. Because truth be told, the innkeeper didn't know that was Jesus. It was just a young couple. They needed space. I don't have any. And so him not making room for them isn't maybe as egregious of a sin as it would seem. But it's a helpful vehicle for us to understand the contrast. And we know who Jesus is. We've heard of him. We've been told of him. And so if we really want to look at the difference between how Jesus was received by the innkeeper and how he was received by Simeon, then I think that we have to conclude that our response to Jesus is proportional to our awareness of him. Our response to Jesus when he shows up, when he arrives in an opportunity of service, when he arrives in someone bringing us a hug when we need it, when he arrives an opportunity to be that hug when someone else needs it, when he arrives in conviction, when he arrives in asking for our affection, when he arrives in asking for our devotion, when Jesus arrives in our life. When he speaks into our life. Our response to that voice of Christ, I believe, is directly proportional to our general awareness of him. What we have in Simeon is someone who had prayerfully sought him out his entire life. He had devoted his life to pursuing Christ. Let me see him. Let me see him. Let me see him. And it's not lost on me. And I think this is so important. Do you understand that besides Mary Magdalene, Mary, his mother, maybe Joseph and John the Baptist, that the only other person in Jesus's life to acknowledge who he was and what he really came to do before he died on the cross was Simeon. Everybody else in Jesus's life, when they met him, they said, you can't be the guy. You're not the Messiah. You didn't come how we expected you to come. You're not saying the things we expect you to say. You're not being who we expect you to be. You're not performing the miracles we expect you to perform. You're not a king like we expected you to be the king. So you're not the Messiah. We reject you. Simeon was a man of such faith, such piety, such devotion, such closeness to God. He didn't need Jesus to say a word or do a thing. He recognized him when he saw him. And he said, I can die happy. That kind of awareness, that kind of recognition of who Jesus is only comes through prayer, only comes through devotion, only comes through an earnest desire to see him and to know him and to be exposed to him. I believe that Simeon saw who Jesus was because God heard his prayers. God saw his devotion. He was pleading with the Lord, let me see him, let me see him, let me see him. And God answered those prayers and gave him a unique vision and a unique reception of Jesus despite no one else in his life knowing who he was. And two of the people who knew who Jesus was had to be told by an angel before he got there. Simeon knew. How did Simeon know? Because he lived a life of devotion and pursuit of Jesus. Because he carried the torch that was passed to him by the previous generations. And he made it his ardent desire to know him, to see him, and to recognize him. And I believe that our ability to respond to Jesus with the zeal of Simeon operates in direct proportion to our desire for that Jesus, to our awareness of him. There's no reason in the world the innkeeper couldn't have been on the same page and been like Simeon, devout and devoted and righteous and prayerful. He simply wasn't. And so when Jesus showed up, he kicked him to a cave. Simeon says, I can die happy, nothing else matters. When I started developing the sermon, I thought the question that we would be driving to and that I would pose to you at the end was, am I the innkeeper or am I Simeon? In my life, the way that I respond to Jesus, am I and have I been more like the innkeeper making space for him in the margins or am I and have I been more like Simeon celebrating him, anticipating him, praying for him, praying to see him and receive him with an open-hearted humility? Am I more like the innkeeper or am I more like Simeon? But as I got into the sermon and it started to kind of, sometimes the sermon will write itself if you just pull the thread the right way. As it started to kind of write itself, I realized that question, that's not the right question. So if you take notes, do that. Cross out the question. That's a stupid question. That's a stupid question because no one in here is going, I'm Simeon. I've done it. No more zeal than me. And the reality of it is, the people in the room who are the most like Simeon are the ones who feel the most like the innkeeper right now because that's how spiritual humility and maturity works. Isn't that right, Jen? No, I'm just messing around. That's a silly question. Because of course we would all answer, yeah, I tend to be more like the innkeeper. Yeah, I tend to just kind of make room for him in the comfortable margins. Instead of taking the steps of obedience that he wants from me. I tend to just kind of passively celebrate him instead of enthusiastically welcoming him. And when we see the zeal of Simeon, and I don't think we can overstate it, his ability to see the Messiah for who he was because of his open-handed humility and his approach to God. That we all know we need to be more like Simeon. So the real question then becomes, and the one that I would leave you with is this, how can I dethrone comfort and pursue Jesus in order to receive him with the zeal of Simeon? That's a better question for you to ask yourself. How can I first, how can I dethrone comfort? What are the things that Jesus is asking me for that I can finally kick out of the VIP suite and put him in there? Is it waking up 30 minutes earlier? Is he asking for your mornings? Here's a hint. Yes. He wants our mornings. Does he want our car rides? Yeah. Does he want our runs and our workouts? Yeah. Does he want our relationships with our coworkers? He does. Does he want us to be a more loving spouse? Yes. Does he want us to be more patient parent? Yeah. Does he want us to remember the grace that he offers us and so offer that to others? Yes. We know what Jesus asks of us. What comfort do we need to dethrone? Not being as accepted by the people in our life that matter to us. Taking steps of obedience and we're not sure where they lead. Allowing ourselves to rethink things even though that makes it scary for us. What comfort is impeding our pursuit of Christ? And then, once we figure out what comfort is there that is prohibiting Jesus from occupying the space he needs to occupy, how can we pursue Jesus? Really pursue him. Really ardently pray for him. So that when we see him, and when he calls for things and asks for things, we receive that and offer that as zealously as Simeon does. We pray for him every day. That's easy. Every morning, Jesus, if you arrive today, help me see you. If you arrive in an opportunity to serve, let me see it. If you arrive in a person who needs you, let me see it. If someone arrives in my life who's you've sent to encourage me, let me see it. We had a situation in our house recently where we were discouraged and we were discouraged about a couple of different things. And we had this talk about it at night. And the very next day, every single thing that we said that was discouraging, God addressed in a gracious way and gave us joy in that area of our life. So at the end of the day, we looked at each other and we said, let's not miss Jesus here because he showed up today and he showed us, I care about this and I care about this and I care about this and I care about you. So ask God, God, help me see you when you show up. Help me obey you when you ask. Help me celebrate you this season. Help me not get so headlong into plans and parties and gifts and decorations that I miss you this season. Jesus, help me see you. Make every day a pursuit of him. And we'll start to become more like Simeon than the innkeeper. And if we do that, if we'll pursue Jesus like Simeon this Christmas, I can promise you, you will have a far more rich Christmas. You will see little things that matter every day. Your spirit will be blessed every day. You will notice people to pray for and be a blessing to them every day. When we see the gifts and the movement of Jesus all through the season, and we see them because we've asked our God to open our eyes to those things. So as we go into December and we usher in all the things, let us have the zeal and the pursuit of Simeon and make space for Jesus in our lives wherever he wants to stay. Let's pray. Jesus, we love you. And God, we sing a song sometimes. It says our affection and our devotion we pour out at the feet of Jesus. Lord, I pray that that would be true. That we would love you and love you well. Father, where we are choosing comfort over obedience, would you show us? Would we see it? Would we care? And would we invite you in? Lord, attune our hearts and our eyes and our minds and our ears to see you, to hear you, to recognize you when you show up in our lives. Not just this Christmas season, God, but moving forward. And would we ultimately be a people who receive you and celebrate you like your servant Simeon. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service is over. I echo the gratitude of Kyle for our decorating squad that made this look like maybe the best looking stage we've ever had. And please take advantage of the photo booth out there if you are one who likes photo booths. Welcome to our December series. I'm very excited about it. We've had this planned for a while. I'm looking forward to what I get to share with you over the course of the next month. And if you guys are going to be singing like that in December, I'm going to shorten the sermons and we're going to add in more songs because that was fantastic. This year, the Christmas series is called Twas the Night. We are looking at the story of Christmas, the classic story of Christmas. We'll spend every week in a different portion of Luke chapter 2. So if you have a Bible this morning, as I've been encouraging you to bring them and go through the sermons with me. Please go ahead and open those up to Luke chapter 2. If you don't have a Bible, it's in the seat back in front of you. But we're going to be spending the next four Sundays in Luke chapter 2 and looking at the Christmas story from the perspective of different people involved in the story. This morning, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the innkeeper and from one of my favorite people in the story, Simeon. And you'll see why when we get there. But in the story, Luke chapter two, where the Christmas story is, and just so you know, that's like the traditional, like peanutsanuts Christmas, that's where it comes from, Luke 2. That's the classic Christmas passage. So that's why we're going to be there for these next four weeks. In the passage, the innkeeper is mentioned kind of indirectly. We don't get words from, we presume him could be her. I don't want to be misogynistic in who I think owns inns in ancient, but hunches is probably a guy and Mary and Joseph are traveling to Jerusalem for a religious festival. They have to go. The law says they have to go. It's for a census and Jerusalem. I don't know if you've thought about this. Why the heck would you Jerusalem is three days journey fromareth, averaging about eight to 10 hours a day on foot. We presume that Mary was on a donkey if they could afford such luxuries. She's clearly very pregnant because she pops when she gets there. Okay. So like she is on the verge of pregnant or giving birth. She's very, very pregnant. That's a different thing. And you got to imagine it's stressful. Y'all grow up. And then this might be the first clip of me that blows up on YouTube. Good job. It's nice for everyone to have goals. Anyways, they're going to Jerusalem. It's eight to 10 hours a day on foot. It's got to be very stressful. They don't know where they're going to stay. They probably don't have a lot of means. And so they get there and they're scrambling for a room. They're scrambling for a place to stay. They go to the innkeeper. The innkeeper famously says there's no room in the inn. And then he makes space for them in a manger. And I can't imagine the stress of Joseph as he's trying to arrange all this stuff and get everything squared away. But the inn keeper doesn't make room for them. He says, we have some room for you in the manger, which whenever we think of manger, and this is just for my own personal fun, I do this year and Jen my wife hates it when I do I like to ruin different elements of people's Christmas traditions when we look at the nativity scene and it's the stable with like the Spanish moss coming down that's probably not accurate it could be accurate but it probably isn't it was probably inside of a shallow cave in a cliffside or a hillside there in Bethlehem. Probably wasn't a nice stable. But anyways, I digress. He lets them stay in the manger. And the innkeeper, the Christmas story doesn't have too many villains. The innkeeper is about the closest thing to a villain we have besides, of course, Herod, who comes at the end of the Christmas story. And he's the villain because he doesn't make room for Jesus. But I would say two things, one later, but one thing right here to support him. He did make room for Jesus. It's just that the innkeeper offered Jesus the margins. He offered him the margins. I'm not going to kick anybody out of the room for you. I'm not going to make some space. I'm not going to invite you into my own house. I'm not going to divide up one of the rooms. I'm not going to talk to the other innkeepers and see what we can do. I'll give you a space that's very convenient for me. The innkeeper invites Jesus into the margins. And this is wild because what he should have done this is the Messiah Emmanuel God with us his people have been waiting for him for thousands of years they've been pining for him and praying for him and passed down a desire for Jesus generation after generation each generation has carried the torch of hope waiting for the Messiah to arrive the prophecies go all the way back to Genesis 12 and Abraham, and they know the prophecies. The innkeeper, whether he fully believes them or not, has grown up in an environment and in a culture so saturated with these prophecies that he knows it. And the Messiah is coming, and he has arrived. What he should have done is gone to the VIP suite and flung the door open and said, hey, buddy, go kick rocks. Get out of here. Go hit the bricks. You're out. Messiah's here. Emmanuel has arrived. He gets the suite, and we're going to kick in the continental breakfast with an omelet bar because Jesus is here. But that's not what he does. He doesn't disrupt anything. He doesn't make his life more difficult. He says, here, here's a margin for you to slide into. And in this way, I feel like a lot of us, all of us at points, can relate to the innkeeper. When Jesus shows up, when he offers himself, when he asks to be led into our heart, when he asks to be Lord of our life, when he gives us an opportunity to serve, when he asks us for a bit of devotion. When he asks us to set our alarm early to spend time with him. When he asks us for the next step of obedience and faithfulness with him. When he asks us to just trust him and his standards over ourselves and our standards. I think so often when Jesus shows up in our life, we, like the innkeeper, simply offer him the margins. Jesus, I'm going to fit you into places where I don't have to adjust anything. I'll pray to you, but I'm going to do it before meals when other people are around so I can appear pious and holy. But you and I know that's the only time I've prayed in the last three days. Yeah, I'll give you car rides for worship, Jesus. But only when the podcast I normally listen to or the music I normally like has gone stale. Yeah, Jesus, I'll go to church. But I'll go to church when I'm in town and it's convenient and my things didn't happen in my Saturday that makes it prohibitive for me to get up on Sunday. I'll give you those Sundays, God, but I'm not going to like rush back from the beach to fellowship with my church. I'm going to give you the margins. I'll give occasionally to a compelling thing, but I'm not going to make it uncomfortable for myself and give regularly in a habitual way because of the generosity that you teach me. I'll forgive people when it doesn't hurt me, but if I'm really mad, then I'm sorry, Jesus, you can't have that forgiveness for them. I think in so many ways, so many small aspects, when Jesus shows up in our life and asks to be invited in, we give him the margins where it's easiest, where it's the least inconvenient. When what we should do, what we should do when Jesus shows up and he asks for parts of our life, he asks to be let into our life, he asks for our obedience and our trust and our worship and our devotion and our love and our affection. When he asks for those things, what we should do is thunder into our VIP suite and kick out whatever's currently ruling and be like, go pound sand, buddy. Jesus is here. Emmanuel, God with us. The guy who died on the cross for me and then rose again on the third day and is coming back to get me and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. That guy's here, so you are out. That's what we should do. And so I think it begs the question, and I know that the phrasing here is ridiculous, but you'll understand the question. What is in your VIP suite? Who or what is in the most important rooms in your life? Who's occupying the space that Jesus deserves, but we're not willing to kick them or it out? What is holding you back from inviting Jesus not into the margins of your life, but in every bit of your life. Who is in your VIP suite? Now, if you're like me, you have a bunch of those. It's difficult to pinpoint one thing, a person, or affection that I have in my life that is the sole thing keeping Jesus from occupying all of my life. But if I had to guess what one of yours was, I bet in the top three for everyone in this room is comfort. Isn't it, North Raleigh? We're pretty comfortable people. We have things like we like them. We've organized our life like we like it. We've organized our faith like we like it. We've organized our politics like we like it. We've organized our priorities like we like it. We've put our money in the places that we like. We are a comfortable people. And when Jesus begins to poke at our comfort, I think we tend to say, sorry, buddy, room's full. I have a manger, if you're interested. The couch in my bonus room is surprisingly sleepable, Jesus. You're going to love it in there. But you're not getting in the master bedroom. I think comfort is one of our predominant idols. Comfort in how we think. When Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, the message of the Bible, when God starts to challenge the way that we think, some of the traditional norms that we've clung to to make things make sense, we kind of push back on that and be like, I'm not really open to new information, Jesus thinks. I need you to fit where I've put you. When Jesus' message starts to run up against our politics and our philosophies, sometimes we stop listening to Jesus in favor of what we always thought, and we say, there's no room for you there, Jesus. Sorry, I need you to fit into this box. When he starts asking for our finances, when he starts asking for our priorities, for our schedule, when he starts asking for our forgiveness, when he starts asking for the way that we do business, when he starts asking for transparency and honesty and vulnerability, when he starts asking us to be a good friend to someone who's hurting and it makes us uncomfortable. I think so often we choose comfort over obedience. And so I think that for many of us, comfort is what sits in that space of highest value in our life. And we'll make room for Jesus. We'll just do it like the innkeeper and tuck him away in the bonus room. And this is important because when we juxtapose the innkeeper's reception of Jesus with that of Simeon. We see a totally different story. And I didn't bring you here this morning to beat you up about being the innkeeper because I'm talking to myself. That's me. That's what I do. If you do that too, join me in my conviction. If you don't do that, do that. Pray for the rest of us heathens in the room. But for those of us who do, let's look at, learn from, and be humbled by the response of Simeon in Luke chapter 2. Now, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Simeon. But most of what we need to know is actually in this passage. So if you have a Bible, look at Luke chapter 2. I'm going to begin in verse 25 and read through verse 32. Luke writes this. Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple. And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, listen to this, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of the innkeeper. The innkeeper says, oh, Jesus is here. Let me see where I can conveniently fit you. Simeon's response, I would sum up this way. I have seen Jesus. Nothing else matters. I have seen Jesus. Nothing else matters. I can die happy. I don't care about anything else. Simeon doesn't clean out the VIP room. He cleans out the entire hotel, the whole inn, done. Everybody kick rocks. Jesus is coming in. He gets all the omelets. He gets all the things. He's here. He ushers him right in. He says, I've seen Jesus. Literally nothing else matters. The difference between his response and the innkeeper's response is mind-blowing. And we learn why Simeon has this response in the text. All the clues are there. It says he was righteous and devout. He was committed to God. He was committed to prayer. He was committed to the pursuit of Jesus. And I love the phrase that Luke includes in there to describe what Simeon had been praying for. Did you catch it? He had been praying for the consolation of Israel. That's such a good phrase and descriptor of who Jesus was, particularly to the ancient Hebrew mind. He was the consolation of Israel. See, I mentioned earlier that the innkeeper had grown up in a culture that was so steeped in religious understanding that he knew how far back the generational prophecies went about the Messiah that was going to arrive. And Simeon knew that too. And I have a whole sermon that I do just on the zeal of Simeon. I've actually done it twice here at Grace. And we look at how Simeon was the torch keeper. He was the torch bearer for his generation, waiting and looking and watching and wanting for the Messiah. And how that wait goes all the way back to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, where God promises that one of the descendants of Abraham will come and will bless the whole earth. And then the Old Testament is a story of waiting for that Messiah, of watching for him. And the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they watched. Is he here? Is it going to be one of these grandsons of Abraham? Is the Messiah come? No, he's not come. And then Moses comes around. Is it Moses? And they watch Moses lead God's people and bring them out of slavery and bring down the Ten Commandments and be God's spokesperson to his people. Is it Moses? Is he going to save us? No, it's not Moses. And then they go through the judges. Is it one of the judges? No. Is it one of the kings? Certainly it's David. No. But God renews his promise and renews their hope in 2 Samuel chapter 7. And then they watch the kings and hope maybe it's one of the kings that will rescue us. No, it's not one of the kings. But every generation after finding that no continues to pass forward the torch from grandfather to grandson to carry the torch of hope into the next generation waiting and watching and longing for the Messiah. And then they go into exile in Babylon and Assyria, and they cling to this torch of hope. And then they begin to wander back and reconstruct and rebuild Israel, and they cling to hope. And then they enter this period where God doesn't speak called the 400 years of silence, and they cling to hope. And then somewhere, some Jewish father or grandfather has a grandson named Simeon, and they start to tell them about the hope that they carried through the generations that one day they will see the Messiah. And Simeon commits to prayer. Father, let me see him. Father, let me see him. Father, bring your Christ. Bring your Messiah. Bring the consolation of Israel, the hope of all the generations. Simeon is now the torchbearer. And in that ardent praying and in that searching, God answers his prayers. And he says, I promise you that you will not pass away before you hold the Christ. So when he finally sees Jesus, it says that his parents brought Jesus in and Simeon went and scooped up the baby. I don't know what was said, hopefully words, hopefully he didn't just rip an eight-day-old infant out of Mary's arms, but he just went and he took that baby. And he prayed over that baby. And then he said, I can die now, God, because he's held that baby. And then if you keep reading, he blesses Mary and Joseph and tells them what they have, confirms for them what the angels have said. He was so ready to meet Jesus that when he finally did, he flung everything out and he said, I've met Jesus. Nothing else matters. And so this is where it's probably worthwhile to point out that the innkeeper does get a really bum rap. Because truth be told, the innkeeper didn't know that was Jesus. It was just a young couple. They needed space. I don't have any. And so him not making room for them isn't maybe as egregious of a sin as it would seem. But it's a helpful vehicle for us to understand the contrast. And we know who Jesus is. We've heard of him. We've been told of him. And so if we really want to look at the difference between how Jesus was received by the innkeeper and how he was received by Simeon, then I think that we have to conclude that our response to Jesus is proportional to our awareness of him. Our response to Jesus when he shows up, when he arrives in an opportunity of service, when he arrives in someone bringing us a hug when we need it, when he arrives an opportunity to be that hug when someone else needs it, when he arrives in conviction, when he arrives in asking for our affection, when he arrives in asking for our devotion, when Jesus arrives in our life. When he speaks into our life. Our response to that voice of Christ, I believe, is directly proportional to our general awareness of him. What we have in Simeon is someone who had prayerfully sought him out his entire life. He had devoted his life to pursuing Christ. Let me see him. Let me see him. Let me see him. And it's not lost on me. And I think this is so important. Do you understand that besides Mary Magdalene, Mary, his mother, maybe Joseph and John the Baptist, that the only other person in Jesus's life to acknowledge who he was and what he really came to do before he died on the cross was Simeon. Everybody else in Jesus's life, when they met him, they said, you can't be the guy. You're not the Messiah. You didn't come how we expected you to come. You're not saying the things we expect you to say. You're not being who we expect you to be. You're not performing the miracles we expect you to perform. You're not a king like we expected you to be the king. So you're not the Messiah. We reject you. Simeon was a man of such faith, such piety, such devotion, such closeness to God. He didn't need Jesus to say a word or do a thing. He recognized him when he saw him. And he said, I can die happy. That kind of awareness, that kind of recognition of who Jesus is only comes through prayer, only comes through devotion, only comes through an earnest desire to see him and to know him and to be exposed to him. I believe that Simeon saw who Jesus was because God heard his prayers. God saw his devotion. He was pleading with the Lord, let me see him, let me see him, let me see him. And God answered those prayers and gave him a unique vision and a unique reception of Jesus despite no one else in his life knowing who he was. And two of the people who knew who Jesus was had to be told by an angel before he got there. Simeon knew. How did Simeon know? Because he lived a life of devotion and pursuit of Jesus. Because he carried the torch that was passed to him by the previous generations. And he made it his ardent desire to know him, to see him, and to recognize him. And I believe that our ability to respond to Jesus with the zeal of Simeon operates in direct proportion to our desire for that Jesus, to our awareness of him. There's no reason in the world the innkeeper couldn't have been on the same page and been like Simeon, devout and devoted and righteous and prayerful. He simply wasn't. And so when Jesus showed up, he kicked him to a cave. Simeon says, I can die happy, nothing else matters. When I started developing the sermon, I thought the question that we would be driving to and that I would pose to you at the end was, am I the innkeeper or am I Simeon? In my life, the way that I respond to Jesus, am I and have I been more like the innkeeper making space for him in the margins or am I and have I been more like Simeon celebrating him, anticipating him, praying for him, praying to see him and receive him with an open-hearted humility? Am I more like the innkeeper or am I more like Simeon? But as I got into the sermon and it started to kind of, sometimes the sermon will write itself if you just pull the thread the right way. As it started to kind of write itself, I realized that question, that's not the right question. So if you take notes, do that. Cross out the question. That's a stupid question. That's a stupid question because no one in here is going, I'm Simeon. I've done it. No more zeal than me. And the reality of it is, the people in the room who are the most like Simeon are the ones who feel the most like the innkeeper right now because that's how spiritual humility and maturity works. Isn't that right, Jen? No, I'm just messing around. That's a silly question. Because of course we would all answer, yeah, I tend to be more like the innkeeper. Yeah, I tend to just kind of make room for him in the comfortable margins. Instead of taking the steps of obedience that he wants from me. I tend to just kind of passively celebrate him instead of enthusiastically welcoming him. And when we see the zeal of Simeon, and I don't think we can overstate it, his ability to see the Messiah for who he was because of his open-handed humility and his approach to God. That we all know we need to be more like Simeon. So the real question then becomes, and the one that I would leave you with is this, how can I dethrone comfort and pursue Jesus in order to receive him with the zeal of Simeon? That's a better question for you to ask yourself. How can I first, how can I dethrone comfort? What are the things that Jesus is asking me for that I can finally kick out of the VIP suite and put him in there? Is it waking up 30 minutes earlier? Is he asking for your mornings? Here's a hint. Yes. He wants our mornings. Does he want our car rides? Yeah. Does he want our runs and our workouts? Yeah. Does he want our relationships with our coworkers? He does. Does he want us to be a more loving spouse? Yes. Does he want us to be more patient parent? Yeah. Does he want us to remember the grace that he offers us and so offer that to others? Yes. We know what Jesus asks of us. What comfort do we need to dethrone? Not being as accepted by the people in our life that matter to us. Taking steps of obedience and we're not sure where they lead. Allowing ourselves to rethink things even though that makes it scary for us. What comfort is impeding our pursuit of Christ? And then, once we figure out what comfort is there that is prohibiting Jesus from occupying the space he needs to occupy, how can we pursue Jesus? Really pursue him. Really ardently pray for him. So that when we see him, and when he calls for things and asks for things, we receive that and offer that as zealously as Simeon does. We pray for him every day. That's easy. Every morning, Jesus, if you arrive today, help me see you. If you arrive in an opportunity to serve, let me see it. If you arrive in a person who needs you, let me see it. If someone arrives in my life who's you've sent to encourage me, let me see it. We had a situation in our house recently where we were discouraged and we were discouraged about a couple of different things. And we had this talk about it at night. And the very next day, every single thing that we said that was discouraging, God addressed in a gracious way and gave us joy in that area of our life. So at the end of the day, we looked at each other and we said, let's not miss Jesus here because he showed up today and he showed us, I care about this and I care about this and I care about this and I care about you. So ask God, God, help me see you when you show up. Help me obey you when you ask. Help me celebrate you this season. Help me not get so headlong into plans and parties and gifts and decorations that I miss you this season. Jesus, help me see you. Make every day a pursuit of him. And we'll start to become more like Simeon than the innkeeper. And if we do that, if we'll pursue Jesus like Simeon this Christmas, I can promise you, you will have a far more rich Christmas. You will see little things that matter every day. Your spirit will be blessed every day. You will notice people to pray for and be a blessing to them every day. When we see the gifts and the movement of Jesus all through the season, and we see them because we've asked our God to open our eyes to those things. So as we go into December and we usher in all the things, let us have the zeal and the pursuit of Simeon and make space for Jesus in our lives wherever he wants to stay. Let's pray. Jesus, we love you. And God, we sing a song sometimes. It says our affection and our devotion we pour out at the feet of Jesus. Lord, I pray that that would be true. That we would love you and love you well. Father, where we are choosing comfort over obedience, would you show us? Would we see it? Would we care? And would we invite you in? Lord, attune our hearts and our eyes and our minds and our ears to see you, to hear you, to recognize you when you show up in our lives. Not just this Christmas season, God, but moving forward. And would we ultimately be a people who receive you and celebrate you like your servant Simeon. In Jesus' name, amen.

This morning, we are in the last part of our series called With. We've been walking through a book by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani, talking about our postures before God, which ones are appropriate, which ones are helpful, and which ones are not. And so we've spent four weeks looking at postures that ultimately are not helpful for us, postures that ultimately lead to a spiritually empty life and are ultimately damaging. And so we've kind of just left every week where we talk about a posture, we help each other see that in ourselves, and we go, yeah, that's not good. And then we pray and we go home, and it's been kind of a downer. So this week is the resolution to all of those postures. You'll remember that the first one we talked about was life under God. And we said in this posture, the mindset is, God, I'm going to obey you and submit to your authority in exchange for your protection in my life. I'm going to obey you and then things are going to go well for me. You're going to keep me from heartache and trial. And we saw that that never happens. Life is going to involve tragedy. It's going to involve hurt. It's going to involve loss. And that what we're trying to do when we say, God, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, is we're really trying to control the universe via God. It's our subtle way of regaining control over the things that we fear, and that's ultimately empty. We talked about the life over God posture. The life over God posture says, God, I'm not really interested in your authority in my life. I'm going to live my life over you, but I am going to extract from you and your word some best practices to apply to my life so that things can go better for me. Life from God says, God, I'm going to follow you and you're going to bless me. I'm going to do the things that you want me to do. I'm going to live my life for you, and then you're going to give me all the things that I want. And then the life for God posture says, God, I'm going to live my life for you, and you're going to love me for it. I'm going to live my life making an impact for your kingdom, and because of that, I'm going to be more valuable to you than my peers. I'm going to earn your affection. And we saw that each of these were empty. And ultimately, they're empty because we're following God for his treasures. We're following God because there's a motivation that isn't God, it's these other things, and they fall short. And that's where the life with God posture becomes important. That's the right posture to have before the Father. And in life with God, we no longer use God for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. You see? We no longer use God to acquire the things. We no longer use God to acquire the blessings. We no longer go to him because of what we want from him. We go to him because we want him. We no longer use him for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. This is the right posture before the Lord, to simply be with him because he wants to be with us. The best way I've ever heard this explained, I actually have this explained to me by someone else before I had a child. I have a four-year-old daughter named Lily. But before Lily was ever an idea in 2013, somebody explained this posture to me in this way, and I thought it was perfect. So Eve, if you have kids, this will really resonate with you. Even if you don't yet have kids, I think you'll see the power in this. Lily is my favorite thing on the planet. I love doing everything with her. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking about your friend Lily. They picked up on it back there. I love doing everything with her. We've actually, on our front porch, we've turned around our porch swing so it faces the cul-de-sac where she runs around with her friends every day. And I love sitting out there and watching her play. I love watching her play soccer, kind of. I'm the coach, so I also hate it. But I love watching her play. I love when she brings me things and she says, look what I drew or look what I did. I love when she tells me about school. I love when she decides that she wants to talk to me and let me into her little world. I love Lily. But do you know my favorite thing to do with Lily is? Hugs and snugs, man. That's all I want. Hugs and snugs. I want her to climb up in my lap. I want her to let me hold on to her. And I want us to be quiet together. That's all I want. And I don't want us to be quiet together because I'm tired of hearing her talk or make noise. I want us to be quiet together because I just want us to rest together. Burt Banks, one of our great elders, he jokingly told me that he loves his grandchildren until they're too old to sit in his lap. Once they're too old to sit in his lap, he says, I have no use for them anymore. Because those of you who are parents, those of you who have had those little kids, when they're sitting in your lap, or those of you who are grandparents, when you get to hold them and simply be with them and just enjoy their presence, there's nothing better than that. There's nothing better than that. I love watching her play. I love watching her dance. I love it most when she climbs up in my lap. And sometimes I'll tell her, she'll ask me for something. I'll say, you can have that if you come give daddy hugs. And she'll say, how many hugs? And I'll say, a hundred. And she'll go, that's too many. How about 10? I'm like, all right, 10. So she crawls up on my lap, and she wraps her arms around me, and she says, you count. And she starts just pulsing out these hugs. And I always lose count, and I get more than she bargained for. And that's great. And I love those. But my favorite is when she wants to do it. My favorite is when she comes and she gives me hugs. No other reason just to do it. She just wants to be with me. That's the best. Why would we think that our Heavenly Father would want anything any different? He simply wants to be with you. He wants to enjoy your presence. He created you to be with Him. Do you understand it was out of the context of relationship that you were created? Do you understand that God looked around at the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and said, we need to share this relationship with something. And so He created you so that you could share in a relationship with him. Do you understand that all he's ever wanted with you is not your performance, it's not even your devotion, it's just to be with him and all those other things come. And we see this desire of the Father. This is amazing. I love this part of the sermon, I really do, because I just think it helps Scripture make so much sense. Do you understand that this desire of the Father to simply be with us is seen throughout the narrative arc of the Bible? It's all through Scripture that all God wants with His children that He created is to be with you. If you look in Genesis 3, verse 8, it tells on God a little bit. Now, admittedly, I'm taking this verse totally out of context, and I'm using it to make a point that it was not intended to make, but now they become ultra-aware of everything around them. And they hear God, and they go and they hide, and God's about to come and confront them about their sin. That's what's happening in that verse. But here's what this verse tells on God that I want us to see. Understand that in Genesis 3, right before the fall, right before the fall of man and just as the first sin is committed, that it is perfect. You understand this? Creation is perfect. It is exactly as God intended. Every leaf is laying exactly where God wants it to lay. Every breeze is the exact temperature and pace that God wants it to be. Every day is exactly as cool in the morning and in the evening and at the midday as God wants it to be. Every piece of fruit hanging from the tree tastes exactly as God wants it to taste. Every interaction with every animal that Adam and Eve have goes exactly as God wants it to go. Adam and Eve, their days are mapped out exactly as God wants them to be. And in these days, apparently they were very used to hearing the sound of the Lord walking with them in the garden in the cool of the evening. It does not say they heard what sounded like God walking in the garden. Because they knew that sound. This is what God wanted to do. At perfection of creation, all God wanted to do is come down and hang out with Adam and Eve. You understand that? He created all of this so that in the evenings he could come down from heaven and be like, what did you guys do today? Want to hang out? And it says they hid themselves from the presence of God. They were used to him coming down and spending time with them. They knew what his presence felt like. They knew what it sounded like when he walked through the garden because this is what God wanted, but then sin messed it up. And when sin messed it up, God had to withdraw himself to heaven and say, I can no longer be with you because of your imperfection. The relationship that we had has been broken and so God is no longer with us. And what does God do to fix this? Isaiah tells us. He's going to send his son. And his name will be called Emmanuel. My Bible people know what Emmanuel means, don't you? God with us. And then he sends his son in the New Testament. So first God wanted to be with us. then sin messed it up so he could no longer be with us. You know what he did to fix our error? He came down to be with us. Look at what John writes in the first chapter. He starts off his amazing gospel and he says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made. And he's telling us that Jesus is the word of God. And then you skip on down to verse 13, and he writes this, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was with us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. God made all of creation so that he could simply be with us. Then our sin messed it up, and how did he fix it? He sent his son to be with us, to be Emmanuel God with us. The word became flesh. And it's worth pointing out here, do you understand that this is what differentiates Christianity from all other world religions? That we possess the only faith that claims that our God loves us so much that he came down to join us. Our God loves us so much that he gave up his heavenly body, his heavenly realm to condescend to be with us and get down in the muck and the mire and see the worst of us and then die for us to be with us before he went back to heaven to make a path for us to be with him for all of eternity. Do you understand that? We're the only faith that claims that. We're the only faith that claims a God who came down, who loved us enough to be with us because it's all God ever wanted. And then at the end of scripture, in Revelation chapter 21, when all is said and done, Jesus has come down. He started his, he dies for us. He starts the church. He leaves it to the disciples. We carry on that legacy until Jesus's return, which is what we're doing right now is we tell people the great news of the gospel. And then one day in Revelation, God is going to enact the end of times and a series of events are going to occur. And at the end of these series of events, Revelation 21. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people. And God himself will be with them as their God. The climax of all of history, to usher in eternity, the very first stroke in the most perfect picture that God could paint for us is that he is with us again, and we are with him. That's all he wants over the whole arc of scripture. He created us to be with us. We screwed it up. So he sent his son to be with us again and make a way for us to be with him for all of eternity. That's all he wants. He just wants to be with us. Everything else flows from that. His perfect picture of eternity begins with his presence with us and our presence with him. And I think that's amazing. And what we see, and I don't have time to fully unpack this this morning. This is when it's really helpful to read the book for yourself and think through it on your own. But what we see when we adopt this posture is that we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. We live life as God intended. When this is our posture, when all we want, when we match God, when God has said, you are my treasure, when we look back at God and we say, yes, and you are my treasure, and all I want is to be with you just as you want to be with me, then when we adopt this posture, we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. And I choose those words very intentionally because they're the antithesis of all the other postures. And life under God, that's a posture of fear. God, all these things are out of my control. I'm really scared. Will you control the universe for me and I'll control how much I submit to you? And when we live life with God, what we see is that eternity is God's presence in heaven and eternity has already begun for his believers that we started this new life in this new body that we know God, we are reconciled with him. And in that way, heaven has been brought down to us, brought down to us by God so that we can begin to experience pieces of it now as we enjoy his presence. And we have to no longer fear death because Jesus conquered it for us. That's why the scriptures say that death has lost its sting. We have to no longer, the greatest fear any of us have in life, God has removed that from us when we live life with him. And the life over God policy, the thing that we, or posture, the thing that we fear the most is that God will be in control of us, that we won't be able to do what we want to do. I don't want your authority in my life because there's joys over here that I want to experience that I don't feel like I can if I'm submitted to you. And what we find when we live life with God is that he came to give us life to the full, that as David said, at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There is no greater life than to be walking in lockstep with the Father, than to walk with him in the cool of the evening. And in that place, we find total and complete freedom to be exactly who he created us to be. We are everything that God ever intended when we walk with him. So we no longer need that posture. We are blessed. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, you heard Doug's, I thought, brilliant illustration of the kid who asked for a horse and his parents brought them back a car instead. He asked for a horse. They were supposed to get a horse when he became of age, but by the time he became of age, cars had been invented. So his parents gave him a car because it fit the bill of what he was asking for and was so much beyond what he could ever imagine. And he painted this great picture of in our life we ask for so many horses. We want so many simple things, and God sees beyond those so much and blesses us beyond what we could ever ask or imagine, as it says in Ephesians. And when we walk this life with God, we are blessed in ways that we could have never had the audacity to ask for. And we are affirmed. In the life for God posture, we perform so that God will love us, so that our peers will respect us, because everyone needs to be valued. Everybody needs to be told that they're loved, that I see you, and I love you, and that you're enough. And in life with God, when we're with God, when we're just with our Father and we're just basking in his presence, there is that constant voice of affirmation in our life that you are loved and I love you and you are enough. The life with God posture is the antithesis of all the others. And it's the way that we live life finally and fully as God intended. And so to me, the question becomes, okay, that's what God wants. I see it over the whole narrative arc of Scripture. I see it as the antithesis of all the others. It's the answer to them. How do I adopt this posture in my life? How do I do that? How do I practically live life with God? Again, I think it's worth diving into the book where he has four chapters to unpack what I'm going to try to distill down into eight minutes for you. But the first thing that I would say is this. We adopt this posture when we understand that the gospel is not a way to get people to heaven, it's a way to get people to God. I'll say it again. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven. It is a way to get people to God. That's not my thought. That's John Piper's thought. He's smarter than me. I stole it. I think so often we think about being saved. We think that Jesus died to get us to heaven. And when we think about heaven, we think about getting to see our lost loved ones, the people that we're going to be reunited with. We think about the sweet mansion on the streets of gold and how awesome it's going to be in this perfect utopia for all of eternity. And that's great. That's what heaven is. But Jesus didn't die to get us to heaven. He died to get us to God. To reconcile our relationship with him. Because in heaven, the first strokes God paints in the picture are that he will be with us. We will see the face of our God. We will see the love in his eyes. We will see our Savior Jesus and hear his voice for the first time. We will see the presence of the Spirit that's been guiding us as we've stumbled and tripped and fall through life. That is what Jesus died for. To get us to God. Heaven is secondary. That just happens to be where God is. He died to reunite us with him and with the Father and with the Spirit. And a good litmus test for whether or not we think about it like this is when you think about heaven, when you think about getting to be there, who are you most excited to see? Are you most excited to see a lost loved one? Or are you most excited to see the face of your Father God? Are you most excited to be reunited with someone you lost? Or are you most excited to finally get to see the face of Jesus and hear his voice? Now listen, I know that's a terribly unfair question. It's manipulative and mean. I get it. When I think about that, I think about my papa. I loved him as much as you can love anybody. He was my hero growing up. He died when I was 19. I really want him to meet Lily. I really want him to hear me preach. And I can't wait to hug him. And you have the people that you love too. And unfortunately, the older you get, the greater the population of people you want to see is in heaven. But I'm telling you, if what we long for most is to see the people we already know and not meet the God who created us, then we're not quite in a place yet where God has become our treasure. And so if we want to adopt this life with God posture and yearn for the proper things and see the gospel as a way to get to God and treasure what that is, I think the only way to do that is to know him more. I think the only way for our value of God to grow is to know him more, to learn him more, to pursue him more, to engage in the things that he wants us to engage in, to wake up daily. You've heard me say over and over again, the most important thing we can do in our lives is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. We've got to pursue him through his word and not just read it as a way to learn about God, but a way to learn who God is. The highest goal that we could have in our lives is to know God. Because the more we know him, the more we want to be with him, and the more accurately we see what the gospel is, and the more fervently we live our life for him, the more we want to be with him. I think that this is why Paul prays in Ephesians, the prayer that I've shared with you so many times. We've made this the prayer of grace. This was the prayer of Paul over his churches. I love this prayer so much that Jen's cousin, who's a calligrapher, I had her write it out. And we're in the process of getting it framed and putting it in our living room so that my family can see it every day. And this is what Paul prays for us in that prayer. I'm going to skip down to verse 17 of Ephesians chapter 3. He writes, he starts us off, for this reason I bow my knees before the Father. But then he says in 17, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul's chief desire for his churches was that they would know God. My chief desire for you is that you would know God. Not that life would go well, not that we would be protected, not that we would be prosperous, not that we would make money, not that we would get the job or have the relationship or dodge that pain or be able to dance through the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That's not Paul's prayer for us. Paul's prayer for us is that we would know God. And in knowing him, he becomes more lovely to us. And in becoming more lovely for us, our hearts and our souls yearn for the proper eternity. If heaven sounds boring to you, you just don't have a very good picture of who God is. Part of that's your pastor's fault. The first thing we do to adopt this posture is we understand that Jesus died to get us to God. Heaven just happens to be where he is. The second thing that we do, and I love this on a practical level for us, and I really want you guys to think about this. The second thing we can do to adopt this posture is we adopt this posture when prayer grows from communication to communion. We adopt this posture when our idea and practice of prayer grows from communication to communion. When we first start to think about prayer, when we first encounter it, when we're a child or when we get saved or when we become interested in it, whenever it might be, I think the very first thing we learn about prayer is that it's our opportunity to talk to God. When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he said, pray like this, and he talked to God. And so the first way we encounter prayer is to think of it as speaking to God. It's this communication from us to the Father. And then once you study prayer a little bit longer, once you read more scripture, once you're around church a little bit more and you get to know the Lord a little bit better, you understand that you can listen when you pray. That sometimes being prayerful is to be silent before God and to simply listen to him. So now he's communicating with you. But in scripture, there is this deeper prayer. In life, there is this deeper prayer that's simply communion with God. It's this prayer that helps us to pray without ceasing, as we are commanded to do. It's this communing prayer that allows us to be in the presence of God. It's this communing prayer that allows us to pray as we go through our days and through our weeks, even while we're in meetings and conversations with other people. This idea of communing prayer. It's captured in the book by a conversation between Dan Rather and Mother Teresa that I really loved. Dan Rather's talking to Mother Teresa and he says, you know, I hear that you're really renowned for your prayers. So when you pray, what do you say to God? Mother Teresa says, oh, I don't say anything. I just listen. So Dan Rather says, okay. Well then, while you're listening, what does God say to you? And she says, oh, he doesn't say anything. He's just listening. And if you don't understand that, I don't know how to explain it to you. That's a different way to think about prayer. Communing with God. And you know, I hesitated on what to say here and whether or not to share this. Because this is a little wispy. And some of you, I know, I will lose you. And you will think, Nate's a weird hippie. I don't know if I can go to this church anymore. But if we were just friends, I'm friends with most of you. If you and I had the chance to sit down over a drink and talk about prayer, and I'm just talking to my friend, and we got to talk about this, and we said, what, like, this communing prayer, like, what are you talking about? Like, how does that even work? I would tell you this, because this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. And I have books that lend themselves to this that are good traditional books. I'll be happy to email them to you if you want to know. I think there is something to meditative prayer. I think there's something to meditation. I think in our Western culture, we don't have time for that. We don't have interest in that. We don't have value for that. That's something for weird Eastern cultures. But I think we shortchange ourselves a lot when we just cast that aside. And I would even go as far to say this to my friend over drinks. I think that the other world religions and cultures that have figured out the value of meditation are groping and mimicking the meditation, the prayerful meditation that God intended us to have. I think the reason that they do it is because they're on to something and there is a peace that's found there and that God intended us to find that peace there because for a Christian, he's intended us to find him there. I think there's absolutely something to meditative contemplative prayer where we simply listen and we are simply with God. And if you think about it, how else are we going to crawl up in his lap and be still? I said my favorite times with Lily are the times when I get to hold her and we're quiet together. How else do we do that with our God who is in heaven than to simply be quiet in his presence? And you think to yourself, that's great. How do I do that? How do I just start contemplative prayer? I would say it works like anything else that we try for the first time. This last year and a half or so, I've gotten into cooking. I just like cooking. And now if you want to cook, you don't need a cookbook. You just need YouTube. And so like you just watch videos. And one of the things that I've wanted to learn to cook is the perfect steak. I've gone nuts with this. I talk with my friends about it all the time. It's probably a sin in my life by this point because I think about it so much. But I want to cook the perfect steak. And you can watch all the YouTube videos you want to watch. You can watch all the TikTok chefs you want to watch. But until you fire up the stove and put the pan on it and heat it up and hear the sizzle when the steak goes in and learn what it is when you do this and when you do this, what happens when you dry it and you don't dry it, what happens when it's not hot enough or when it's too hot? What happens when you don't put enough oil in or you need more butter or whatever it is? Until you start to do it, there's no way you can understand it. You can learn all you want about how to cook a steak, but nothing is going to teach you like experience. And when you start to do it, some things start to click and fire off. And I believe that this contemplative prayer works the same way. We can learn all about it. We can read the books. We can think about how we might want to try to do it. But all I can tell you to do is start trying. Spend some time with God. Read His Word. Spend some time in the Bible. Pursue him. Desire him. Let him paint a picture of himself in your life. And then set the Bible down and sit quietly with him for as long as you can stand. Don't worry about how long it takes. Just do it. Just sit down and do it, and then when you can't do it anymore, stop doing it. Who cares how long you did it? And sit in the presence of God. And if you're really thinking along with me, if you're really engaged, you may be thinking to yourself, Nate, did you really just take the church through a book and five weeks worth of sermons so that you could arrive at the conclusion that if we really want to live the life that God wants for us and experience the relationship with God that he intended us to have, that what we need to do is read the Bible and pray more? Yeah, I did. Because it's that simple. Because that's what God wants from us. He wants us to be with him. I hope you will. I hope you will intentionally pursue the presence of the Father this week. And I hope that he begins to open doors of understanding for you that you didn't have previously. And I hope that he will slowly but surely, as we develop a larger picture of him, as we pursue him, I hope that he will become our treasure. And that we will begin to view the gospel as a way to get to God and to Jesus. And not just a way to heaven. Let's pray and then we get to do communion together. Father, we love you. We are grateful for you. And to you. Lord, would you open our hearts and our eyes and our minds to what a relationship with you can look like? Would you help us mine scripture for who you are and listen to books and read podcasts and have conversations? Give us time, God, to get out in your creation and simply soak you in in silence. Help us enjoy the rain this afternoon as it pours. May we find a time to go outside in the quiet and just listen to your sovereignty pour down on us and enjoy your presence there. Help us to pursue you through prayer, to see it as communion with you and not reduce it to communication. God, may we as a church live our lives with you and acknowledge that's all you've ever really wanted. Let us experience your presence even today, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

This morning, we are in the last part of our series called With. We've been walking through a book by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani, talking about our postures before God, which ones are appropriate, which ones are helpful, and which ones are not. And so we've spent four weeks looking at postures that ultimately are not helpful for us, postures that ultimately lead to a spiritually empty life and are ultimately damaging. And so we've kind of just left every week where we talk about a posture, we help each other see that in ourselves, and we go, yeah, that's not good. And then we pray and we go home, and it's been kind of a downer. So this week is the resolution to all of those postures. You'll remember that the first one we talked about was life under God. And we said in this posture, the mindset is, God, I'm going to obey you and submit to your authority in exchange for your protection in my life. I'm going to obey you and then things are going to go well for me. You're going to keep me from heartache and trial. And we saw that that never happens. Life is going to involve tragedy. It's going to involve hurt. It's going to involve loss. And that what we're trying to do when we say, God, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, is we're really trying to control the universe via God. It's our subtle way of regaining control over the things that we fear, and that's ultimately empty. We talked about the life over God posture. The life over God posture says, God, I'm not really interested in your authority in my life. I'm going to live my life over you, but I am going to extract from you and your word some best practices to apply to my life so that things can go better for me. Life from God says, God, I'm going to follow you and you're going to bless me. I'm going to do the things that you want me to do. I'm going to live my life for you, and then you're going to give me all the things that I want. And then the life for God posture says, God, I'm going to live my life for you, and you're going to love me for it. I'm going to live my life making an impact for your kingdom, and because of that, I'm going to be more valuable to you than my peers. I'm going to earn your affection. And we saw that each of these were empty. And ultimately, they're empty because we're following God for his treasures. We're following God because there's a motivation that isn't God, it's these other things, and they fall short. And that's where the life with God posture becomes important. That's the right posture to have before the Father. And in life with God, we no longer use God for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. You see? We no longer use God to acquire the things. We no longer use God to acquire the blessings. We no longer go to him because of what we want from him. We go to him because we want him. We no longer use him for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. This is the right posture before the Lord, to simply be with him because he wants to be with us. The best way I've ever heard this explained, I actually have this explained to me by someone else before I had a child. I have a four-year-old daughter named Lily. But before Lily was ever an idea in 2013, somebody explained this posture to me in this way, and I thought it was perfect. So Eve, if you have kids, this will really resonate with you. Even if you don't yet have kids, I think you'll see the power in this. Lily is my favorite thing on the planet. I love doing everything with her. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking about your friend Lily. They picked up on it back there. I love doing everything with her. We've actually, on our front porch, we've turned around our porch swing so it faces the cul-de-sac where she runs around with her friends every day. And I love sitting out there and watching her play. I love watching her play soccer, kind of. I'm the coach, so I also hate it. But I love watching her play. I love when she brings me things and she says, look what I drew or look what I did. I love when she tells me about school. I love when she decides that she wants to talk to me and let me into her little world. I love Lily. But do you know my favorite thing to do with Lily is? Hugs and snugs, man. That's all I want. Hugs and snugs. I want her to climb up in my lap. I want her to let me hold on to her. And I want us to be quiet together. That's all I want. And I don't want us to be quiet together because I'm tired of hearing her talk or make noise. I want us to be quiet together because I just want us to rest together. Burt Banks, one of our great elders, he jokingly told me that he loves his grandchildren until they're too old to sit in his lap. Once they're too old to sit in his lap, he says, I have no use for them anymore. Because those of you who are parents, those of you who have had those little kids, when they're sitting in your lap, or those of you who are grandparents, when you get to hold them and simply be with them and just enjoy their presence, there's nothing better than that. There's nothing better than that. I love watching her play. I love watching her dance. I love it most when she climbs up in my lap. And sometimes I'll tell her, she'll ask me for something. I'll say, you can have that if you come give daddy hugs. And she'll say, how many hugs? And I'll say, a hundred. And she'll go, that's too many. How about 10? I'm like, all right, 10. So she crawls up on my lap, and she wraps her arms around me, and she says, you count. And she starts just pulsing out these hugs. And I always lose count, and I get more than she bargained for. And that's great. And I love those. But my favorite is when she wants to do it. My favorite is when she comes and she gives me hugs. No other reason just to do it. She just wants to be with me. That's the best. Why would we think that our Heavenly Father would want anything any different? He simply wants to be with you. He wants to enjoy your presence. He created you to be with Him. Do you understand it was out of the context of relationship that you were created? Do you understand that God looked around at the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and said, we need to share this relationship with something. And so He created you so that you could share in a relationship with him. Do you understand that all he's ever wanted with you is not your performance, it's not even your devotion, it's just to be with him and all those other things come. And we see this desire of the Father. This is amazing. I love this part of the sermon, I really do, because I just think it helps Scripture make so much sense. Do you understand that this desire of the Father to simply be with us is seen throughout the narrative arc of the Bible? It's all through Scripture that all God wants with His children that He created is to be with you. If you look in Genesis 3, verse 8, it tells on God a little bit. Now, admittedly, I'm taking this verse totally out of context, and I'm using it to make a point that it was not intended to make, but now they become ultra-aware of everything around them. And they hear God, and they go and they hide, and God's about to come and confront them about their sin. That's what's happening in that verse. But here's what this verse tells on God that I want us to see. Understand that in Genesis 3, right before the fall, right before the fall of man and just as the first sin is committed, that it is perfect. You understand this? Creation is perfect. It is exactly as God intended. Every leaf is laying exactly where God wants it to lay. Every breeze is the exact temperature and pace that God wants it to be. Every day is exactly as cool in the morning and in the evening and at the midday as God wants it to be. Every piece of fruit hanging from the tree tastes exactly as God wants it to taste. Every interaction with every animal that Adam and Eve have goes exactly as God wants it to go. Adam and Eve, their days are mapped out exactly as God wants them to be. And in these days, apparently they were very used to hearing the sound of the Lord walking with them in the garden in the cool of the evening. It does not say they heard what sounded like God walking in the garden. Because they knew that sound. This is what God wanted to do. At perfection of creation, all God wanted to do is come down and hang out with Adam and Eve. You understand that? He created all of this so that in the evenings he could come down from heaven and be like, what did you guys do today? Want to hang out? And it says they hid themselves from the presence of God. They were used to him coming down and spending time with them. They knew what his presence felt like. They knew what it sounded like when he walked through the garden because this is what God wanted, but then sin messed it up. And when sin messed it up, God had to withdraw himself to heaven and say, I can no longer be with you because of your imperfection. The relationship that we had has been broken and so God is no longer with us. And what does God do to fix this? Isaiah tells us. He's going to send his son. And his name will be called Emmanuel. My Bible people know what Emmanuel means, don't you? God with us. And then he sends his son in the New Testament. So first God wanted to be with us. then sin messed it up so he could no longer be with us. You know what he did to fix our error? He came down to be with us. Look at what John writes in the first chapter. He starts off his amazing gospel and he says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made. And he's telling us that Jesus is the word of God. And then you skip on down to verse 13, and he writes this, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was with us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. God made all of creation so that he could simply be with us. Then our sin messed it up, and how did he fix it? He sent his son to be with us, to be Emmanuel God with us. The word became flesh. And it's worth pointing out here, do you understand that this is what differentiates Christianity from all other world religions? That we possess the only faith that claims that our God loves us so much that he came down to join us. Our God loves us so much that he gave up his heavenly body, his heavenly realm to condescend to be with us and get down in the muck and the mire and see the worst of us and then die for us to be with us before he went back to heaven to make a path for us to be with him for all of eternity. Do you understand that? We're the only faith that claims that. We're the only faith that claims a God who came down, who loved us enough to be with us because it's all God ever wanted. And then at the end of scripture, in Revelation chapter 21, when all is said and done, Jesus has come down. He started his, he dies for us. He starts the church. He leaves it to the disciples. We carry on that legacy until Jesus's return, which is what we're doing right now is we tell people the great news of the gospel. And then one day in Revelation, God is going to enact the end of times and a series of events are going to occur. And at the end of these series of events, Revelation 21. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people. And God himself will be with them as their God. The climax of all of history, to usher in eternity, the very first stroke in the most perfect picture that God could paint for us is that he is with us again, and we are with him. That's all he wants over the whole arc of scripture. He created us to be with us. We screwed it up. So he sent his son to be with us again and make a way for us to be with him for all of eternity. That's all he wants. He just wants to be with us. Everything else flows from that. His perfect picture of eternity begins with his presence with us and our presence with him. And I think that's amazing. And what we see, and I don't have time to fully unpack this this morning. This is when it's really helpful to read the book for yourself and think through it on your own. But what we see when we adopt this posture is that we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. We live life as God intended. When this is our posture, when all we want, when we match God, when God has said, you are my treasure, when we look back at God and we say, yes, and you are my treasure, and all I want is to be with you just as you want to be with me, then when we adopt this posture, we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. And I choose those words very intentionally because they're the antithesis of all the other postures. And life under God, that's a posture of fear. God, all these things are out of my control. I'm really scared. Will you control the universe for me and I'll control how much I submit to you? And when we live life with God, what we see is that eternity is God's presence in heaven and eternity has already begun for his believers that we started this new life in this new body that we know God, we are reconciled with him. And in that way, heaven has been brought down to us, brought down to us by God so that we can begin to experience pieces of it now as we enjoy his presence. And we have to no longer fear death because Jesus conquered it for us. That's why the scriptures say that death has lost its sting. We have to no longer, the greatest fear any of us have in life, God has removed that from us when we live life with him. And the life over God policy, the thing that we, or posture, the thing that we fear the most is that God will be in control of us, that we won't be able to do what we want to do. I don't want your authority in my life because there's joys over here that I want to experience that I don't feel like I can if I'm submitted to you. And what we find when we live life with God is that he came to give us life to the full, that as David said, at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There is no greater life than to be walking in lockstep with the Father, than to walk with him in the cool of the evening. And in that place, we find total and complete freedom to be exactly who he created us to be. We are everything that God ever intended when we walk with him. So we no longer need that posture. We are blessed. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, you heard Doug's, I thought, brilliant illustration of the kid who asked for a horse and his parents brought them back a car instead. He asked for a horse. They were supposed to get a horse when he became of age, but by the time he became of age, cars had been invented. So his parents gave him a car because it fit the bill of what he was asking for and was so much beyond what he could ever imagine. And he painted this great picture of in our life we ask for so many horses. We want so many simple things, and God sees beyond those so much and blesses us beyond what we could ever ask or imagine, as it says in Ephesians. And when we walk this life with God, we are blessed in ways that we could have never had the audacity to ask for. And we are affirmed. In the life for God posture, we perform so that God will love us, so that our peers will respect us, because everyone needs to be valued. Everybody needs to be told that they're loved, that I see you, and I love you, and that you're enough. And in life with God, when we're with God, when we're just with our Father and we're just basking in his presence, there is that constant voice of affirmation in our life that you are loved and I love you and you are enough. The life with God posture is the antithesis of all the others. And it's the way that we live life finally and fully as God intended. And so to me, the question becomes, okay, that's what God wants. I see it over the whole narrative arc of Scripture. I see it as the antithesis of all the others. It's the answer to them. How do I adopt this posture in my life? How do I do that? How do I practically live life with God? Again, I think it's worth diving into the book where he has four chapters to unpack what I'm going to try to distill down into eight minutes for you. But the first thing that I would say is this. We adopt this posture when we understand that the gospel is not a way to get people to heaven, it's a way to get people to God. I'll say it again. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven. It is a way to get people to God. That's not my thought. That's John Piper's thought. He's smarter than me. I stole it. I think so often we think about being saved. We think that Jesus died to get us to heaven. And when we think about heaven, we think about getting to see our lost loved ones, the people that we're going to be reunited with. We think about the sweet mansion on the streets of gold and how awesome it's going to be in this perfect utopia for all of eternity. And that's great. That's what heaven is. But Jesus didn't die to get us to heaven. He died to get us to God. To reconcile our relationship with him. Because in heaven, the first strokes God paints in the picture are that he will be with us. We will see the face of our God. We will see the love in his eyes. We will see our Savior Jesus and hear his voice for the first time. We will see the presence of the Spirit that's been guiding us as we've stumbled and tripped and fall through life. That is what Jesus died for. To get us to God. Heaven is secondary. That just happens to be where God is. He died to reunite us with him and with the Father and with the Spirit. And a good litmus test for whether or not we think about it like this is when you think about heaven, when you think about getting to be there, who are you most excited to see? Are you most excited to see a lost loved one? Or are you most excited to see the face of your Father God? Are you most excited to be reunited with someone you lost? Or are you most excited to finally get to see the face of Jesus and hear his voice? Now listen, I know that's a terribly unfair question. It's manipulative and mean. I get it. When I think about that, I think about my papa. I loved him as much as you can love anybody. He was my hero growing up. He died when I was 19. I really want him to meet Lily. I really want him to hear me preach. And I can't wait to hug him. And you have the people that you love too. And unfortunately, the older you get, the greater the population of people you want to see is in heaven. But I'm telling you, if what we long for most is to see the people we already know and not meet the God who created us, then we're not quite in a place yet where God has become our treasure. And so if we want to adopt this life with God posture and yearn for the proper things and see the gospel as a way to get to God and treasure what that is, I think the only way to do that is to know him more. I think the only way for our value of God to grow is to know him more, to learn him more, to pursue him more, to engage in the things that he wants us to engage in, to wake up daily. You've heard me say over and over again, the most important thing we can do in our lives is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. We've got to pursue him through his word and not just read it as a way to learn about God, but a way to learn who God is. The highest goal that we could have in our lives is to know God. Because the more we know him, the more we want to be with him, and the more accurately we see what the gospel is, and the more fervently we live our life for him, the more we want to be with him. I think that this is why Paul prays in Ephesians, the prayer that I've shared with you so many times. We've made this the prayer of grace. This was the prayer of Paul over his churches. I love this prayer so much that Jen's cousin, who's a calligrapher, I had her write it out. And we're in the process of getting it framed and putting it in our living room so that my family can see it every day. And this is what Paul prays for us in that prayer. I'm going to skip down to verse 17 of Ephesians chapter 3. He writes, he starts us off, for this reason I bow my knees before the Father. But then he says in 17, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul's chief desire for his churches was that they would know God. My chief desire for you is that you would know God. Not that life would go well, not that we would be protected, not that we would be prosperous, not that we would make money, not that we would get the job or have the relationship or dodge that pain or be able to dance through the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That's not Paul's prayer for us. Paul's prayer for us is that we would know God. And in knowing him, he becomes more lovely to us. And in becoming more lovely for us, our hearts and our souls yearn for the proper eternity. If heaven sounds boring to you, you just don't have a very good picture of who God is. Part of that's your pastor's fault. The first thing we do to adopt this posture is we understand that Jesus died to get us to God. Heaven just happens to be where he is. The second thing that we do, and I love this on a practical level for us, and I really want you guys to think about this. The second thing we can do to adopt this posture is we adopt this posture when prayer grows from communication to communion. We adopt this posture when our idea and practice of prayer grows from communication to communion. When we first start to think about prayer, when we first encounter it, when we're a child or when we get saved or when we become interested in it, whenever it might be, I think the very first thing we learn about prayer is that it's our opportunity to talk to God. When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he said, pray like this, and he talked to God. And so the first way we encounter prayer is to think of it as speaking to God. It's this communication from us to the Father. And then once you study prayer a little bit longer, once you read more scripture, once you're around church a little bit more and you get to know the Lord a little bit better, you understand that you can listen when you pray. That sometimes being prayerful is to be silent before God and to simply listen to him. So now he's communicating with you. But in scripture, there is this deeper prayer. In life, there is this deeper prayer that's simply communion with God. It's this prayer that helps us to pray without ceasing, as we are commanded to do. It's this communing prayer that allows us to be in the presence of God. It's this communing prayer that allows us to pray as we go through our days and through our weeks, even while we're in meetings and conversations with other people. This idea of communing prayer. It's captured in the book by a conversation between Dan Rather and Mother Teresa that I really loved. Dan Rather's talking to Mother Teresa and he says, you know, I hear that you're really renowned for your prayers. So when you pray, what do you say to God? Mother Teresa says, oh, I don't say anything. I just listen. So Dan Rather says, okay. Well then, while you're listening, what does God say to you? And she says, oh, he doesn't say anything. He's just listening. And if you don't understand that, I don't know how to explain it to you. That's a different way to think about prayer. Communing with God. And you know, I hesitated on what to say here and whether or not to share this. Because this is a little wispy. And some of you, I know, I will lose you. And you will think, Nate's a weird hippie. I don't know if I can go to this church anymore. But if we were just friends, I'm friends with most of you. If you and I had the chance to sit down over a drink and talk about prayer, and I'm just talking to my friend, and we got to talk about this, and we said, what, like, this communing prayer, like, what are you talking about? Like, how does that even work? I would tell you this, because this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. And I have books that lend themselves to this that are good traditional books. I'll be happy to email them to you if you want to know. I think there is something to meditative prayer. I think there's something to meditation. I think in our Western culture, we don't have time for that. We don't have interest in that. We don't have value for that. That's something for weird Eastern cultures. But I think we shortchange ourselves a lot when we just cast that aside. And I would even go as far to say this to my friend over drinks. I think that the other world religions and cultures that have figured out the value of meditation are groping and mimicking the meditation, the prayerful meditation that God intended us to have. I think the reason that they do it is because they're on to something and there is a peace that's found there and that God intended us to find that peace there because for a Christian, he's intended us to find him there. I think there's absolutely something to meditative contemplative prayer where we simply listen and we are simply with God. And if you think about it, how else are we going to crawl up in his lap and be still? I said my favorite times with Lily are the times when I get to hold her and we're quiet together. How else do we do that with our God who is in heaven than to simply be quiet in his presence? And you think to yourself, that's great. How do I do that? How do I just start contemplative prayer? I would say it works like anything else that we try for the first time. This last year and a half or so, I've gotten into cooking. I just like cooking. And now if you want to cook, you don't need a cookbook. You just need YouTube. And so like you just watch videos. And one of the things that I've wanted to learn to cook is the perfect steak. I've gone nuts with this. I talk with my friends about it all the time. It's probably a sin in my life by this point because I think about it so much. But I want to cook the perfect steak. And you can watch all the YouTube videos you want to watch. You can watch all the TikTok chefs you want to watch. But until you fire up the stove and put the pan on it and heat it up and hear the sizzle when the steak goes in and learn what it is when you do this and when you do this, what happens when you dry it and you don't dry it, what happens when it's not hot enough or when it's too hot? What happens when you don't put enough oil in or you need more butter or whatever it is? Until you start to do it, there's no way you can understand it. You can learn all you want about how to cook a steak, but nothing is going to teach you like experience. And when you start to do it, some things start to click and fire off. And I believe that this contemplative prayer works the same way. We can learn all about it. We can read the books. We can think about how we might want to try to do it. But all I can tell you to do is start trying. Spend some time with God. Read His Word. Spend some time in the Bible. Pursue him. Desire him. Let him paint a picture of himself in your life. And then set the Bible down and sit quietly with him for as long as you can stand. Don't worry about how long it takes. Just do it. Just sit down and do it, and then when you can't do it anymore, stop doing it. Who cares how long you did it? And sit in the presence of God. And if you're really thinking along with me, if you're really engaged, you may be thinking to yourself, Nate, did you really just take the church through a book and five weeks worth of sermons so that you could arrive at the conclusion that if we really want to live the life that God wants for us and experience the relationship with God that he intended us to have, that what we need to do is read the Bible and pray more? Yeah, I did. Because it's that simple. Because that's what God wants from us. He wants us to be with him. I hope you will. I hope you will intentionally pursue the presence of the Father this week. And I hope that he begins to open doors of understanding for you that you didn't have previously. And I hope that he will slowly but surely, as we develop a larger picture of him, as we pursue him, I hope that he will become our treasure. And that we will begin to view the gospel as a way to get to God and to Jesus. And not just a way to heaven. Let's pray and then we get to do communion together. Father, we love you. We are grateful for you. And to you. Lord, would you open our hearts and our eyes and our minds to what a relationship with you can look like? Would you help us mine scripture for who you are and listen to books and read podcasts and have conversations? Give us time, God, to get out in your creation and simply soak you in in silence. Help us enjoy the rain this afternoon as it pours. May we find a time to go outside in the quiet and just listen to your sovereignty pour down on us and enjoy your presence there. Help us to pursue you through prayer, to see it as communion with you and not reduce it to communication. God, may we as a church live our lives with you and acknowledge that's all you've ever really wanted. Let us experience your presence even today, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

This morning, we are in the last part of our series called With. We've been walking through a book by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani, talking about our postures before God, which ones are appropriate, which ones are helpful, and which ones are not. And so we've spent four weeks looking at postures that ultimately are not helpful for us, postures that ultimately lead to a spiritually empty life and are ultimately damaging. And so we've kind of just left every week where we talk about a posture, we help each other see that in ourselves, and we go, yeah, that's not good. And then we pray and we go home, and it's been kind of a downer. So this week is the resolution to all of those postures. You'll remember that the first one we talked about was life under God. And we said in this posture, the mindset is, God, I'm going to obey you and submit to your authority in exchange for your protection in my life. I'm going to obey you and then things are going to go well for me. You're going to keep me from heartache and trial. And we saw that that never happens. Life is going to involve tragedy. It's going to involve hurt. It's going to involve loss. And that what we're trying to do when we say, God, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, is we're really trying to control the universe via God. It's our subtle way of regaining control over the things that we fear, and that's ultimately empty. We talked about the life over God posture. The life over God posture says, God, I'm not really interested in your authority in my life. I'm going to live my life over you, but I am going to extract from you and your word some best practices to apply to my life so that things can go better for me. Life from God says, God, I'm going to follow you and you're going to bless me. I'm going to do the things that you want me to do. I'm going to live my life for you, and then you're going to give me all the things that I want. And then the life for God posture says, God, I'm going to live my life for you, and you're going to love me for it. I'm going to live my life making an impact for your kingdom, and because of that, I'm going to be more valuable to you than my peers. I'm going to earn your affection. And we saw that each of these were empty. And ultimately, they're empty because we're following God for his treasures. We're following God because there's a motivation that isn't God, it's these other things, and they fall short. And that's where the life with God posture becomes important. That's the right posture to have before the Father. And in life with God, we no longer use God for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. You see? We no longer use God to acquire the things. We no longer use God to acquire the blessings. We no longer go to him because of what we want from him. We go to him because we want him. We no longer use him for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. This is the right posture before the Lord, to simply be with him because he wants to be with us. The best way I've ever heard this explained, I actually have this explained to me by someone else before I had a child. I have a four-year-old daughter named Lily. But before Lily was ever an idea in 2013, somebody explained this posture to me in this way, and I thought it was perfect. So Eve, if you have kids, this will really resonate with you. Even if you don't yet have kids, I think you'll see the power in this. Lily is my favorite thing on the planet. I love doing everything with her. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking about your friend Lily. They picked up on it back there. I love doing everything with her. We've actually, on our front porch, we've turned around our porch swing so it faces the cul-de-sac where she runs around with her friends every day. And I love sitting out there and watching her play. I love watching her play soccer, kind of. I'm the coach, so I also hate it. But I love watching her play. I love when she brings me things and she says, look what I drew or look what I did. I love when she tells me about school. I love when she decides that she wants to talk to me and let me into her little world. I love Lily. But do you know my favorite thing to do with Lily is? Hugs and snugs, man. That's all I want. Hugs and snugs. I want her to climb up in my lap. I want her to let me hold on to her. And I want us to be quiet together. That's all I want. And I don't want us to be quiet together because I'm tired of hearing her talk or make noise. I want us to be quiet together because I just want us to rest together. Burt Banks, one of our great elders, he jokingly told me that he loves his grandchildren until they're too old to sit in his lap. Once they're too old to sit in his lap, he says, I have no use for them anymore. Because those of you who are parents, those of you who have had those little kids, when they're sitting in your lap, or those of you who are grandparents, when you get to hold them and simply be with them and just enjoy their presence, there's nothing better than that. There's nothing better than that. I love watching her play. I love watching her dance. I love it most when she climbs up in my lap. And sometimes I'll tell her, she'll ask me for something. I'll say, you can have that if you come give daddy hugs. And she'll say, how many hugs? And I'll say, a hundred. And she'll go, that's too many. How about 10? I'm like, all right, 10. So she crawls up on my lap, and she wraps her arms around me, and she says, you count. And she starts just pulsing out these hugs. And I always lose count, and I get more than she bargained for. And that's great. And I love those. But my favorite is when she wants to do it. My favorite is when she comes and she gives me hugs. No other reason just to do it. She just wants to be with me. That's the best. Why would we think that our Heavenly Father would want anything any different? He simply wants to be with you. He wants to enjoy your presence. He created you to be with Him. Do you understand it was out of the context of relationship that you were created? Do you understand that God looked around at the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and said, we need to share this relationship with something. And so He created you so that you could share in a relationship with him. Do you understand that all he's ever wanted with you is not your performance, it's not even your devotion, it's just to be with him and all those other things come. And we see this desire of the Father. This is amazing. I love this part of the sermon, I really do, because I just think it helps Scripture make so much sense. Do you understand that this desire of the Father to simply be with us is seen throughout the narrative arc of the Bible? It's all through Scripture that all God wants with His children that He created is to be with you. If you look in Genesis 3, verse 8, it tells on God a little bit. Now, admittedly, I'm taking this verse totally out of context, and I'm using it to make a point that it was not intended to make, but now they become ultra-aware of everything around them. And they hear God, and they go and they hide, and God's about to come and confront them about their sin. That's what's happening in that verse. But here's what this verse tells on God that I want us to see. Understand that in Genesis 3, right before the fall, right before the fall of man and just as the first sin is committed, that it is perfect. You understand this? Creation is perfect. It is exactly as God intended. Every leaf is laying exactly where God wants it to lay. Every breeze is the exact temperature and pace that God wants it to be. Every day is exactly as cool in the morning and in the evening and at the midday as God wants it to be. Every piece of fruit hanging from the tree tastes exactly as God wants it to taste. Every interaction with every animal that Adam and Eve have goes exactly as God wants it to go. Adam and Eve, their days are mapped out exactly as God wants them to be. And in these days, apparently they were very used to hearing the sound of the Lord walking with them in the garden in the cool of the evening. It does not say they heard what sounded like God walking in the garden. Because they knew that sound. This is what God wanted to do. At perfection of creation, all God wanted to do is come down and hang out with Adam and Eve. You understand that? He created all of this so that in the evenings he could come down from heaven and be like, what did you guys do today? Want to hang out? And it says they hid themselves from the presence of God. They were used to him coming down and spending time with them. They knew what his presence felt like. They knew what it sounded like when he walked through the garden because this is what God wanted, but then sin messed it up. And when sin messed it up, God had to withdraw himself to heaven and say, I can no longer be with you because of your imperfection. The relationship that we had has been broken and so God is no longer with us. And what does God do to fix this? Isaiah tells us. He's going to send his son. And his name will be called Emmanuel. My Bible people know what Emmanuel means, don't you? God with us. And then he sends his son in the New Testament. So first God wanted to be with us. then sin messed it up so he could no longer be with us. You know what he did to fix our error? He came down to be with us. Look at what John writes in the first chapter. He starts off his amazing gospel and he says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made. And he's telling us that Jesus is the word of God. And then you skip on down to verse 13, and he writes this, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was with us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. God made all of creation so that he could simply be with us. Then our sin messed it up, and how did he fix it? He sent his son to be with us, to be Emmanuel God with us. The word became flesh. And it's worth pointing out here, do you understand that this is what differentiates Christianity from all other world religions? That we possess the only faith that claims that our God loves us so much that he came down to join us. Our God loves us so much that he gave up his heavenly body, his heavenly realm to condescend to be with us and get down in the muck and the mire and see the worst of us and then die for us to be with us before he went back to heaven to make a path for us to be with him for all of eternity. Do you understand that? We're the only faith that claims that. We're the only faith that claims a God who came down, who loved us enough to be with us because it's all God ever wanted. And then at the end of scripture, in Revelation chapter 21, when all is said and done, Jesus has come down. He started his, he dies for us. He starts the church. He leaves it to the disciples. We carry on that legacy until Jesus's return, which is what we're doing right now is we tell people the great news of the gospel. And then one day in Revelation, God is going to enact the end of times and a series of events are going to occur. And at the end of these series of events, Revelation 21. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people. And God himself will be with them as their God. The climax of all of history, to usher in eternity, the very first stroke in the most perfect picture that God could paint for us is that he is with us again, and we are with him. That's all he wants over the whole arc of scripture. He created us to be with us. We screwed it up. So he sent his son to be with us again and make a way for us to be with him for all of eternity. That's all he wants. He just wants to be with us. Everything else flows from that. His perfect picture of eternity begins with his presence with us and our presence with him. And I think that's amazing. And what we see, and I don't have time to fully unpack this this morning. This is when it's really helpful to read the book for yourself and think through it on your own. But what we see when we adopt this posture is that we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. We live life as God intended. When this is our posture, when all we want, when we match God, when God has said, you are my treasure, when we look back at God and we say, yes, and you are my treasure, and all I want is to be with you just as you want to be with me, then when we adopt this posture, we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. And I choose those words very intentionally because they're the antithesis of all the other postures. And life under God, that's a posture of fear. God, all these things are out of my control. I'm really scared. Will you control the universe for me and I'll control how much I submit to you? And when we live life with God, what we see is that eternity is God's presence in heaven and eternity has already begun for his believers that we started this new life in this new body that we know God, we are reconciled with him. And in that way, heaven has been brought down to us, brought down to us by God so that we can begin to experience pieces of it now as we enjoy his presence. And we have to no longer fear death because Jesus conquered it for us. That's why the scriptures say that death has lost its sting. We have to no longer, the greatest fear any of us have in life, God has removed that from us when we live life with him. And the life over God policy, the thing that we, or posture, the thing that we fear the most is that God will be in control of us, that we won't be able to do what we want to do. I don't want your authority in my life because there's joys over here that I want to experience that I don't feel like I can if I'm submitted to you. And what we find when we live life with God is that he came to give us life to the full, that as David said, at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There is no greater life than to be walking in lockstep with the Father, than to walk with him in the cool of the evening. And in that place, we find total and complete freedom to be exactly who he created us to be. We are everything that God ever intended when we walk with him. So we no longer need that posture. We are blessed. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, you heard Doug's, I thought, brilliant illustration of the kid who asked for a horse and his parents brought them back a car instead. He asked for a horse. They were supposed to get a horse when he became of age, but by the time he became of age, cars had been invented. So his parents gave him a car because it fit the bill of what he was asking for and was so much beyond what he could ever imagine. And he painted this great picture of in our life we ask for so many horses. We want so many simple things, and God sees beyond those so much and blesses us beyond what we could ever ask or imagine, as it says in Ephesians. And when we walk this life with God, we are blessed in ways that we could have never had the audacity to ask for. And we are affirmed. In the life for God posture, we perform so that God will love us, so that our peers will respect us, because everyone needs to be valued. Everybody needs to be told that they're loved, that I see you, and I love you, and that you're enough. And in life with God, when we're with God, when we're just with our Father and we're just basking in his presence, there is that constant voice of affirmation in our life that you are loved and I love you and you are enough. The life with God posture is the antithesis of all the others. And it's the way that we live life finally and fully as God intended. And so to me, the question becomes, okay, that's what God wants. I see it over the whole narrative arc of Scripture. I see it as the antithesis of all the others. It's the answer to them. How do I adopt this posture in my life? How do I do that? How do I practically live life with God? Again, I think it's worth diving into the book where he has four chapters to unpack what I'm going to try to distill down into eight minutes for you. But the first thing that I would say is this. We adopt this posture when we understand that the gospel is not a way to get people to heaven, it's a way to get people to God. I'll say it again. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven. It is a way to get people to God. That's not my thought. That's John Piper's thought. He's smarter than me. I stole it. I think so often we think about being saved. We think that Jesus died to get us to heaven. And when we think about heaven, we think about getting to see our lost loved ones, the people that we're going to be reunited with. We think about the sweet mansion on the streets of gold and how awesome it's going to be in this perfect utopia for all of eternity. And that's great. That's what heaven is. But Jesus didn't die to get us to heaven. He died to get us to God. To reconcile our relationship with him. Because in heaven, the first strokes God paints in the picture are that he will be with us. We will see the face of our God. We will see the love in his eyes. We will see our Savior Jesus and hear his voice for the first time. We will see the presence of the Spirit that's been guiding us as we've stumbled and tripped and fall through life. That is what Jesus died for. To get us to God. Heaven is secondary. That just happens to be where God is. He died to reunite us with him and with the Father and with the Spirit. And a good litmus test for whether or not we think about it like this is when you think about heaven, when you think about getting to be there, who are you most excited to see? Are you most excited to see a lost loved one? Or are you most excited to see the face of your Father God? Are you most excited to be reunited with someone you lost? Or are you most excited to finally get to see the face of Jesus and hear his voice? Now listen, I know that's a terribly unfair question. It's manipulative and mean. I get it. When I think about that, I think about my papa. I loved him as much as you can love anybody. He was my hero growing up. He died when I was 19. I really want him to meet Lily. I really want him to hear me preach. And I can't wait to hug him. And you have the people that you love too. And unfortunately, the older you get, the greater the population of people you want to see is in heaven. But I'm telling you, if what we long for most is to see the people we already know and not meet the God who created us, then we're not quite in a place yet where God has become our treasure. And so if we want to adopt this life with God posture and yearn for the proper things and see the gospel as a way to get to God and treasure what that is, I think the only way to do that is to know him more. I think the only way for our value of God to grow is to know him more, to learn him more, to pursue him more, to engage in the things that he wants us to engage in, to wake up daily. You've heard me say over and over again, the most important thing we can do in our lives is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. We've got to pursue him through his word and not just read it as a way to learn about God, but a way to learn who God is. The highest goal that we could have in our lives is to know God. Because the more we know him, the more we want to be with him, and the more accurately we see what the gospel is, and the more fervently we live our life for him, the more we want to be with him. I think that this is why Paul prays in Ephesians, the prayer that I've shared with you so many times. We've made this the prayer of grace. This was the prayer of Paul over his churches. I love this prayer so much that Jen's cousin, who's a calligrapher, I had her write it out. And we're in the process of getting it framed and putting it in our living room so that my family can see it every day. And this is what Paul prays for us in that prayer. I'm going to skip down to verse 17 of Ephesians chapter 3. He writes, he starts us off, for this reason I bow my knees before the Father. But then he says in 17, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul's chief desire for his churches was that they would know God. My chief desire for you is that you would know God. Not that life would go well, not that we would be protected, not that we would be prosperous, not that we would make money, not that we would get the job or have the relationship or dodge that pain or be able to dance through the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That's not Paul's prayer for us. Paul's prayer for us is that we would know God. And in knowing him, he becomes more lovely to us. And in becoming more lovely for us, our hearts and our souls yearn for the proper eternity. If heaven sounds boring to you, you just don't have a very good picture of who God is. Part of that's your pastor's fault. The first thing we do to adopt this posture is we understand that Jesus died to get us to God. Heaven just happens to be where he is. The second thing that we do, and I love this on a practical level for us, and I really want you guys to think about this. The second thing we can do to adopt this posture is we adopt this posture when prayer grows from communication to communion. We adopt this posture when our idea and practice of prayer grows from communication to communion. When we first start to think about prayer, when we first encounter it, when we're a child or when we get saved or when we become interested in it, whenever it might be, I think the very first thing we learn about prayer is that it's our opportunity to talk to God. When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he said, pray like this, and he talked to God. And so the first way we encounter prayer is to think of it as speaking to God. It's this communication from us to the Father. And then once you study prayer a little bit longer, once you read more scripture, once you're around church a little bit more and you get to know the Lord a little bit better, you understand that you can listen when you pray. That sometimes being prayerful is to be silent before God and to simply listen to him. So now he's communicating with you. But in scripture, there is this deeper prayer. In life, there is this deeper prayer that's simply communion with God. It's this prayer that helps us to pray without ceasing, as we are commanded to do. It's this communing prayer that allows us to be in the presence of God. It's this communing prayer that allows us to pray as we go through our days and through our weeks, even while we're in meetings and conversations with other people. This idea of communing prayer. It's captured in the book by a conversation between Dan Rather and Mother Teresa that I really loved. Dan Rather's talking to Mother Teresa and he says, you know, I hear that you're really renowned for your prayers. So when you pray, what do you say to God? Mother Teresa says, oh, I don't say anything. I just listen. So Dan Rather says, okay. Well then, while you're listening, what does God say to you? And she says, oh, he doesn't say anything. He's just listening. And if you don't understand that, I don't know how to explain it to you. That's a different way to think about prayer. Communing with God. And you know, I hesitated on what to say here and whether or not to share this. Because this is a little wispy. And some of you, I know, I will lose you. And you will think, Nate's a weird hippie. I don't know if I can go to this church anymore. But if we were just friends, I'm friends with most of you. If you and I had the chance to sit down over a drink and talk about prayer, and I'm just talking to my friend, and we got to talk about this, and we said, what, like, this communing prayer, like, what are you talking about? Like, how does that even work? I would tell you this, because this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. And I have books that lend themselves to this that are good traditional books. I'll be happy to email them to you if you want to know. I think there is something to meditative prayer. I think there's something to meditation. I think in our Western culture, we don't have time for that. We don't have interest in that. We don't have value for that. That's something for weird Eastern cultures. But I think we shortchange ourselves a lot when we just cast that aside. And I would even go as far to say this to my friend over drinks. I think that the other world religions and cultures that have figured out the value of meditation are groping and mimicking the meditation, the prayerful meditation that God intended us to have. I think the reason that they do it is because they're on to something and there is a peace that's found there and that God intended us to find that peace there because for a Christian, he's intended us to find him there. I think there's absolutely something to meditative contemplative prayer where we simply listen and we are simply with God. And if you think about it, how else are we going to crawl up in his lap and be still? I said my favorite times with Lily are the times when I get to hold her and we're quiet together. How else do we do that with our God who is in heaven than to simply be quiet in his presence? And you think to yourself, that's great. How do I do that? How do I just start contemplative prayer? I would say it works like anything else that we try for the first time. This last year and a half or so, I've gotten into cooking. I just like cooking. And now if you want to cook, you don't need a cookbook. You just need YouTube. And so like you just watch videos. And one of the things that I've wanted to learn to cook is the perfect steak. I've gone nuts with this. I talk with my friends about it all the time. It's probably a sin in my life by this point because I think about it so much. But I want to cook the perfect steak. And you can watch all the YouTube videos you want to watch. You can watch all the TikTok chefs you want to watch. But until you fire up the stove and put the pan on it and heat it up and hear the sizzle when the steak goes in and learn what it is when you do this and when you do this, what happens when you dry it and you don't dry it, what happens when it's not hot enough or when it's too hot? What happens when you don't put enough oil in or you need more butter or whatever it is? Until you start to do it, there's no way you can understand it. You can learn all you want about how to cook a steak, but nothing is going to teach you like experience. And when you start to do it, some things start to click and fire off. And I believe that this contemplative prayer works the same way. We can learn all about it. We can read the books. We can think about how we might want to try to do it. But all I can tell you to do is start trying. Spend some time with God. Read His Word. Spend some time in the Bible. Pursue him. Desire him. Let him paint a picture of himself in your life. And then set the Bible down and sit quietly with him for as long as you can stand. Don't worry about how long it takes. Just do it. Just sit down and do it, and then when you can't do it anymore, stop doing it. Who cares how long you did it? And sit in the presence of God. And if you're really thinking along with me, if you're really engaged, you may be thinking to yourself, Nate, did you really just take the church through a book and five weeks worth of sermons so that you could arrive at the conclusion that if we really want to live the life that God wants for us and experience the relationship with God that he intended us to have, that what we need to do is read the Bible and pray more? Yeah, I did. Because it's that simple. Because that's what God wants from us. He wants us to be with him. I hope you will. I hope you will intentionally pursue the presence of the Father this week. And I hope that he begins to open doors of understanding for you that you didn't have previously. And I hope that he will slowly but surely, as we develop a larger picture of him, as we pursue him, I hope that he will become our treasure. And that we will begin to view the gospel as a way to get to God and to Jesus. And not just a way to heaven. Let's pray and then we get to do communion together. Father, we love you. We are grateful for you. And to you. Lord, would you open our hearts and our eyes and our minds to what a relationship with you can look like? Would you help us mine scripture for who you are and listen to books and read podcasts and have conversations? Give us time, God, to get out in your creation and simply soak you in in silence. Help us enjoy the rain this afternoon as it pours. May we find a time to go outside in the quiet and just listen to your sovereignty pour down on us and enjoy your presence there. Help us to pursue you through prayer, to see it as communion with you and not reduce it to communication. God, may we as a church live our lives with you and acknowledge that's all you've ever really wanted. Let us experience your presence even today, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

This morning, we are in the last part of our series called With. We've been walking through a book by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani, talking about our postures before God, which ones are appropriate, which ones are helpful, and which ones are not. And so we've spent four weeks looking at postures that ultimately are not helpful for us, postures that ultimately lead to a spiritually empty life and are ultimately damaging. And so we've kind of just left every week where we talk about a posture, we help each other see that in ourselves, and we go, yeah, that's not good. And then we pray and we go home, and it's been kind of a downer. So this week is the resolution to all of those postures. You'll remember that the first one we talked about was life under God. And we said in this posture, the mindset is, God, I'm going to obey you and submit to your authority in exchange for your protection in my life. I'm going to obey you and then things are going to go well for me. You're going to keep me from heartache and trial. And we saw that that never happens. Life is going to involve tragedy. It's going to involve hurt. It's going to involve loss. And that what we're trying to do when we say, God, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, is we're really trying to control the universe via God. It's our subtle way of regaining control over the things that we fear, and that's ultimately empty. We talked about the life over God posture. The life over God posture says, God, I'm not really interested in your authority in my life. I'm going to live my life over you, but I am going to extract from you and your word some best practices to apply to my life so that things can go better for me. Life from God says, God, I'm going to follow you and you're going to bless me. I'm going to do the things that you want me to do. I'm going to live my life for you, and then you're going to give me all the things that I want. And then the life for God posture says, God, I'm going to live my life for you, and you're going to love me for it. I'm going to live my life making an impact for your kingdom, and because of that, I'm going to be more valuable to you than my peers. I'm going to earn your affection. And we saw that each of these were empty. And ultimately, they're empty because we're following God for his treasures. We're following God because there's a motivation that isn't God, it's these other things, and they fall short. And that's where the life with God posture becomes important. That's the right posture to have before the Father. And in life with God, we no longer use God for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. You see? We no longer use God to acquire the things. We no longer use God to acquire the blessings. We no longer go to him because of what we want from him. We go to him because we want him. We no longer use him for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. This is the right posture before the Lord, to simply be with him because he wants to be with us. The best way I've ever heard this explained, I actually have this explained to me by someone else before I had a child. I have a four-year-old daughter named Lily. But before Lily was ever an idea in 2013, somebody explained this posture to me in this way, and I thought it was perfect. So Eve, if you have kids, this will really resonate with you. Even if you don't yet have kids, I think you'll see the power in this. Lily is my favorite thing on the planet. I love doing everything with her. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking about your friend Lily. They picked up on it back there. I love doing everything with her. We've actually, on our front porch, we've turned around our porch swing so it faces the cul-de-sac where she runs around with her friends every day. And I love sitting out there and watching her play. I love watching her play soccer, kind of. I'm the coach, so I also hate it. But I love watching her play. I love when she brings me things and she says, look what I drew or look what I did. I love when she tells me about school. I love when she decides that she wants to talk to me and let me into her little world. I love Lily. But do you know my favorite thing to do with Lily is? Hugs and snugs, man. That's all I want. Hugs and snugs. I want her to climb up in my lap. I want her to let me hold on to her. And I want us to be quiet together. That's all I want. And I don't want us to be quiet together because I'm tired of hearing her talk or make noise. I want us to be quiet together because I just want us to rest together. Burt Banks, one of our great elders, he jokingly told me that he loves his grandchildren until they're too old to sit in his lap. Once they're too old to sit in his lap, he says, I have no use for them anymore. Because those of you who are parents, those of you who have had those little kids, when they're sitting in your lap, or those of you who are grandparents, when you get to hold them and simply be with them and just enjoy their presence, there's nothing better than that. There's nothing better than that. I love watching her play. I love watching her dance. I love it most when she climbs up in my lap. And sometimes I'll tell her, she'll ask me for something. I'll say, you can have that if you come give daddy hugs. And she'll say, how many hugs? And I'll say, a hundred. And she'll go, that's too many. How about 10? I'm like, all right, 10. So she crawls up on my lap, and she wraps her arms around me, and she says, you count. And she starts just pulsing out these hugs. And I always lose count, and I get more than she bargained for. And that's great. And I love those. But my favorite is when she wants to do it. My favorite is when she comes and she gives me hugs. No other reason just to do it. She just wants to be with me. That's the best. Why would we think that our Heavenly Father would want anything any different? He simply wants to be with you. He wants to enjoy your presence. He created you to be with Him. Do you understand it was out of the context of relationship that you were created? Do you understand that God looked around at the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and said, we need to share this relationship with something. And so He created you so that you could share in a relationship with him. Do you understand that all he's ever wanted with you is not your performance, it's not even your devotion, it's just to be with him and all those other things come. And we see this desire of the Father. This is amazing. I love this part of the sermon, I really do, because I just think it helps Scripture make so much sense. Do you understand that this desire of the Father to simply be with us is seen throughout the narrative arc of the Bible? It's all through Scripture that all God wants with His children that He created is to be with you. If you look in Genesis 3, verse 8, it tells on God a little bit. Now, admittedly, I'm taking this verse totally out of context, and I'm using it to make a point that it was not intended to make, but now they become ultra-aware of everything around them. And they hear God, and they go and they hide, and God's about to come and confront them about their sin. That's what's happening in that verse. But here's what this verse tells on God that I want us to see. Understand that in Genesis 3, right before the fall, right before the fall of man and just as the first sin is committed, that it is perfect. You understand this? Creation is perfect. It is exactly as God intended. Every leaf is laying exactly where God wants it to lay. Every breeze is the exact temperature and pace that God wants it to be. Every day is exactly as cool in the morning and in the evening and at the midday as God wants it to be. Every piece of fruit hanging from the tree tastes exactly as God wants it to taste. Every interaction with every animal that Adam and Eve have goes exactly as God wants it to go. Adam and Eve, their days are mapped out exactly as God wants them to be. And in these days, apparently they were very used to hearing the sound of the Lord walking with them in the garden in the cool of the evening. It does not say they heard what sounded like God walking in the garden. Because they knew that sound. This is what God wanted to do. At perfection of creation, all God wanted to do is come down and hang out with Adam and Eve. You understand that? He created all of this so that in the evenings he could come down from heaven and be like, what did you guys do today? Want to hang out? And it says they hid themselves from the presence of God. They were used to him coming down and spending time with them. They knew what his presence felt like. They knew what it sounded like when he walked through the garden because this is what God wanted, but then sin messed it up. And when sin messed it up, God had to withdraw himself to heaven and say, I can no longer be with you because of your imperfection. The relationship that we had has been broken and so God is no longer with us. And what does God do to fix this? Isaiah tells us. He's going to send his son. And his name will be called Emmanuel. My Bible people know what Emmanuel means, don't you? God with us. And then he sends his son in the New Testament. So first God wanted to be with us. then sin messed it up so he could no longer be with us. You know what he did to fix our error? He came down to be with us. Look at what John writes in the first chapter. He starts off his amazing gospel and he says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made. And he's telling us that Jesus is the word of God. And then you skip on down to verse 13, and he writes this, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was with us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. God made all of creation so that he could simply be with us. Then our sin messed it up, and how did he fix it? He sent his son to be with us, to be Emmanuel God with us. The word became flesh. And it's worth pointing out here, do you understand that this is what differentiates Christianity from all other world religions? That we possess the only faith that claims that our God loves us so much that he came down to join us. Our God loves us so much that he gave up his heavenly body, his heavenly realm to condescend to be with us and get down in the muck and the mire and see the worst of us and then die for us to be with us before he went back to heaven to make a path for us to be with him for all of eternity. Do you understand that? We're the only faith that claims that. We're the only faith that claims a God who came down, who loved us enough to be with us because it's all God ever wanted. And then at the end of scripture, in Revelation chapter 21, when all is said and done, Jesus has come down. He started his, he dies for us. He starts the church. He leaves it to the disciples. We carry on that legacy until Jesus's return, which is what we're doing right now is we tell people the great news of the gospel. And then one day in Revelation, God is going to enact the end of times and a series of events are going to occur. And at the end of these series of events, Revelation 21. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people. And God himself will be with them as their God. The climax of all of history, to usher in eternity, the very first stroke in the most perfect picture that God could paint for us is that he is with us again, and we are with him. That's all he wants over the whole arc of scripture. He created us to be with us. We screwed it up. So he sent his son to be with us again and make a way for us to be with him for all of eternity. That's all he wants. He just wants to be with us. Everything else flows from that. His perfect picture of eternity begins with his presence with us and our presence with him. And I think that's amazing. And what we see, and I don't have time to fully unpack this this morning. This is when it's really helpful to read the book for yourself and think through it on your own. But what we see when we adopt this posture is that we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. We live life as God intended. When this is our posture, when all we want, when we match God, when God has said, you are my treasure, when we look back at God and we say, yes, and you are my treasure, and all I want is to be with you just as you want to be with me, then when we adopt this posture, we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. And I choose those words very intentionally because they're the antithesis of all the other postures. And life under God, that's a posture of fear. God, all these things are out of my control. I'm really scared. Will you control the universe for me and I'll control how much I submit to you? And when we live life with God, what we see is that eternity is God's presence in heaven and eternity has already begun for his believers that we started this new life in this new body that we know God, we are reconciled with him. And in that way, heaven has been brought down to us, brought down to us by God so that we can begin to experience pieces of it now as we enjoy his presence. And we have to no longer fear death because Jesus conquered it for us. That's why the scriptures say that death has lost its sting. We have to no longer, the greatest fear any of us have in life, God has removed that from us when we live life with him. And the life over God policy, the thing that we, or posture, the thing that we fear the most is that God will be in control of us, that we won't be able to do what we want to do. I don't want your authority in my life because there's joys over here that I want to experience that I don't feel like I can if I'm submitted to you. And what we find when we live life with God is that he came to give us life to the full, that as David said, at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There is no greater life than to be walking in lockstep with the Father, than to walk with him in the cool of the evening. And in that place, we find total and complete freedom to be exactly who he created us to be. We are everything that God ever intended when we walk with him. So we no longer need that posture. We are blessed. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, you heard Doug's, I thought, brilliant illustration of the kid who asked for a horse and his parents brought them back a car instead. He asked for a horse. They were supposed to get a horse when he became of age, but by the time he became of age, cars had been invented. So his parents gave him a car because it fit the bill of what he was asking for and was so much beyond what he could ever imagine. And he painted this great picture of in our life we ask for so many horses. We want so many simple things, and God sees beyond those so much and blesses us beyond what we could ever ask or imagine, as it says in Ephesians. And when we walk this life with God, we are blessed in ways that we could have never had the audacity to ask for. And we are affirmed. In the life for God posture, we perform so that God will love us, so that our peers will respect us, because everyone needs to be valued. Everybody needs to be told that they're loved, that I see you, and I love you, and that you're enough. And in life with God, when we're with God, when we're just with our Father and we're just basking in his presence, there is that constant voice of affirmation in our life that you are loved and I love you and you are enough. The life with God posture is the antithesis of all the others. And it's the way that we live life finally and fully as God intended. And so to me, the question becomes, okay, that's what God wants. I see it over the whole narrative arc of Scripture. I see it as the antithesis of all the others. It's the answer to them. How do I adopt this posture in my life? How do I do that? How do I practically live life with God? Again, I think it's worth diving into the book where he has four chapters to unpack what I'm going to try to distill down into eight minutes for you. But the first thing that I would say is this. We adopt this posture when we understand that the gospel is not a way to get people to heaven, it's a way to get people to God. I'll say it again. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven. It is a way to get people to God. That's not my thought. That's John Piper's thought. He's smarter than me. I stole it. I think so often we think about being saved. We think that Jesus died to get us to heaven. And when we think about heaven, we think about getting to see our lost loved ones, the people that we're going to be reunited with. We think about the sweet mansion on the streets of gold and how awesome it's going to be in this perfect utopia for all of eternity. And that's great. That's what heaven is. But Jesus didn't die to get us to heaven. He died to get us to God. To reconcile our relationship with him. Because in heaven, the first strokes God paints in the picture are that he will be with us. We will see the face of our God. We will see the love in his eyes. We will see our Savior Jesus and hear his voice for the first time. We will see the presence of the Spirit that's been guiding us as we've stumbled and tripped and fall through life. That is what Jesus died for. To get us to God. Heaven is secondary. That just happens to be where God is. He died to reunite us with him and with the Father and with the Spirit. And a good litmus test for whether or not we think about it like this is when you think about heaven, when you think about getting to be there, who are you most excited to see? Are you most excited to see a lost loved one? Or are you most excited to see the face of your Father God? Are you most excited to be reunited with someone you lost? Or are you most excited to finally get to see the face of Jesus and hear his voice? Now listen, I know that's a terribly unfair question. It's manipulative and mean. I get it. When I think about that, I think about my papa. I loved him as much as you can love anybody. He was my hero growing up. He died when I was 19. I really want him to meet Lily. I really want him to hear me preach. And I can't wait to hug him. And you have the people that you love too. And unfortunately, the older you get, the greater the population of people you want to see is in heaven. But I'm telling you, if what we long for most is to see the people we already know and not meet the God who created us, then we're not quite in a place yet where God has become our treasure. And so if we want to adopt this life with God posture and yearn for the proper things and see the gospel as a way to get to God and treasure what that is, I think the only way to do that is to know him more. I think the only way for our value of God to grow is to know him more, to learn him more, to pursue him more, to engage in the things that he wants us to engage in, to wake up daily. You've heard me say over and over again, the most important thing we can do in our lives is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. We've got to pursue him through his word and not just read it as a way to learn about God, but a way to learn who God is. The highest goal that we could have in our lives is to know God. Because the more we know him, the more we want to be with him, and the more accurately we see what the gospel is, and the more fervently we live our life for him, the more we want to be with him. I think that this is why Paul prays in Ephesians, the prayer that I've shared with you so many times. We've made this the prayer of grace. This was the prayer of Paul over his churches. I love this prayer so much that Jen's cousin, who's a calligrapher, I had her write it out. And we're in the process of getting it framed and putting it in our living room so that my family can see it every day. And this is what Paul prays for us in that prayer. I'm going to skip down to verse 17 of Ephesians chapter 3. He writes, he starts us off, for this reason I bow my knees before the Father. But then he says in 17, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul's chief desire for his churches was that they would know God. My chief desire for you is that you would know God. Not that life would go well, not that we would be protected, not that we would be prosperous, not that we would make money, not that we would get the job or have the relationship or dodge that pain or be able to dance through the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That's not Paul's prayer for us. Paul's prayer for us is that we would know God. And in knowing him, he becomes more lovely to us. And in becoming more lovely for us, our hearts and our souls yearn for the proper eternity. If heaven sounds boring to you, you just don't have a very good picture of who God is. Part of that's your pastor's fault. The first thing we do to adopt this posture is we understand that Jesus died to get us to God. Heaven just happens to be where he is. The second thing that we do, and I love this on a practical level for us, and I really want you guys to think about this. The second thing we can do to adopt this posture is we adopt this posture when prayer grows from communication to communion. We adopt this posture when our idea and practice of prayer grows from communication to communion. When we first start to think about prayer, when we first encounter it, when we're a child or when we get saved or when we become interested in it, whenever it might be, I think the very first thing we learn about prayer is that it's our opportunity to talk to God. When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he said, pray like this, and he talked to God. And so the first way we encounter prayer is to think of it as speaking to God. It's this communication from us to the Father. And then once you study prayer a little bit longer, once you read more scripture, once you're around church a little bit more and you get to know the Lord a little bit better, you understand that you can listen when you pray. That sometimes being prayerful is to be silent before God and to simply listen to him. So now he's communicating with you. But in scripture, there is this deeper prayer. In life, there is this deeper prayer that's simply communion with God. It's this prayer that helps us to pray without ceasing, as we are commanded to do. It's this communing prayer that allows us to be in the presence of God. It's this communing prayer that allows us to pray as we go through our days and through our weeks, even while we're in meetings and conversations with other people. This idea of communing prayer. It's captured in the book by a conversation between Dan Rather and Mother Teresa that I really loved. Dan Rather's talking to Mother Teresa and he says, you know, I hear that you're really renowned for your prayers. So when you pray, what do you say to God? Mother Teresa says, oh, I don't say anything. I just listen. So Dan Rather says, okay. Well then, while you're listening, what does God say to you? And she says, oh, he doesn't say anything. He's just listening. And if you don't understand that, I don't know how to explain it to you. That's a different way to think about prayer. Communing with God. And you know, I hesitated on what to say here and whether or not to share this. Because this is a little wispy. And some of you, I know, I will lose you. And you will think, Nate's a weird hippie. I don't know if I can go to this church anymore. But if we were just friends, I'm friends with most of you. If you and I had the chance to sit down over a drink and talk about prayer, and I'm just talking to my friend, and we got to talk about this, and we said, what, like, this communing prayer, like, what are you talking about? Like, how does that even work? I would tell you this, because this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. And I have books that lend themselves to this that are good traditional books. I'll be happy to email them to you if you want to know. I think there is something to meditative prayer. I think there's something to meditation. I think in our Western culture, we don't have time for that. We don't have interest in that. We don't have value for that. That's something for weird Eastern cultures. But I think we shortchange ourselves a lot when we just cast that aside. And I would even go as far to say this to my friend over drinks. I think that the other world religions and cultures that have figured out the value of meditation are groping and mimicking the meditation, the prayerful meditation that God intended us to have. I think the reason that they do it is because they're on to something and there is a peace that's found there and that God intended us to find that peace there because for a Christian, he's intended us to find him there. I think there's absolutely something to meditative contemplative prayer where we simply listen and we are simply with God. And if you think about it, how else are we going to crawl up in his lap and be still? I said my favorite times with Lily are the times when I get to hold her and we're quiet together. How else do we do that with our God who is in heaven than to simply be quiet in his presence? And you think to yourself, that's great. How do I do that? How do I just start contemplative prayer? I would say it works like anything else that we try for the first time. This last year and a half or so, I've gotten into cooking. I just like cooking. And now if you want to cook, you don't need a cookbook. You just need YouTube. And so like you just watch videos. And one of the things that I've wanted to learn to cook is the perfect steak. I've gone nuts with this. I talk with my friends about it all the time. It's probably a sin in my life by this point because I think about it so much. But I want to cook the perfect steak. And you can watch all the YouTube videos you want to watch. You can watch all the TikTok chefs you want to watch. But until you fire up the stove and put the pan on it and heat it up and hear the sizzle when the steak goes in and learn what it is when you do this and when you do this, what happens when you dry it and you don't dry it, what happens when it's not hot enough or when it's too hot? What happens when you don't put enough oil in or you need more butter or whatever it is? Until you start to do it, there's no way you can understand it. You can learn all you want about how to cook a steak, but nothing is going to teach you like experience. And when you start to do it, some things start to click and fire off. And I believe that this contemplative prayer works the same way. We can learn all about it. We can read the books. We can think about how we might want to try to do it. But all I can tell you to do is start trying. Spend some time with God. Read His Word. Spend some time in the Bible. Pursue him. Desire him. Let him paint a picture of himself in your life. And then set the Bible down and sit quietly with him for as long as you can stand. Don't worry about how long it takes. Just do it. Just sit down and do it, and then when you can't do it anymore, stop doing it. Who cares how long you did it? And sit in the presence of God. And if you're really thinking along with me, if you're really engaged, you may be thinking to yourself, Nate, did you really just take the church through a book and five weeks worth of sermons so that you could arrive at the conclusion that if we really want to live the life that God wants for us and experience the relationship with God that he intended us to have, that what we need to do is read the Bible and pray more? Yeah, I did. Because it's that simple. Because that's what God wants from us. He wants us to be with him. I hope you will. I hope you will intentionally pursue the presence of the Father this week. And I hope that he begins to open doors of understanding for you that you didn't have previously. And I hope that he will slowly but surely, as we develop a larger picture of him, as we pursue him, I hope that he will become our treasure. And that we will begin to view the gospel as a way to get to God and to Jesus. And not just a way to heaven. Let's pray and then we get to do communion together. Father, we love you. We are grateful for you. And to you. Lord, would you open our hearts and our eyes and our minds to what a relationship with you can look like? Would you help us mine scripture for who you are and listen to books and read podcasts and have conversations? Give us time, God, to get out in your creation and simply soak you in in silence. Help us enjoy the rain this afternoon as it pours. May we find a time to go outside in the quiet and just listen to your sovereignty pour down on us and enjoy your presence there. Help us to pursue you through prayer, to see it as communion with you and not reduce it to communication. God, may we as a church live our lives with you and acknowledge that's all you've ever really wanted. Let us experience your presence even today, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

This morning, we are in the last part of our series called With. We've been walking through a book by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani, talking about our postures before God, which ones are appropriate, which ones are helpful, and which ones are not. And so we've spent four weeks looking at postures that ultimately are not helpful for us, postures that ultimately lead to a spiritually empty life and are ultimately damaging. And so we've kind of just left every week where we talk about a posture, we help each other see that in ourselves, and we go, yeah, that's not good. And then we pray and we go home, and it's been kind of a downer. So this week is the resolution to all of those postures. You'll remember that the first one we talked about was life under God. And we said in this posture, the mindset is, God, I'm going to obey you and submit to your authority in exchange for your protection in my life. I'm going to obey you and then things are going to go well for me. You're going to keep me from heartache and trial. And we saw that that never happens. Life is going to involve tragedy. It's going to involve hurt. It's going to involve loss. And that what we're trying to do when we say, God, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, is we're really trying to control the universe via God. It's our subtle way of regaining control over the things that we fear, and that's ultimately empty. We talked about the life over God posture. The life over God posture says, God, I'm not really interested in your authority in my life. I'm going to live my life over you, but I am going to extract from you and your word some best practices to apply to my life so that things can go better for me. Life from God says, God, I'm going to follow you and you're going to bless me. I'm going to do the things that you want me to do. I'm going to live my life for you, and then you're going to give me all the things that I want. And then the life for God posture says, God, I'm going to live my life for you, and you're going to love me for it. I'm going to live my life making an impact for your kingdom, and because of that, I'm going to be more valuable to you than my peers. I'm going to earn your affection. And we saw that each of these were empty. And ultimately, they're empty because we're following God for his treasures. We're following God because there's a motivation that isn't God, it's these other things, and they fall short. And that's where the life with God posture becomes important. That's the right posture to have before the Father. And in life with God, we no longer use God for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. You see? We no longer use God to acquire the things. We no longer use God to acquire the blessings. We no longer go to him because of what we want from him. We go to him because we want him. We no longer use him for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. This is the right posture before the Lord, to simply be with him because he wants to be with us. The best way I've ever heard this explained, I actually have this explained to me by someone else before I had a child. I have a four-year-old daughter named Lily. But before Lily was ever an idea in 2013, somebody explained this posture to me in this way, and I thought it was perfect. So Eve, if you have kids, this will really resonate with you. Even if you don't yet have kids, I think you'll see the power in this. Lily is my favorite thing on the planet. I love doing everything with her. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking about your friend Lily. They picked up on it back there. I love doing everything with her. We've actually, on our front porch, we've turned around our porch swing so it faces the cul-de-sac where she runs around with her friends every day. And I love sitting out there and watching her play. I love watching her play soccer, kind of. I'm the coach, so I also hate it. But I love watching her play. I love when she brings me things and she says, look what I drew or look what I did. I love when she tells me about school. I love when she decides that she wants to talk to me and let me into her little world. I love Lily. But do you know my favorite thing to do with Lily is? Hugs and snugs, man. That's all I want. Hugs and snugs. I want her to climb up in my lap. I want her to let me hold on to her. And I want us to be quiet together. That's all I want. And I don't want us to be quiet together because I'm tired of hearing her talk or make noise. I want us to be quiet together because I just want us to rest together. Burt Banks, one of our great elders, he jokingly told me that he loves his grandchildren until they're too old to sit in his lap. Once they're too old to sit in his lap, he says, I have no use for them anymore. Because those of you who are parents, those of you who have had those little kids, when they're sitting in your lap, or those of you who are grandparents, when you get to hold them and simply be with them and just enjoy their presence, there's nothing better than that. There's nothing better than that. I love watching her play. I love watching her dance. I love it most when she climbs up in my lap. And sometimes I'll tell her, she'll ask me for something. I'll say, you can have that if you come give daddy hugs. And she'll say, how many hugs? And I'll say, a hundred. And she'll go, that's too many. How about 10? I'm like, all right, 10. So she crawls up on my lap, and she wraps her arms around me, and she says, you count. And she starts just pulsing out these hugs. And I always lose count, and I get more than she bargained for. And that's great. And I love those. But my favorite is when she wants to do it. My favorite is when she comes and she gives me hugs. No other reason just to do it. She just wants to be with me. That's the best. Why would we think that our Heavenly Father would want anything any different? He simply wants to be with you. He wants to enjoy your presence. He created you to be with Him. Do you understand it was out of the context of relationship that you were created? Do you understand that God looked around at the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and said, we need to share this relationship with something. And so He created you so that you could share in a relationship with him. Do you understand that all he's ever wanted with you is not your performance, it's not even your devotion, it's just to be with him and all those other things come. And we see this desire of the Father. This is amazing. I love this part of the sermon, I really do, because I just think it helps Scripture make so much sense. Do you understand that this desire of the Father to simply be with us is seen throughout the narrative arc of the Bible? It's all through Scripture that all God wants with His children that He created is to be with you. If you look in Genesis 3, verse 8, it tells on God a little bit. Now, admittedly, I'm taking this verse totally out of context, and I'm using it to make a point that it was not intended to make, but now they become ultra-aware of everything around them. And they hear God, and they go and they hide, and God's about to come and confront them about their sin. That's what's happening in that verse. But here's what this verse tells on God that I want us to see. Understand that in Genesis 3, right before the fall, right before the fall of man and just as the first sin is committed, that it is perfect. You understand this? Creation is perfect. It is exactly as God intended. Every leaf is laying exactly where God wants it to lay. Every breeze is the exact temperature and pace that God wants it to be. Every day is exactly as cool in the morning and in the evening and at the midday as God wants it to be. Every piece of fruit hanging from the tree tastes exactly as God wants it to taste. Every interaction with every animal that Adam and Eve have goes exactly as God wants it to go. Adam and Eve, their days are mapped out exactly as God wants them to be. And in these days, apparently they were very used to hearing the sound of the Lord walking with them in the garden in the cool of the evening. It does not say they heard what sounded like God walking in the garden. Because they knew that sound. This is what God wanted to do. At perfection of creation, all God wanted to do is come down and hang out with Adam and Eve. You understand that? He created all of this so that in the evenings he could come down from heaven and be like, what did you guys do today? Want to hang out? And it says they hid themselves from the presence of God. They were used to him coming down and spending time with them. They knew what his presence felt like. They knew what it sounded like when he walked through the garden because this is what God wanted, but then sin messed it up. And when sin messed it up, God had to withdraw himself to heaven and say, I can no longer be with you because of your imperfection. The relationship that we had has been broken and so God is no longer with us. And what does God do to fix this? Isaiah tells us. He's going to send his son. And his name will be called Emmanuel. My Bible people know what Emmanuel means, don't you? God with us. And then he sends his son in the New Testament. So first God wanted to be with us. then sin messed it up so he could no longer be with us. You know what he did to fix our error? He came down to be with us. Look at what John writes in the first chapter. He starts off his amazing gospel and he says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made. And he's telling us that Jesus is the word of God. And then you skip on down to verse 13, and he writes this, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was with us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. God made all of creation so that he could simply be with us. Then our sin messed it up, and how did he fix it? He sent his son to be with us, to be Emmanuel God with us. The word became flesh. And it's worth pointing out here, do you understand that this is what differentiates Christianity from all other world religions? That we possess the only faith that claims that our God loves us so much that he came down to join us. Our God loves us so much that he gave up his heavenly body, his heavenly realm to condescend to be with us and get down in the muck and the mire and see the worst of us and then die for us to be with us before he went back to heaven to make a path for us to be with him for all of eternity. Do you understand that? We're the only faith that claims that. We're the only faith that claims a God who came down, who loved us enough to be with us because it's all God ever wanted. And then at the end of scripture, in Revelation chapter 21, when all is said and done, Jesus has come down. He started his, he dies for us. He starts the church. He leaves it to the disciples. We carry on that legacy until Jesus's return, which is what we're doing right now is we tell people the great news of the gospel. And then one day in Revelation, God is going to enact the end of times and a series of events are going to occur. And at the end of these series of events, Revelation 21. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people. And God himself will be with them as their God. The climax of all of history, to usher in eternity, the very first stroke in the most perfect picture that God could paint for us is that he is with us again, and we are with him. That's all he wants over the whole arc of scripture. He created us to be with us. We screwed it up. So he sent his son to be with us again and make a way for us to be with him for all of eternity. That's all he wants. He just wants to be with us. Everything else flows from that. His perfect picture of eternity begins with his presence with us and our presence with him. And I think that's amazing. And what we see, and I don't have time to fully unpack this this morning. This is when it's really helpful to read the book for yourself and think through it on your own. But what we see when we adopt this posture is that we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. We live life as God intended. When this is our posture, when all we want, when we match God, when God has said, you are my treasure, when we look back at God and we say, yes, and you are my treasure, and all I want is to be with you just as you want to be with me, then when we adopt this posture, we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. And I choose those words very intentionally because they're the antithesis of all the other postures. And life under God, that's a posture of fear. God, all these things are out of my control. I'm really scared. Will you control the universe for me and I'll control how much I submit to you? And when we live life with God, what we see is that eternity is God's presence in heaven and eternity has already begun for his believers that we started this new life in this new body that we know God, we are reconciled with him. And in that way, heaven has been brought down to us, brought down to us by God so that we can begin to experience pieces of it now as we enjoy his presence. And we have to no longer fear death because Jesus conquered it for us. That's why the scriptures say that death has lost its sting. We have to no longer, the greatest fear any of us have in life, God has removed that from us when we live life with him. And the life over God policy, the thing that we, or posture, the thing that we fear the most is that God will be in control of us, that we won't be able to do what we want to do. I don't want your authority in my life because there's joys over here that I want to experience that I don't feel like I can if I'm submitted to you. And what we find when we live life with God is that he came to give us life to the full, that as David said, at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There is no greater life than to be walking in lockstep with the Father, than to walk with him in the cool of the evening. And in that place, we find total and complete freedom to be exactly who he created us to be. We are everything that God ever intended when we walk with him. So we no longer need that posture. We are blessed. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, you heard Doug's, I thought, brilliant illustration of the kid who asked for a horse and his parents brought them back a car instead. He asked for a horse. They were supposed to get a horse when he became of age, but by the time he became of age, cars had been invented. So his parents gave him a car because it fit the bill of what he was asking for and was so much beyond what he could ever imagine. And he painted this great picture of in our life we ask for so many horses. We want so many simple things, and God sees beyond those so much and blesses us beyond what we could ever ask or imagine, as it says in Ephesians. And when we walk this life with God, we are blessed in ways that we could have never had the audacity to ask for. And we are affirmed. In the life for God posture, we perform so that God will love us, so that our peers will respect us, because everyone needs to be valued. Everybody needs to be told that they're loved, that I see you, and I love you, and that you're enough. And in life with God, when we're with God, when we're just with our Father and we're just basking in his presence, there is that constant voice of affirmation in our life that you are loved and I love you and you are enough. The life with God posture is the antithesis of all the others. And it's the way that we live life finally and fully as God intended. And so to me, the question becomes, okay, that's what God wants. I see it over the whole narrative arc of Scripture. I see it as the antithesis of all the others. It's the answer to them. How do I adopt this posture in my life? How do I do that? How do I practically live life with God? Again, I think it's worth diving into the book where he has four chapters to unpack what I'm going to try to distill down into eight minutes for you. But the first thing that I would say is this. We adopt this posture when we understand that the gospel is not a way to get people to heaven, it's a way to get people to God. I'll say it again. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven. It is a way to get people to God. That's not my thought. That's John Piper's thought. He's smarter than me. I stole it. I think so often we think about being saved. We think that Jesus died to get us to heaven. And when we think about heaven, we think about getting to see our lost loved ones, the people that we're going to be reunited with. We think about the sweet mansion on the streets of gold and how awesome it's going to be in this perfect utopia for all of eternity. And that's great. That's what heaven is. But Jesus didn't die to get us to heaven. He died to get us to God. To reconcile our relationship with him. Because in heaven, the first strokes God paints in the picture are that he will be with us. We will see the face of our God. We will see the love in his eyes. We will see our Savior Jesus and hear his voice for the first time. We will see the presence of the Spirit that's been guiding us as we've stumbled and tripped and fall through life. That is what Jesus died for. To get us to God. Heaven is secondary. That just happens to be where God is. He died to reunite us with him and with the Father and with the Spirit. And a good litmus test for whether or not we think about it like this is when you think about heaven, when you think about getting to be there, who are you most excited to see? Are you most excited to see a lost loved one? Or are you most excited to see the face of your Father God? Are you most excited to be reunited with someone you lost? Or are you most excited to finally get to see the face of Jesus and hear his voice? Now listen, I know that's a terribly unfair question. It's manipulative and mean. I get it. When I think about that, I think about my papa. I loved him as much as you can love anybody. He was my hero growing up. He died when I was 19. I really want him to meet Lily. I really want him to hear me preach. And I can't wait to hug him. And you have the people that you love too. And unfortunately, the older you get, the greater the population of people you want to see is in heaven. But I'm telling you, if what we long for most is to see the people we already know and not meet the God who created us, then we're not quite in a place yet where God has become our treasure. And so if we want to adopt this life with God posture and yearn for the proper things and see the gospel as a way to get to God and treasure what that is, I think the only way to do that is to know him more. I think the only way for our value of God to grow is to know him more, to learn him more, to pursue him more, to engage in the things that he wants us to engage in, to wake up daily. You've heard me say over and over again, the most important thing we can do in our lives is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. We've got to pursue him through his word and not just read it as a way to learn about God, but a way to learn who God is. The highest goal that we could have in our lives is to know God. Because the more we know him, the more we want to be with him, and the more accurately we see what the gospel is, and the more fervently we live our life for him, the more we want to be with him. I think that this is why Paul prays in Ephesians, the prayer that I've shared with you so many times. We've made this the prayer of grace. This was the prayer of Paul over his churches. I love this prayer so much that Jen's cousin, who's a calligrapher, I had her write it out. And we're in the process of getting it framed and putting it in our living room so that my family can see it every day. And this is what Paul prays for us in that prayer. I'm going to skip down to verse 17 of Ephesians chapter 3. He writes, he starts us off, for this reason I bow my knees before the Father. But then he says in 17, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul's chief desire for his churches was that they would know God. My chief desire for you is that you would know God. Not that life would go well, not that we would be protected, not that we would be prosperous, not that we would make money, not that we would get the job or have the relationship or dodge that pain or be able to dance through the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That's not Paul's prayer for us. Paul's prayer for us is that we would know God. And in knowing him, he becomes more lovely to us. And in becoming more lovely for us, our hearts and our souls yearn for the proper eternity. If heaven sounds boring to you, you just don't have a very good picture of who God is. Part of that's your pastor's fault. The first thing we do to adopt this posture is we understand that Jesus died to get us to God. Heaven just happens to be where he is. The second thing that we do, and I love this on a practical level for us, and I really want you guys to think about this. The second thing we can do to adopt this posture is we adopt this posture when prayer grows from communication to communion. We adopt this posture when our idea and practice of prayer grows from communication to communion. When we first start to think about prayer, when we first encounter it, when we're a child or when we get saved or when we become interested in it, whenever it might be, I think the very first thing we learn about prayer is that it's our opportunity to talk to God. When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he said, pray like this, and he talked to God. And so the first way we encounter prayer is to think of it as speaking to God. It's this communication from us to the Father. And then once you study prayer a little bit longer, once you read more scripture, once you're around church a little bit more and you get to know the Lord a little bit better, you understand that you can listen when you pray. That sometimes being prayerful is to be silent before God and to simply listen to him. So now he's communicating with you. But in scripture, there is this deeper prayer. In life, there is this deeper prayer that's simply communion with God. It's this prayer that helps us to pray without ceasing, as we are commanded to do. It's this communing prayer that allows us to be in the presence of God. It's this communing prayer that allows us to pray as we go through our days and through our weeks, even while we're in meetings and conversations with other people. This idea of communing prayer. It's captured in the book by a conversation between Dan Rather and Mother Teresa that I really loved. Dan Rather's talking to Mother Teresa and he says, you know, I hear that you're really renowned for your prayers. So when you pray, what do you say to God? Mother Teresa says, oh, I don't say anything. I just listen. So Dan Rather says, okay. Well then, while you're listening, what does God say to you? And she says, oh, he doesn't say anything. He's just listening. And if you don't understand that, I don't know how to explain it to you. That's a different way to think about prayer. Communing with God. And you know, I hesitated on what to say here and whether or not to share this. Because this is a little wispy. And some of you, I know, I will lose you. And you will think, Nate's a weird hippie. I don't know if I can go to this church anymore. But if we were just friends, I'm friends with most of you. If you and I had the chance to sit down over a drink and talk about prayer, and I'm just talking to my friend, and we got to talk about this, and we said, what, like, this communing prayer, like, what are you talking about? Like, how does that even work? I would tell you this, because this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. And I have books that lend themselves to this that are good traditional books. I'll be happy to email them to you if you want to know. I think there is something to meditative prayer. I think there's something to meditation. I think in our Western culture, we don't have time for that. We don't have interest in that. We don't have value for that. That's something for weird Eastern cultures. But I think we shortchange ourselves a lot when we just cast that aside. And I would even go as far to say this to my friend over drinks. I think that the other world religions and cultures that have figured out the value of meditation are groping and mimicking the meditation, the prayerful meditation that God intended us to have. I think the reason that they do it is because they're on to something and there is a peace that's found there and that God intended us to find that peace there because for a Christian, he's intended us to find him there. I think there's absolutely something to meditative contemplative prayer where we simply listen and we are simply with God. And if you think about it, how else are we going to crawl up in his lap and be still? I said my favorite times with Lily are the times when I get to hold her and we're quiet together. How else do we do that with our God who is in heaven than to simply be quiet in his presence? And you think to yourself, that's great. How do I do that? How do I just start contemplative prayer? I would say it works like anything else that we try for the first time. This last year and a half or so, I've gotten into cooking. I just like cooking. And now if you want to cook, you don't need a cookbook. You just need YouTube. And so like you just watch videos. And one of the things that I've wanted to learn to cook is the perfect steak. I've gone nuts with this. I talk with my friends about it all the time. It's probably a sin in my life by this point because I think about it so much. But I want to cook the perfect steak. And you can watch all the YouTube videos you want to watch. You can watch all the TikTok chefs you want to watch. But until you fire up the stove and put the pan on it and heat it up and hear the sizzle when the steak goes in and learn what it is when you do this and when you do this, what happens when you dry it and you don't dry it, what happens when it's not hot enough or when it's too hot? What happens when you don't put enough oil in or you need more butter or whatever it is? Until you start to do it, there's no way you can understand it. You can learn all you want about how to cook a steak, but nothing is going to teach you like experience. And when you start to do it, some things start to click and fire off. And I believe that this contemplative prayer works the same way. We can learn all about it. We can read the books. We can think about how we might want to try to do it. But all I can tell you to do is start trying. Spend some time with God. Read His Word. Spend some time in the Bible. Pursue him. Desire him. Let him paint a picture of himself in your life. And then set the Bible down and sit quietly with him for as long as you can stand. Don't worry about how long it takes. Just do it. Just sit down and do it, and then when you can't do it anymore, stop doing it. Who cares how long you did it? And sit in the presence of God. And if you're really thinking along with me, if you're really engaged, you may be thinking to yourself, Nate, did you really just take the church through a book and five weeks worth of sermons so that you could arrive at the conclusion that if we really want to live the life that God wants for us and experience the relationship with God that he intended us to have, that what we need to do is read the Bible and pray more? Yeah, I did. Because it's that simple. Because that's what God wants from us. He wants us to be with him. I hope you will. I hope you will intentionally pursue the presence of the Father this week. And I hope that he begins to open doors of understanding for you that you didn't have previously. And I hope that he will slowly but surely, as we develop a larger picture of him, as we pursue him, I hope that he will become our treasure. And that we will begin to view the gospel as a way to get to God and to Jesus. And not just a way to heaven. Let's pray and then we get to do communion together. Father, we love you. We are grateful for you. And to you. Lord, would you open our hearts and our eyes and our minds to what a relationship with you can look like? Would you help us mine scripture for who you are and listen to books and read podcasts and have conversations? Give us time, God, to get out in your creation and simply soak you in in silence. Help us enjoy the rain this afternoon as it pours. May we find a time to go outside in the quiet and just listen to your sovereignty pour down on us and enjoy your presence there. Help us to pursue you through prayer, to see it as communion with you and not reduce it to communication. God, may we as a church live our lives with you and acknowledge that's all you've ever really wanted. Let us experience your presence even today, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week, even though Joseph was sold into slavery, we saw that he chose to trust God and honor Him in his service to his new master, Potiphar's wife, attention that eventually forced Joseph to make a decision to run from temptation, even though running ultimately landed him in an Egyptian jail. A prisoner once again, we wonder together, will Joseph still choose to believe in his God and that in the end, he has a plan? Well, good morning. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that after the service if you're not afraid of me. Thank you also for joining us online and to the people in the back right of the room, there's other rows. So you guys don't, you don't all have to sit there every week. Just, I'm just throwing that out there. There's other places if you're also not afraid of those. This is the fourth part in our series where we're moving through the life of Joseph in the Old Testament. We find the life of Joseph in basically the back third of the book of Genesis, the very first book in the Bible. And I've said from the beginning a couple of things. First of all, that the story of Joseph to me is one of the most sweeping and stunning portrayals of the sovereignty of God that I think we find in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. I love the story of Joseph. And because it's a big, long story that points to the sovereignty of God, we are approaching this series not as seven individual sermons, but as one big long seven week sermon. So we stop and we make points along the way that are applicable to us and that help the text come alive to us. But really we're driving to the end of this narrative and the end of the series as we get to week seven and hopefully see the story in a light that maybe we haven't thought of it before. Because it's one big long sermon, and I've said that from the beginning, this week in particular highlights that. So I would tell you if you're watching online or listening online and it's not Sunday morning right now and you haven't heard week one, this would be a good place to pause and go listen to week one and then come back and listen to this. Now I know that it's ambitious of me to assume that you're willing to listen to 60 minutes of Nate in one week, but if you are, then it would be worth it to listen to week one before you consume this. If you haven't heard week one and you're just, this is fresh for you, don't worry, I'm going to bring you along, but it's going to resonate more if you really drill down into the life of Jacob like we did in the first week. So that's just an upfront for you. I'm going to assume a couple things of your knowledge of Jacob when we get to his portion of the sermon today. But like we said last week, Joseph is accused of sexual harassment in Potiphar's house and is subsequently thrown in jail. Potiphar's wife kept trying to seduce Joseph. Joseph wouldn't have it. Eventually in this scene, she grabs a hold of him. There's no one else around and he chooses to run away. And we spent a lot of time last week on what it means to run away from our temptations. He runs away and he leaves behind his outer garment because she had a hold on it and it was the only way for him to get away. And then she lets out a cry and she falsely accuses him of accosting her. When Potiphar hears this story, the master of the house, he's enraged and he has Joseph thrown in jail, which is a good place to acknowledge this idea that just because we're obeying God doesn't mean our life is going to immediately go better. Joseph chose obedience, and his life immediately got worse, circumstantially. So simply choosing to walk in obedience sometimes makes our life more difficult. Obedience is a long-term decision. It's not a short-term decision. But Joseph chose obedience. He chose to honor his God, and it lands him in jail. He gets thrown into like the royal jail where the prisoners of Pharaoh are thrown in as well. This becomes important a little bit later in the story and in this week's sermon. But he gets thrown in that jail. And when he's in the jail, he's again, Joseph has these patterns in his life where he has these dreams, right, early on that his brothers are going to bow down to him and his father and mother are going to bow down to him. And then he's sold into slavery and he's brought low. And then he ends up in Potiphar's house and slowly he ascends to second in command in Potiphar's house. And he's in this unprecedentedly high place for a Hebrew person to be. And then he gets thrown in jail and he's brought low. And spoiler alert, okay, if you don't know the story, we're gonna get into the details in the future. But then eventually he gets out of prison. He's put in Pharaoh's house where he rises to prominence again. And so Joseph's life is this constant ebbing and flowing of being brought high and then being brought low. And in these low moments being faced with the decision, am I going to choose to honor God or am I going to resent him because he's disappointed me in some way, because he's allowed these things to happen to me? And so as he's thrown in jail again, he chooses to honor God, he chooses to obey him, and his life gets harder. And again, he's faced with, do I honor God or do I do my own thing? And this is what we're told in the text at the end of Genesis 39, beginning in verse 21, which in the ancient world was kind of employee-employer relationship. And it's understandable to see that someone could rise to prominence there, but you don't really expect someone to climb up the ranks in jail, right? So much so that they're now entrusted with everything, that whatever prisoners, whatever task the jailer gave Joseph, he didn't worry about it. Joseph had total integrity. I'm sure there were systems that he could have taken advantage of. I'm sure there were things that he could have gotten away with, but his integrity wouldn't allow him to do it. And so he garnered more and more trust, even within the prison system in Egypt, which to me is remarkable. And often when we think of the story of Joseph, I know that I do this and you might as well, and maybe this is one of the things you're picking up on as we move throughout the story together, that it seems like at every turn Joseph chooses to honor God. So then in turn, God continues to honor Joseph. But one of the things that stands out to me in the text is every time I read it, every time I get to the next portion of the story where he's brought low again, what you'll notice is that God's favor always precedes Joseph's behavior. This passage starts out, but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. So it's not that Joseph went to jail and then in his uncertainty and disillusionment, he says, you know what? I'm just going to choose to trust and obey God. And then God is there with the favor. It's important that we understand that Joseph's obedience was a response to God's favor. God's favor is not a response to Joseph's obedience. Do you see? We don't win God's favor. We don't win God's blessings by how we behave. One of the things I said in week one at the end of it is that God's commitment to his promises are not contingent upon our behavior. That works both ways. We don't lose God's promises with bad behavior, nor do we gain them, we see in Joseph's life, with good behavior. They're simply there. God's favor simply rests on us. God's love and concern for us simply rests on us. God has a plan for us and a way that he wants to use us and things that he's gifted us to do and people that he's placed in our life. And the spirit works in our hearts in mysterious ways. And he does all that despite our behavior. So we can't look at the life of Joseph and teach, look, if you honor God, God honors you. That's not the lesson. Because at every turn, God's favor precedes Joseph's behavior. So God's favor simply rested on Joseph's life. Which is why, as I was trying to plan to preach this, when we wrote the series out, when I wrote the series out months ago, this week was gonna be a lesson on obeying God where we are. Wherever you are, serve God. And I think that's a fine lesson, but I wasn't happy with it. And so Tuesday, I went on a walk. I've never done this before, but I left the little office complex and I walked all the way down to the end of the street where it stops in the woods and then I got scared and I came back. I went on a walk and I was just thinking and praying about this passage and what's going on in the life of Joseph, and it occurred to me something that's worth reflecting on. Joseph is brought high over and over again in his life because God has favor on him, because God has a plan for Joseph, because God has a plan for Joseph that echoes throughout the centuries, that is seen far beyond even what we're going to arrive at a place in chapter 7, it's going to be like, or in the seventh week, and we're going to go, oh my gosh, that's amazing. Look at how God was taking care of his brothers. But no, no, no. Look at how God was taking care of his people. And look at how it's a picture for what happens all time. So yes, God is showing favor to Joseph because he has a plan for him, but it's at this point worth stopping and reflecting on the life of his father, Jacob. Because listen to me, Jacob had that same favor. Remember? Jacob enjoyed the same favor that Joseph did. Jacob came from the same line. God had the same plan, was going to bring about the same things, was going to display his sovereignty in the same ways and in the same favor that Joseph had. And they didn't have it because of how they acted. They had it because God promised them something. And God keeps his promises. That's what his righteousness is. And so it occurred to me as I was thinking about the difference between Jacob and Joseph and kind of reflecting on their lives, that Jacob, his dad, was a person of strife. The father of Joseph, Jacob, was a person of strife. If you'll remember his story, at every turn he is scheming and he is planning and he is controlling and he is stressed and he is anxious about bringing about the life that he wants. He wanted his father's blessing. He wanted to be a claimant of the promises of Abraham. He wanted to be the one through whom the blessings would flow to future generations. He wanted to be the top guy. He saw the life that he wanted and he did everything that he could to bring it about. Even though, even though before he was born, God spoke to his mother and said, in you are two nations and the older will serve the younger. The younger will rule over the older. These promises were made before Jacob was ever born. God knew what his plan was and how he was going to bring it about. And yet Jacob chose to either not open his eyes to those promises or not trust those promises or not trust God's favor. And he spent his entire life scheming and planning to try to bring things about in his own life, and all it caused him was strife and stress. He wants his father's blessing, so he schemes up a way to get the birthright from his brother, and then he schemes up a way to get the blessing from his father that required him to lie to his dying father on his deathbed, which is a despicable thing to do. Then he has to flee to a family member where he's then deceived by Laban. And then he has to work for 21 years to be able to go out on his own. And on the way out, he has to lie and cheat and steal again. He's still a deplorable person. And then at the end of the narrative, we see him, he's going to be reunited with his brother Esau, who is coming for him. And he schemes again on how to mitigate the anger and the wrath of his brother Esau so that maybe he won't get murdered by him. And we see throughout his whole life this striving and this anxiety and this stress and this sense of control and scheming and how can I bring about the things that I want? And then at the end of his life, or at the end of the story, about halfway through his life, he wrestles all night with someone that I said humbly is possibly Jesus. But we can disagree on that and it's fine. And Jesus renames him Israel. And he says, you have striven with man and with God. And Jacob realizes that he's seen the face of God. And in that moment, he realizes all the striving that I've been doing to bring things about in my life were things that God was going to make happen anyways. If I'll just get out of the way and let him do it. And so what we see in Jacob and Joseph is two men upon whom the favor of the Lord rested. Two men with whom God had made plans, to whom God had made promises, who he had gifted, who he had blessed, and who he loved dearly, and he cared about what happened in their lives. But the contrast is that while Jacob was a person of strife, that Joseph was a person of peace. Jacob was a person of strife. Joseph was a person of peace. When you read the narrative about Jacob, you see stress and anxiety and control and worry and all these things leaping off the page and scheming and lying and manipulating and kind of being a jerk. And when I read the story of Joseph, I don't see any of that springing off the page to me. When I read the story of Joseph, I see remarkable peace and humility. I see a man that's never shaken in his faith. I see a man that seems to not worry too much about his circumstances. I see a man who humbly chooses to serve God at every turn in his life. If you continue to read down through chapter 40, and we'll talk about this in just a minute, there's two prisoners in the prison with Joseph, a baker and a cup bearer. And they go to him and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you can interpret dreams. Will you tell us what they mean? And Joseph, instead of puffing himself up, says, aren't interpretations of dreams, don't those belong to the Lord? Sure, I'll listen to what you have to say, but listen, it's not me doing this. At every point, he gives the credit to God. Last week, we talked about the temptation with Potiphar's wife. And she comes to him and she tries to entice him and get him to commit sin with her. And what's his response? I've been blessed in so many ways. How could I possibly sin against my God in this way? He's humble. He's obedient. He gives God the credit. A few chapters over, we're going to see that he's brought to Pharaoh. Pharaoh's had a couple dreams and he says, I've heard you're good at interpreting dreams. Let me tell you about my dreams. And in front of Pharaoh, where he could take credit again, he could say, I'm the guy. He says, don't dreams belong to the Lord? You can tell me your dreams. Let's see what he says. With Joseph, we see this profound peace. We see this profound joy that exists through his whole life, that runs like a stream through his whole life. No matter the ebbs and the flows, as he's brought high and he's brought low, we see this stream of joy and peace that runs through the life of Joseph. And it absolutely relates to the song that we sang a few minutes ago, that we're going to have joy and we're going to sing whether we're brought high to the mountain or low to the valley. And we see this displayed in the life of Joseph. That he's this person of incredible joy who in every moment simply chooses to trust God and honor God in the moment. And know that even though I don't know how this is going to work out, it will. God loves me and cares about me. So I'm going to control the things that I can control and I'm going to love him the best I can now. And this point, I was actually, I got done with the walk and I came back and I talked to Kyle. He was sitting in his office and I was all excited. Listen to what I just thought about. I think this is really fun. And I was telling him about it. And he made this point, and I think it's a great one. That Jacob's striving prohibited his joy. If the same favor rested on both of them, if God's sovereignty rested on both of them, if God had plans for both of them that he was going to bring about regardless of their behavior, then Kyle's point was the same joy was available to them the whole time. That if you can put yourself in the place of Jacob and imagine the relief that he felt when he realized, oh my gosh, I've been striving with God my whole life and I don't have to try so hard. If you can imagine the joy and relief that he felt when he met his brother who didn't want to murder him, who actually wanted to forgive him. If you can imagine how relieving and joy-filled those days were for Jacob, the disappointing thing is that joy was available to him for his entire life. And he lived half of his life without the joy of the Lord because his striving and his control and his anxiety and his worry and his scheming blinded him to the peace of the Father and prohibited him from experiencing the joy of the Father. And you contrast that with Joseph, who saw it the whole time, whose peaceful nature, whose trust in God, whose belief that God would come through, allowed him to be joyful and calm and peaceful in the moment, no matter what happened. And what you see, really, as you juxtapose their two lives and acknowledge that the same favor rested on both, is you see what it really means to trust God. I'm not talking about believing in God. Believing is an intellectual exercise. Are there enough facts in my head that I can willing to put my faith behind God? That's an intellectual exercise. And actually, every time we see the word belief in the Bible, in the original text, it means trust. And to trust is to rely on something fully, knowing that it will hold me up. There's belief mixed in there, but trust is really an action. And the difference between Joseph and Jacob is that Joseph trusted God and Jacob didn't. He may have believed in God, but Joseph trusted him. Because Joseph trusted God, he was a person of peace. Because Joseph trusted God, there was a river of joy that flowed through his life, irrespective of the circumstances that surrounded it. Because Jacob did not trust God, he merely at times when it was for him, chose to believe God. He was a person of strife, arrested with anxiety and worry and scheming and stress. And so where the rubber meets the road here for us this morning is for us to reflect on this question. Are you Jacob or are you Joseph? In your life, in the things that matter to you most, are you Jacob? Are you a person of strife? Or are you Joseph, a person of trusting peace? When I think about this for me, I think about grace. When the pandemic started and we can't meet in person anymore, and I lead an organization that it kind of matters whether or not we meet in person. That's a pretty big part of what we do. I got really worried. And I became Jacob. And I schemed and I stressed and I controlled. Who's coming? How do we reach out to them? How do we make our online product better? How do we keep people engaged? We just had this great campaign. We had a ton of people coming. How do I keep 330 people coming online every week? This is so challenging. I haven't talked to so-and-so in a couple of weeks. Are they gone? And then the other people would, I would talk to so-and-so and they said, yeah, I saw so-and-so this week. And I would go, do they still go to Grace? Do I need to call them? And every day I would just think about Grace. How do we hold it together? How do I keep this church where it is? And I made myself feel like, without realizing it, that it was all on me. And I Jacobed the heck out of that situation. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, it made me miserable. I didn't realize it. It made me miserable. And poor Jen, it made me grumpy at the house. She put up with some stuff. It was not good. And somewhere around four months ago, I wouldn't have used this language at the time, but somewhere around four months ago, I became Joseph about grace. And I finally realized, you know what? God loves this church. I don't know why. I don't know why he does. He just does. He loves us. And if you've been here for any number of years, you've seen him see us through time and again. God loves this place. And if he loves this place, he has a plan for this place. And if he has a plan for this place, he's going to execute it regardless of what I do. So I can keep trying to Jacob the situation and fix it and figure out what we need to do and stress out about it all the time. Or I can be Joseph. I can trust that God cares about this place and has a plan for this place that he's going to bring about regardless of my behavior. So the best possible thing I can do is to rest easy in the sovereignty of God, to choose to trust him with the church and simply humbly obey Jesus whenever the opportunity for obedience is presented to me and quit worrying about the things that I can't control. And it brought peace. Parents, with your children, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Do you stress out about who they are and how they behave and how we can augment this behavior so they don't embarrass us in public? Do we stress out about where they're going to go to college, if they're college, what kind of decisions that they're making? Do we stress out about every little thing and be a helicopter parent and stress and scheme and worry and control and be anxious? Or are we Joseph? Do we trust and acknowledge that, you know what? God loves my kid way more than I ever could. And because God loves them, he has a plan for them. And he has a design for them. And he has promises for them. And the best thing I can possibly do for my child is to step out of the way and be Joseph and try to simply obey Jesus in the moment when the moments present themselves. But to be people of peace about our children. About your career, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Are you constantly trying to scheme and align yourselves with the right people and form the right relationships and do the right thing and impress the right person by putting that right time stamp on the email early in the morning or late at night? Are we constantly trying to figure out how to advance ourself in our career? Or are we Joseph? I know that God loves me. And I know that he cares deeply about who I work around and what I do and my witness for him as I work with my coworkers. And so I know that if I work hard and honor him, that he's going to do with my career whatever it is he needs to do. Many in our church are facing retirement. We've recently retired. We're thinking about it. Are you Jacob about that or are you Joseph? Are you trying to control every aspect of it and think through it and plan it all out and map it out and know exactly what's going to happen or can you acknowledge, you know what, I think God loves me and he cares deeply about what I do in the rest of the years of my life. And he's going to direct me to the right place if I trust him with him. In our relationships, in our marriages that we might be trying to save, in broken relationships with friends or with family, are we Jacob or are we Joseph? Are we people of strife or are we people of peace? Are we people who are trying to arrest control from God or are we people who trust God enough to give him control? And if you are a person who's answering over and over again, gosh, I'm Jacob. I'm Jacob and I want the peace that you're talking about, but I don't know how to get it. What do I do? I would simply tell you that our peace is found in Jesus. This is why I think Paul writes in Philippians 4, 6, and 7, be anxious for nothing, but in everything with prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in who? In Christ Jesus. If you're anxious, if you're controlling, if you're worried, if you're not trusting God with things, what does Paul tell you to do in the letter to the Philippians? He tells you, And you know how he's going to do that? By giving you more Jesus. By pointing you towards Christ. Hebrews writes the same thing. Run the race that's set before you. How? By focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. Jesus says the same thing in John 15. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the other things. Don't worry about all the scheming. Don't worry about everything else that I'm going to do in your life. You focus on me. You abide in me. And I'll abide in you. And because of that, everything's going to work out. You're going to bear much fruit. If we want to be like Joseph, and we want to walk away from being like Jacob, then we need to acknowledge that our peace is found in Jesus. And our anxiety and our desire for control should be a reminder to us that we simply need more Jesus. That we simply need to follow him harder. That we simply need to press into him more. That we simply need to let go of something more. If you want to test this, trust him with something that's stressing you out in your life right now. Just this last week, I had a conversation with a couple in the church that I knew was going to be a hard conversation. And I had been stressed out about it for a while. The conversation happened the day after I stumbled on this lesson and this comparison of person of peace, person of strife. And I thought, all right, I'm gonna preach to myself here. Normally, when I go into a difficult conversation or a meeting, I have thought through, Jen will tell you, I have thought through every scenario. I've had every conversation in my head already. I hate being unprepared. I like to have thought through what's gonna happen so that I don't respond emotionally. I respond reasonably. I like to know that there's nothing that's going to happen that I'm not expecting. But for this one, I just chose to be Joseph. And I said, God, I know you love me. I know you love them. I know the results of this conversation matter to you. And that was good. And I went into the conversation trying to honor God with what we talked about, and so did they. And we would all tell you, the results of this conversation were far better than any of us thought they would be going into it. And the Holy Spirit was present with us that night, and he met with us that night. If this is a difficult concept for you, pick one thing that's stressing you out in your life and hand it to Jesus and watch him come through. Because here's what happens when we're people of peace and people of strife. Strife and peace permeate. Strife and peace, they bleed out onto other people. They act like my four-month-old son, John, right now. John permeates, man. He is a drool monster. Like, he wakes up. First of all, he's just drooling like crazy. I don't know what's going on in there. Jen picked him up in the living room the other day and was holding him up and smiling at him. And I saw what she couldn't, which was a bead of spit glimmering in the sunlight through the window that landed square on her forehead, and I died laughing. That is John. I did not even get her a towel. I was laughing too hard. Not only that, not only does he drool constantly, the kid wakes up, and the only thing he cares about in life is how much of his hand fits into his mouth. That's the only thing that matters to him. Nothing else. He doesn't care about a single thing else. It's just how much of this can I jam in here? And it's all he does. And it gets his hand all slobbery. So he'll wipe it on your face or he'll grab you. You'll pick him up. I picked him up yesterday. I picked him up when I was holding him and put him down and my forearm was wet from his leg, from drool that had run down and somehow his legs are really chubby. They had gotten in places and just to touch John is to have drool on you. It just is. I don't know how it happens. It just permeates. Strife and joy work the same way. When you're a person of strife and stress, it permeates, man. It bleeds. It gets on everybody around you. It gets on your spouse and it changes their days. It gets on your kids, it changes their days. It gets on your coworkers, it gets on your friends. Strife bleeds and permeates and has ripples on everyone around you. And so does peace, particularly in a world of so much strife. Normally, when people of strife are around each other, their stress starts amping everyone up, right? We kind of get into a frenzy. You're complaining about this, and I'm complaining about this, and life stinks together, and then we get all worked up about everything. But to be a person of peace that actually calms those waves of strife, well that has a calming effect on everyone around us too. To be a person of trust and for people to see this trust that Joseph had, regardless of circumstances, well that begins to bleed on other people too. So I thought it worth it to pause at this point in the story and acknowledge this idea that the same favor rests on these two men. The difference in their life is how they receive that favor. Jacob's striving made him blind to it. Joseph's trust helped him to see it. And it gave him peace and joy for his whole life that it took Jacob 40 years to experience. And so in our lives and in our situations, which ones do we want to be? Now, as Joseph is in jail, eventually Pharaoh gets angry with his cupbearer and his baker, and he throws them in jail too. And they're under the care of Joseph. While they're there, they have some dreams. And they go to Joseph and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you're a good, good at interpreting dreams. Can you tell us what they mean? And Joseph again says that I'm not good at it. God is, but let's see what you got. And they tell Joseph his dreams. I'm not, their dreams. I'm not going to detail those for you. Those are in the text and you can read them if you like. I hope you will. But they say, these are our dreams. What do they mean? And he looks at the cupbearer and he's like, great news. You, here's what's going to happen. In three days, Pharaoh is going to call you back to service and you're going to serve him. And he's going to restore you to your former position. You're going to go out of prison, back to your former life. Everything's going to be good. And the cupbearer is like, that's great. What's mine mean? And Joseph's like, not as good of news. You're going to get called out of here in three days as well, but when Pharaoh calls you out of here, he's going to hang you, and you're going to die in three days. And as they're leaving, Joseph looks at the cupbearer, and he says, don't forget me. When you go, and Pharaoh restores you, remember me, that I might get out of this pit. I know I'm doing great here in jail. I don't love it. So remember me to Pharaoh that I might get out of here as well. And chapter 39 ends with the somber news that everything that Joseph said would happen did happen, except the cupbearer forgot about him. And we're going to pick up the story next week and spend the whole week on the very first sentence in the next chapter. And it may just be the best part of this whole seven-week series. So I hope that you can come for it, and I hope that we'll get to see you for the hootenanny. Let me pray, and we'll carry on next week. Father, thank you for the way that you speak to us out of Scripture. Thank you for the way that you speak to us through circumstances. Lord, I just pray that... I pray that we would be sensitive to those things. God, give us ears to hear. We know, we know and we've seen over and over again that the same spirit that speaks to Joseph, that spoke to Jacob, that speaks to me, speaks to us. So God, speak to grace and move in grace and press on the hearts of grace for what you would have us do and where you would have us go. Give us the faith to trust you even when we can't fully see the results of that trust yet. Give us the peace that comes from trusting you. Let us this week, those of us who are Jacobs, experience just a taste of the joy that comes when we trust you with a stressful situation and watch you come through in the way that only you can. Father, help us to trust you in all things, to acknowledge that you care about the details of our life even more than we do, and that you have a plan for us that is better than any we could ever come up with. Help us to walk in trust of you, and in turn, walk in peace and influence the people around us. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week, even though Joseph was sold into slavery, we saw that he chose to trust God and honor Him in his service to his new master, Potiphar's wife, attention that eventually forced Joseph to make a decision to run from temptation, even though running ultimately landed him in an Egyptian jail. A prisoner once again, we wonder together, will Joseph still choose to believe in his God and that in the end, he has a plan? Well, good morning. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that after the service if you're not afraid of me. Thank you also for joining us online and to the people in the back right of the room, there's other rows. So you guys don't, you don't all have to sit there every week. Just, I'm just throwing that out there. There's other places if you're also not afraid of those. This is the fourth part in our series where we're moving through the life of Joseph in the Old Testament. We find the life of Joseph in basically the back third of the book of Genesis, the very first book in the Bible. And I've said from the beginning a couple of things. First of all, that the story of Joseph to me is one of the most sweeping and stunning portrayals of the sovereignty of God that I think we find in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. I love the story of Joseph. And because it's a big, long story that points to the sovereignty of God, we are approaching this series not as seven individual sermons, but as one big long seven week sermon. So we stop and we make points along the way that are applicable to us and that help the text come alive to us. But really we're driving to the end of this narrative and the end of the series as we get to week seven and hopefully see the story in a light that maybe we haven't thought of it before. Because it's one big long sermon, and I've said that from the beginning, this week in particular highlights that. So I would tell you if you're watching online or listening online and it's not Sunday morning right now and you haven't heard week one, this would be a good place to pause and go listen to week one and then come back and listen to this. Now I know that it's ambitious of me to assume that you're willing to listen to 60 minutes of Nate in one week, but if you are, then it would be worth it to listen to week one before you consume this. If you haven't heard week one and you're just, this is fresh for you, don't worry, I'm going to bring you along, but it's going to resonate more if you really drill down into the life of Jacob like we did in the first week. So that's just an upfront for you. I'm going to assume a couple things of your knowledge of Jacob when we get to his portion of the sermon today. But like we said last week, Joseph is accused of sexual harassment in Potiphar's house and is subsequently thrown in jail. Potiphar's wife kept trying to seduce Joseph. Joseph wouldn't have it. Eventually in this scene, she grabs a hold of him. There's no one else around and he chooses to run away. And we spent a lot of time last week on what it means to run away from our temptations. He runs away and he leaves behind his outer garment because she had a hold on it and it was the only way for him to get away. And then she lets out a cry and she falsely accuses him of accosting her. When Potiphar hears this story, the master of the house, he's enraged and he has Joseph thrown in jail, which is a good place to acknowledge this idea that just because we're obeying God doesn't mean our life is going to immediately go better. Joseph chose obedience, and his life immediately got worse, circumstantially. So simply choosing to walk in obedience sometimes makes our life more difficult. Obedience is a long-term decision. It's not a short-term decision. But Joseph chose obedience. He chose to honor his God, and it lands him in jail. He gets thrown into like the royal jail where the prisoners of Pharaoh are thrown in as well. This becomes important a little bit later in the story and in this week's sermon. But he gets thrown in that jail. And when he's in the jail, he's again, Joseph has these patterns in his life where he has these dreams, right, early on that his brothers are going to bow down to him and his father and mother are going to bow down to him. And then he's sold into slavery and he's brought low. And then he ends up in Potiphar's house and slowly he ascends to second in command in Potiphar's house. And he's in this unprecedentedly high place for a Hebrew person to be. And then he gets thrown in jail and he's brought low. And spoiler alert, okay, if you don't know the story, we're gonna get into the details in the future. But then eventually he gets out of prison. He's put in Pharaoh's house where he rises to prominence again. And so Joseph's life is this constant ebbing and flowing of being brought high and then being brought low. And in these low moments being faced with the decision, am I going to choose to honor God or am I going to resent him because he's disappointed me in some way, because he's allowed these things to happen to me? And so as he's thrown in jail again, he chooses to honor God, he chooses to obey him, and his life gets harder. And again, he's faced with, do I honor God or do I do my own thing? And this is what we're told in the text at the end of Genesis 39, beginning in verse 21, which in the ancient world was kind of employee-employer relationship. And it's understandable to see that someone could rise to prominence there, but you don't really expect someone to climb up the ranks in jail, right? So much so that they're now entrusted with everything, that whatever prisoners, whatever task the jailer gave Joseph, he didn't worry about it. Joseph had total integrity. I'm sure there were systems that he could have taken advantage of. I'm sure there were things that he could have gotten away with, but his integrity wouldn't allow him to do it. And so he garnered more and more trust, even within the prison system in Egypt, which to me is remarkable. And often when we think of the story of Joseph, I know that I do this and you might as well, and maybe this is one of the things you're picking up on as we move throughout the story together, that it seems like at every turn Joseph chooses to honor God. So then in turn, God continues to honor Joseph. But one of the things that stands out to me in the text is every time I read it, every time I get to the next portion of the story where he's brought low again, what you'll notice is that God's favor always precedes Joseph's behavior. This passage starts out, but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. So it's not that Joseph went to jail and then in his uncertainty and disillusionment, he says, you know what? I'm just going to choose to trust and obey God. And then God is there with the favor. It's important that we understand that Joseph's obedience was a response to God's favor. God's favor is not a response to Joseph's obedience. Do you see? We don't win God's favor. We don't win God's blessings by how we behave. One of the things I said in week one at the end of it is that God's commitment to his promises are not contingent upon our behavior. That works both ways. We don't lose God's promises with bad behavior, nor do we gain them, we see in Joseph's life, with good behavior. They're simply there. God's favor simply rests on us. God's love and concern for us simply rests on us. God has a plan for us and a way that he wants to use us and things that he's gifted us to do and people that he's placed in our life. And the spirit works in our hearts in mysterious ways. And he does all that despite our behavior. So we can't look at the life of Joseph and teach, look, if you honor God, God honors you. That's not the lesson. Because at every turn, God's favor precedes Joseph's behavior. So God's favor simply rested on Joseph's life. Which is why, as I was trying to plan to preach this, when we wrote the series out, when I wrote the series out months ago, this week was gonna be a lesson on obeying God where we are. Wherever you are, serve God. And I think that's a fine lesson, but I wasn't happy with it. And so Tuesday, I went on a walk. I've never done this before, but I left the little office complex and I walked all the way down to the end of the street where it stops in the woods and then I got scared and I came back. I went on a walk and I was just thinking and praying about this passage and what's going on in the life of Joseph, and it occurred to me something that's worth reflecting on. Joseph is brought high over and over again in his life because God has favor on him, because God has a plan for Joseph, because God has a plan for Joseph that echoes throughout the centuries, that is seen far beyond even what we're going to arrive at a place in chapter 7, it's going to be like, or in the seventh week, and we're going to go, oh my gosh, that's amazing. Look at how God was taking care of his brothers. But no, no, no. Look at how God was taking care of his people. And look at how it's a picture for what happens all time. So yes, God is showing favor to Joseph because he has a plan for him, but it's at this point worth stopping and reflecting on the life of his father, Jacob. Because listen to me, Jacob had that same favor. Remember? Jacob enjoyed the same favor that Joseph did. Jacob came from the same line. God had the same plan, was going to bring about the same things, was going to display his sovereignty in the same ways and in the same favor that Joseph had. And they didn't have it because of how they acted. They had it because God promised them something. And God keeps his promises. That's what his righteousness is. And so it occurred to me as I was thinking about the difference between Jacob and Joseph and kind of reflecting on their lives, that Jacob, his dad, was a person of strife. The father of Joseph, Jacob, was a person of strife. If you'll remember his story, at every turn he is scheming and he is planning and he is controlling and he is stressed and he is anxious about bringing about the life that he wants. He wanted his father's blessing. He wanted to be a claimant of the promises of Abraham. He wanted to be the one through whom the blessings would flow to future generations. He wanted to be the top guy. He saw the life that he wanted and he did everything that he could to bring it about. Even though, even though before he was born, God spoke to his mother and said, in you are two nations and the older will serve the younger. The younger will rule over the older. These promises were made before Jacob was ever born. God knew what his plan was and how he was going to bring it about. And yet Jacob chose to either not open his eyes to those promises or not trust those promises or not trust God's favor. And he spent his entire life scheming and planning to try to bring things about in his own life, and all it caused him was strife and stress. He wants his father's blessing, so he schemes up a way to get the birthright from his brother, and then he schemes up a way to get the blessing from his father that required him to lie to his dying father on his deathbed, which is a despicable thing to do. Then he has to flee to a family member where he's then deceived by Laban. And then he has to work for 21 years to be able to go out on his own. And on the way out, he has to lie and cheat and steal again. He's still a deplorable person. And then at the end of the narrative, we see him, he's going to be reunited with his brother Esau, who is coming for him. And he schemes again on how to mitigate the anger and the wrath of his brother Esau so that maybe he won't get murdered by him. And we see throughout his whole life this striving and this anxiety and this stress and this sense of control and scheming and how can I bring about the things that I want? And then at the end of his life, or at the end of the story, about halfway through his life, he wrestles all night with someone that I said humbly is possibly Jesus. But we can disagree on that and it's fine. And Jesus renames him Israel. And he says, you have striven with man and with God. And Jacob realizes that he's seen the face of God. And in that moment, he realizes all the striving that I've been doing to bring things about in my life were things that God was going to make happen anyways. If I'll just get out of the way and let him do it. And so what we see in Jacob and Joseph is two men upon whom the favor of the Lord rested. Two men with whom God had made plans, to whom God had made promises, who he had gifted, who he had blessed, and who he loved dearly, and he cared about what happened in their lives. But the contrast is that while Jacob was a person of strife, that Joseph was a person of peace. Jacob was a person of strife. Joseph was a person of peace. When you read the narrative about Jacob, you see stress and anxiety and control and worry and all these things leaping off the page and scheming and lying and manipulating and kind of being a jerk. And when I read the story of Joseph, I don't see any of that springing off the page to me. When I read the story of Joseph, I see remarkable peace and humility. I see a man that's never shaken in his faith. I see a man that seems to not worry too much about his circumstances. I see a man who humbly chooses to serve God at every turn in his life. If you continue to read down through chapter 40, and we'll talk about this in just a minute, there's two prisoners in the prison with Joseph, a baker and a cup bearer. And they go to him and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you can interpret dreams. Will you tell us what they mean? And Joseph, instead of puffing himself up, says, aren't interpretations of dreams, don't those belong to the Lord? Sure, I'll listen to what you have to say, but listen, it's not me doing this. At every point, he gives the credit to God. Last week, we talked about the temptation with Potiphar's wife. And she comes to him and she tries to entice him and get him to commit sin with her. And what's his response? I've been blessed in so many ways. How could I possibly sin against my God in this way? He's humble. He's obedient. He gives God the credit. A few chapters over, we're going to see that he's brought to Pharaoh. Pharaoh's had a couple dreams and he says, I've heard you're good at interpreting dreams. Let me tell you about my dreams. And in front of Pharaoh, where he could take credit again, he could say, I'm the guy. He says, don't dreams belong to the Lord? You can tell me your dreams. Let's see what he says. With Joseph, we see this profound peace. We see this profound joy that exists through his whole life, that runs like a stream through his whole life. No matter the ebbs and the flows, as he's brought high and he's brought low, we see this stream of joy and peace that runs through the life of Joseph. And it absolutely relates to the song that we sang a few minutes ago, that we're going to have joy and we're going to sing whether we're brought high to the mountain or low to the valley. And we see this displayed in the life of Joseph. That he's this person of incredible joy who in every moment simply chooses to trust God and honor God in the moment. And know that even though I don't know how this is going to work out, it will. God loves me and cares about me. So I'm going to control the things that I can control and I'm going to love him the best I can now. And this point, I was actually, I got done with the walk and I came back and I talked to Kyle. He was sitting in his office and I was all excited. Listen to what I just thought about. I think this is really fun. And I was telling him about it. And he made this point, and I think it's a great one. That Jacob's striving prohibited his joy. If the same favor rested on both of them, if God's sovereignty rested on both of them, if God had plans for both of them that he was going to bring about regardless of their behavior, then Kyle's point was the same joy was available to them the whole time. That if you can put yourself in the place of Jacob and imagine the relief that he felt when he realized, oh my gosh, I've been striving with God my whole life and I don't have to try so hard. If you can imagine the joy and relief that he felt when he met his brother who didn't want to murder him, who actually wanted to forgive him. If you can imagine how relieving and joy-filled those days were for Jacob, the disappointing thing is that joy was available to him for his entire life. And he lived half of his life without the joy of the Lord because his striving and his control and his anxiety and his worry and his scheming blinded him to the peace of the Father and prohibited him from experiencing the joy of the Father. And you contrast that with Joseph, who saw it the whole time, whose peaceful nature, whose trust in God, whose belief that God would come through, allowed him to be joyful and calm and peaceful in the moment, no matter what happened. And what you see, really, as you juxtapose their two lives and acknowledge that the same favor rested on both, is you see what it really means to trust God. I'm not talking about believing in God. Believing is an intellectual exercise. Are there enough facts in my head that I can willing to put my faith behind God? That's an intellectual exercise. And actually, every time we see the word belief in the Bible, in the original text, it means trust. And to trust is to rely on something fully, knowing that it will hold me up. There's belief mixed in there, but trust is really an action. And the difference between Joseph and Jacob is that Joseph trusted God and Jacob didn't. He may have believed in God, but Joseph trusted him. Because Joseph trusted God, he was a person of peace. Because Joseph trusted God, there was a river of joy that flowed through his life, irrespective of the circumstances that surrounded it. Because Jacob did not trust God, he merely at times when it was for him, chose to believe God. He was a person of strife, arrested with anxiety and worry and scheming and stress. And so where the rubber meets the road here for us this morning is for us to reflect on this question. Are you Jacob or are you Joseph? In your life, in the things that matter to you most, are you Jacob? Are you a person of strife? Or are you Joseph, a person of trusting peace? When I think about this for me, I think about grace. When the pandemic started and we can't meet in person anymore, and I lead an organization that it kind of matters whether or not we meet in person. That's a pretty big part of what we do. I got really worried. And I became Jacob. And I schemed and I stressed and I controlled. Who's coming? How do we reach out to them? How do we make our online product better? How do we keep people engaged? We just had this great campaign. We had a ton of people coming. How do I keep 330 people coming online every week? This is so challenging. I haven't talked to so-and-so in a couple of weeks. Are they gone? And then the other people would, I would talk to so-and-so and they said, yeah, I saw so-and-so this week. And I would go, do they still go to Grace? Do I need to call them? And every day I would just think about Grace. How do we hold it together? How do I keep this church where it is? And I made myself feel like, without realizing it, that it was all on me. And I Jacobed the heck out of that situation. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, it made me miserable. I didn't realize it. It made me miserable. And poor Jen, it made me grumpy at the house. She put up with some stuff. It was not good. And somewhere around four months ago, I wouldn't have used this language at the time, but somewhere around four months ago, I became Joseph about grace. And I finally realized, you know what? God loves this church. I don't know why. I don't know why he does. He just does. He loves us. And if you've been here for any number of years, you've seen him see us through time and again. God loves this place. And if he loves this place, he has a plan for this place. And if he has a plan for this place, he's going to execute it regardless of what I do. So I can keep trying to Jacob the situation and fix it and figure out what we need to do and stress out about it all the time. Or I can be Joseph. I can trust that God cares about this place and has a plan for this place that he's going to bring about regardless of my behavior. So the best possible thing I can do is to rest easy in the sovereignty of God, to choose to trust him with the church and simply humbly obey Jesus whenever the opportunity for obedience is presented to me and quit worrying about the things that I can't control. And it brought peace. Parents, with your children, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Do you stress out about who they are and how they behave and how we can augment this behavior so they don't embarrass us in public? Do we stress out about where they're going to go to college, if they're college, what kind of decisions that they're making? Do we stress out about every little thing and be a helicopter parent and stress and scheme and worry and control and be anxious? Or are we Joseph? Do we trust and acknowledge that, you know what? God loves my kid way more than I ever could. And because God loves them, he has a plan for them. And he has a design for them. And he has promises for them. And the best thing I can possibly do for my child is to step out of the way and be Joseph and try to simply obey Jesus in the moment when the moments present themselves. But to be people of peace about our children. About your career, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Are you constantly trying to scheme and align yourselves with the right people and form the right relationships and do the right thing and impress the right person by putting that right time stamp on the email early in the morning or late at night? Are we constantly trying to figure out how to advance ourself in our career? Or are we Joseph? I know that God loves me. And I know that he cares deeply about who I work around and what I do and my witness for him as I work with my coworkers. And so I know that if I work hard and honor him, that he's going to do with my career whatever it is he needs to do. Many in our church are facing retirement. We've recently retired. We're thinking about it. Are you Jacob about that or are you Joseph? Are you trying to control every aspect of it and think through it and plan it all out and map it out and know exactly what's going to happen or can you acknowledge, you know what, I think God loves me and he cares deeply about what I do in the rest of the years of my life. And he's going to direct me to the right place if I trust him with him. In our relationships, in our marriages that we might be trying to save, in broken relationships with friends or with family, are we Jacob or are we Joseph? Are we people of strife or are we people of peace? Are we people who are trying to arrest control from God or are we people who trust God enough to give him control? And if you are a person who's answering over and over again, gosh, I'm Jacob. I'm Jacob and I want the peace that you're talking about, but I don't know how to get it. What do I do? I would simply tell you that our peace is found in Jesus. This is why I think Paul writes in Philippians 4, 6, and 7, be anxious for nothing, but in everything with prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in who? In Christ Jesus. If you're anxious, if you're controlling, if you're worried, if you're not trusting God with things, what does Paul tell you to do in the letter to the Philippians? He tells you, And you know how he's going to do that? By giving you more Jesus. By pointing you towards Christ. Hebrews writes the same thing. Run the race that's set before you. How? By focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. Jesus says the same thing in John 15. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the other things. Don't worry about all the scheming. Don't worry about everything else that I'm going to do in your life. You focus on me. You abide in me. And I'll abide in you. And because of that, everything's going to work out. You're going to bear much fruit. If we want to be like Joseph, and we want to walk away from being like Jacob, then we need to acknowledge that our peace is found in Jesus. And our anxiety and our desire for control should be a reminder to us that we simply need more Jesus. That we simply need to follow him harder. That we simply need to press into him more. That we simply need to let go of something more. If you want to test this, trust him with something that's stressing you out in your life right now. Just this last week, I had a conversation with a couple in the church that I knew was going to be a hard conversation. And I had been stressed out about it for a while. The conversation happened the day after I stumbled on this lesson and this comparison of person of peace, person of strife. And I thought, all right, I'm gonna preach to myself here. Normally, when I go into a difficult conversation or a meeting, I have thought through, Jen will tell you, I have thought through every scenario. I've had every conversation in my head already. I hate being unprepared. I like to have thought through what's gonna happen so that I don't respond emotionally. I respond reasonably. I like to know that there's nothing that's going to happen that I'm not expecting. But for this one, I just chose to be Joseph. And I said, God, I know you love me. I know you love them. I know the results of this conversation matter to you. And that was good. And I went into the conversation trying to honor God with what we talked about, and so did they. And we would all tell you, the results of this conversation were far better than any of us thought they would be going into it. And the Holy Spirit was present with us that night, and he met with us that night. If this is a difficult concept for you, pick one thing that's stressing you out in your life and hand it to Jesus and watch him come through. Because here's what happens when we're people of peace and people of strife. Strife and peace permeate. Strife and peace, they bleed out onto other people. They act like my four-month-old son, John, right now. John permeates, man. He is a drool monster. Like, he wakes up. First of all, he's just drooling like crazy. I don't know what's going on in there. Jen picked him up in the living room the other day and was holding him up and smiling at him. And I saw what she couldn't, which was a bead of spit glimmering in the sunlight through the window that landed square on her forehead, and I died laughing. That is John. I did not even get her a towel. I was laughing too hard. Not only that, not only does he drool constantly, the kid wakes up, and the only thing he cares about in life is how much of his hand fits into his mouth. That's the only thing that matters to him. Nothing else. He doesn't care about a single thing else. It's just how much of this can I jam in here? And it's all he does. And it gets his hand all slobbery. So he'll wipe it on your face or he'll grab you. You'll pick him up. I picked him up yesterday. I picked him up when I was holding him and put him down and my forearm was wet from his leg, from drool that had run down and somehow his legs are really chubby. They had gotten in places and just to touch John is to have drool on you. It just is. I don't know how it happens. It just permeates. Strife and joy work the same way. When you're a person of strife and stress, it permeates, man. It bleeds. It gets on everybody around you. It gets on your spouse and it changes their days. It gets on your kids, it changes their days. It gets on your coworkers, it gets on your friends. Strife bleeds and permeates and has ripples on everyone around you. And so does peace, particularly in a world of so much strife. Normally, when people of strife are around each other, their stress starts amping everyone up, right? We kind of get into a frenzy. You're complaining about this, and I'm complaining about this, and life stinks together, and then we get all worked up about everything. But to be a person of peace that actually calms those waves of strife, well that has a calming effect on everyone around us too. To be a person of trust and for people to see this trust that Joseph had, regardless of circumstances, well that begins to bleed on other people too. So I thought it worth it to pause at this point in the story and acknowledge this idea that the same favor rests on these two men. The difference in their life is how they receive that favor. Jacob's striving made him blind to it. Joseph's trust helped him to see it. And it gave him peace and joy for his whole life that it took Jacob 40 years to experience. And so in our lives and in our situations, which ones do we want to be? Now, as Joseph is in jail, eventually Pharaoh gets angry with his cupbearer and his baker, and he throws them in jail too. And they're under the care of Joseph. While they're there, they have some dreams. And they go to Joseph and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you're a good, good at interpreting dreams. Can you tell us what they mean? And Joseph again says that I'm not good at it. God is, but let's see what you got. And they tell Joseph his dreams. I'm not, their dreams. I'm not going to detail those for you. Those are in the text and you can read them if you like. I hope you will. But they say, these are our dreams. What do they mean? And he looks at the cupbearer and he's like, great news. You, here's what's going to happen. In three days, Pharaoh is going to call you back to service and you're going to serve him. And he's going to restore you to your former position. You're going to go out of prison, back to your former life. Everything's going to be good. And the cupbearer is like, that's great. What's mine mean? And Joseph's like, not as good of news. You're going to get called out of here in three days as well, but when Pharaoh calls you out of here, he's going to hang you, and you're going to die in three days. And as they're leaving, Joseph looks at the cupbearer, and he says, don't forget me. When you go, and Pharaoh restores you, remember me, that I might get out of this pit. I know I'm doing great here in jail. I don't love it. So remember me to Pharaoh that I might get out of here as well. And chapter 39 ends with the somber news that everything that Joseph said would happen did happen, except the cupbearer forgot about him. And we're going to pick up the story next week and spend the whole week on the very first sentence in the next chapter. And it may just be the best part of this whole seven-week series. So I hope that you can come for it, and I hope that we'll get to see you for the hootenanny. Let me pray, and we'll carry on next week. Father, thank you for the way that you speak to us out of Scripture. Thank you for the way that you speak to us through circumstances. Lord, I just pray that... I pray that we would be sensitive to those things. God, give us ears to hear. We know, we know and we've seen over and over again that the same spirit that speaks to Joseph, that spoke to Jacob, that speaks to me, speaks to us. So God, speak to grace and move in grace and press on the hearts of grace for what you would have us do and where you would have us go. Give us the faith to trust you even when we can't fully see the results of that trust yet. Give us the peace that comes from trusting you. Let us this week, those of us who are Jacobs, experience just a taste of the joy that comes when we trust you with a stressful situation and watch you come through in the way that only you can. Father, help us to trust you in all things, to acknowledge that you care about the details of our life even more than we do, and that you have a plan for us that is better than any we could ever come up with. Help us to walk in trust of you, and in turn, walk in peace and influence the people around us. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.