Thank you, guys. Thank you, band. Thank you, Jordan, for the scripture reading this morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. It's so good to see everybody. You know, normally I've been making a very intentional choice to try not to differentiate between the in-person crowd and the online crowd, because I want folks who are not able to attend in person to feel no guilt or feel like second-class citizens for choosing to watch online, because I understand that's a necessity for a lot of you. But I will make an exception this morning and say that if you are here in person on Time Change Sunday, showered and attractive in appearance, you are a better Christian than the people who are at home watching. That's just how it goes. And I want you to know that. That's an encouragement to you from your pastor. This is week two of our series called Greater as we move through the book of Hebrews together. And it's called Greater because the author of Hebrews approaches the book through a lens of comparisons, of four main comparisons. Last week was a comparison to angels. We didn't get there. I don't regret it. You can read it in the Bible yourself. I think where we ended last week was more necessary and effective for the church. And this week we arrive at this comparison with Moses. And because of the way I'm wired, once I finish one sermon, I immediately begin to think about the next one because it's just, that's the life of the pastor. It's coming up in a week. You better get it together, pal. You got this many days to do the next one and do your thing. And so normally I finish prepping a sermon on a Wednesday or a Thursday, which means Thursday afternoon of last week, my mind immediately starts to work on this sermon that I'm giving you this week. And I know that it's on Moses. So I'm working out in my head this comparison to try to help us understand how important Moses was to the Hebrews in this culture. You'll remember that the letter of Hebrews was written to Hellenistic Jews who had converted to Christianity. So remember, a Hellenistic Jew is a Jewish person who grew up practicing Judaism or the Jewish faith, and then at some point or another converted to Christianity. And they're called Hellenistic Jews because they live outside of Israel. They grew up in a Greek context while being practicing Jews and then converted to the faith. And it's important that we also remember from last week that the recipients of this letter were undergoing persecution from without and within, from the Roman Empire violently persecuting them for declaring their faith, and from within, from their own Jewish communities that were trying to lull them and lure them back into a Jewish faith to walk away from this new radical Christian faith that they were claiming. So as we approach chapter 2, he makes a comparison that we're going to read in a second of Jesus to Moses and makes the point that Jesus is greater than Moses. And to help a 21st century American church understand the weight of this comparison. I was working on an illustration in my head that had to do with the framers of the Constitution and the original document of the United States and trying to figure out which founding father is Moses most like, which I've landed on George Washington, even though that is a perilous stance, I understand. But this is where I am. So I'm working all this out in preparation for the sermon. And then I sit down on Tuesday and really start to get into the text to figure out how I'm going to marry all the pieces together. And I read through chapters 3 and 4. And I realize the comparison that the author of Hebrews makes of Jesus to Moses is an important one, and we will look at it. But it's really a jumping off point to another comparison that he makes of the people of Hebrews to the ancient Hebrews in the desert. And that comparison actually allows us to apply this text to our lives today and is going to give us today a plea and an encouragement about our faith that I hope will inspire us and help us walk out the door more determined than ever to continue to walk in our Christian faith. And what I found in these chapters is actually this beautiful message of encouragement that I hope inspires you this morning. But to get there, we need to start where the author starts at the beginning of chapter 3 and look at the comparison that he makes between Jesus and Moses. And then I think what we'll do is we'll find something unexpected in the following text. Look with me in Hebrews chapter 3, verses 3 through 6. If you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. We're going to be all over chapter 3 and a little to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son, and we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope. So let me explain what's happening in these verses as he begins this comparison to Moses. He brings up Moses because, again, the audience is trying to be lured back into their old faith, into their heritage. And the author of that faith is presumed by the Jewish people to be Moses. He's the founding father of their faith. You can make a good argument for Abraham, but Moses is the one that wrote the first five books of the Bible. The first five books of the Bible are called the books of Moses, the books of the law that were authored by him. He's the George Washington. To a Hebrew person, Moses is what George Washington is to an American, like the founding father. This is the guy. That's how we understand him. We still look back on him. He was one of the framers of the Constitution. He helped with all that stuff. And like Thomas Jefferson, he's like a combo platter there. But that's the reverence that they had for him times like 10. He's the framer of everything that they believe. They would have said that Moses was the framer of the religion that they practiced. And what the author of Hebrews is saying is, no, no, no, no, no. He didn't frame this house. He didn't start that religion that they're trying to lure you back into. He didn't write those rules himself. That came from God. God built that house. He gets the honor from that. And the house isn't even the laws that you follow. The house is you. The house is the church. We are the kingdom of God and the body of Christ. The house persists now, 2,000 years later on a whole different continent. That's the house. And Moses wasn't the builder of the house. It's actually kind of shocking that he would say this. He's a servant in the house. But the beautiful part is, if Moses could be there in the audience hearing this read aloud, because that's what they would do with these letters, is they would, the pastor, the equivalent of the pastor would stand up and read the letter to them. And if Moses were in the audience hearing that letter, he would go, amen, I'm just a servant, you guys make too big of a deal out of me. I was just doing what God asked me to do. Jesus is the one that we should focus on. And so he sets their expectations from the very beginning by saying, it's not Moses that we should focus on. It's Christ. Christ is the framer of the house. You are the house. And Moses is no different than you. He's a servant within the house. We're cut from the same cloth. Peter tells us that you and Abraham, you and all the heroes of our faith are hewn from the same quarry by God. We all have the stuff in us of Moses. There was nothing special about Moses. Moses murdered a dude, went and hid out in the wilderness for 40 years, and then was called by a bush that wouldn't stop being on fire. And he argued with God five times until God finally says, just go do it, man. It says the wrath of the Lord was kindled against Moses, so then he went, okay? He stepped into the role that God asked him to play, but there's nothing fundamentally different about Moses than you. He was just obedient. He was a servant in the house. And this is what the author of Hebrews is setting up. But after he sets this up, he pretty much leaves the topic of Moses. It's kind of dumbfounding if you think about it. You think you're about to enter into this discourse about Moses. I've got this whole thing in my head about, okay, yeah, good. Let's dive into this Moses thing more. And I'm trying to figure out why does it matter to the American church, to the 21st century church, that Jesus is greater than Moses? Because listen, you all know that's not a new thing for you. You're not having a problem about which one to prioritize like they were. But then as you read the rest of the chapter, the comparison of Jesus to Moses is really not his focus in these next two chapters. He really jumps to another comparison that encourages them in a unique way and I think encourages us today. And so what we see is that Hebrews 3 and 4 are designed to be an encouragement by comparison. And not by comparison of Jesus to Moses, but by a comparison of generation to generation. He's not really going to belabor the point about Jesus being superior to Moses and all the ramifications of that. He jumps right from Moses into talking about the perils that were faced by the generation of Moses and the perils that are being faced by the Hebrews in this generation that he's writing to now. And I think that if we pay attention, then we can be encouraged in the same way the Hebrew audience was encouraged. He jumps right into this discourse that's summed up at the end of chapter 3. Chapter 3, verse 16 through chapter 4, the first verse. Chapter 4, 1. When we look at this verse, this is a good summary of what's going on in these two chapters. And I'm going to read it, and there's a good chance that a lot of us won't really know what any of it means. But then I'm going to explain it for several minutes because I really want us to understand what's going on here. In the time of Moses, you guys are probably familiar. If you go all the way back, second book of the Bible, you can read through the story of Moses. It is one of the most prolific stories in the Bible. If you've never read it, I would highly encourage you to do it. At my house, we have gotten into the habit of telling Lily a Bible story almost every night before bed. Before you go, oh man, that's impressive. We just started it like three weeks ago, okay? Because I realized I am way behind the eight ball in teaching the Bible to my own kids, so we need to get this started. And we started into the story of Moses, and I told it to her in like six parts, and she loves it. And it's really hard to tell the story of Moses to a five-year-old dodging, dancing through, like there is the inconvenient part about God killing the firstborn of all the Egyptian people. Probably not going to cover that with a five-year-old yet. So you kind of pick the parts that you can share, but we've walked through the story of Moses and she's compelled by it and I think you would be too. So if you never read it, you need to do it. And in the story of Moses, what we find is that after his time in the desert, God tells him, calls him through the burning bush, go back to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. The Hebrew people had lived as slaves in Egypt for 400 years, generation after generation of slaves. They never knew what it was to be free. And so Moses takes his brother Aaron, goes back to Pharaoh, insists that Pharaoh lets his people go. Pharaoh refuses. Then we have the 10 plagues that culminate in Passover that we still celebrate to this day. And Pharaoh lets the people go. The armies of Egypt who are in pursuit of the people perish in the Red Sea. And now they are in the desert and they're wandering through the desert for 40 years. And they're wandering through the desert until God feels like it is time for them to enter into the promised land. You've probably heard that phrase, the promised land. We throw it around in pop culture meaning different things in different places. But it really means the land that was promised to the descendants of Abraham. Back in Genesis 12, God makes three promises to Abraham. One of them is land. Your people will inherit this land on which you are standing, which is the land of Canaan, modern day Israel. And so they are working their way back to the promised land. And the way that it's phrased in Hebrews chapters three and four, the author talks about entering into that land as entering into rest. Because it's this idea of when it was Abraham and his family, they were nomads. They didn't set up permanent camp. They didn't have civilization to set up camp in Israel then. And eventually they had to move down to Egypt because of famine. And then in Egypt they lived as slaves. And now they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years, unpacking their stuff, setting up their tent, doing life for a couple of days, and then packing everything back up and moving down the road. Can you imagine trying to do that with elderly people and with children and how difficult that way of life would be? So 400 years of being slaves, 40 years of living in the desert, these people were not a people who knew what rest was. And so he says you're going to enter into rest because now you can finally, you can cross over the Jordan River, you can go into the promised land, you can build a permanent home, all the women can nest and do the things. I'm sure there was ancient Hebrew Kirklands where you could go buy all the clutter that you wanted and put it on your shelf, and now my house looks great. And they wanted to do this, and the men could go outside and work in the yard and all the stuff. Now we can set up camp, and we can do life, and we can just rest. And that's good. But all of that, while it was literally going on for the Hebrew people at the time of Moses, they were wandering through the desert, and there were struggles in the desert, and they were anticipating entering rest, entering into the promised land, and when they got there, they could finally rest. All that was literally true, but it's also one big, long metaphor for your salvation. The time in Egypt under slavery is when we are slaves to sin. It's a part of our life when we don't know Jesus. When we don't know who it is, we have no choice but to sin. Romans at length, in Romans, Paul tells us about how we are slaves to sin. We have no choice but to do evil, even when we want to do good. And then once we come to know Jesus, we're freed. We skip like a calf loosed from its stall, says Malachi. We're free to walk in the freedom of Jesus and to follow him. But in that freedom, we're in the desert. We're in life. We're going to face trials and struggles. We just talked about that in Ecclesiastes. But if we persevere, we will enter into the promised land. We will enter into God's rest. If you were here or paying attention in January, you'll remember that we did a whole week on Sabbath and what it means. And that this Sabbath rest is really a picture and a reminder of the eternity that waits on us after death, this eternal rest that we enter into with God. And I even in that sermon referred to Hebrews 3 and 4 and talked about the rest that this author describes. And so it's important to understand as we think about that story of Moses, they were intentionally taken through those seasons to mimic the seasons of your life, your time before Christ, and your time with Christ in this life in the desert when we're still not in eternity yet, and then entering into God's rest in eternity, spending eternity in heaven with God in the promised land. It's a metaphor for you and me. Do you understand? And it's important to understand that because one of the things that happened in the desert was that people would groan and complain. They were fed every day by manna. They would wake up in the morning and manna had fallen from the sky and that's what they ate. And the word manna literally in Hebrew means, what is it? We don't know what it is. It's just this nutrition brick that sits on the ground and everybody eats it. And as I was telling this story to Lily, she said, what's manna? I said, it's just a thing. Like we don't really know what it is. And she was like, I would get tired of that. I would want God to give me other food, like chicken nuggets and goldfish. That's what I want. And I thought, well, that's what the Hebrew people wanted too. They got ticked. God gave them quail and it made them sick. It's a whole different story. We didn't get into it. But they started to grumble, as would be natural. They were really thirsty sometimes. And they weren't being led to water. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night and they're just hoping that maybe tomorrow is the day that we get to the oasis of the river and we can finally drink some more and we can fill our vats again. Maybe that's when that will happen. We're sick and tired of man and there's all these struggles of living out in the desert and if you put yourself in that life, you can understand very quickly why people would complain about that. But in their complaining, they began to betray God. In their complaining, they began to say things like, Moses, take us back to Egypt. We would rather be slaves than live in the desert with you because at least there we had access to water every day. At least there I could cook, like, I don't know, a radish. Like, at least we had options back in Egypt. This stinks. One time they got so fed up with life in the desert that while Moses was away, they pulled all the gold that they had stolen from the Egyptian people and melted it down and fashioned it into a golden calf because they thought maybe this God will take better care of us in the desert than our current God. And they began to betray the very God that brought them out of slavery. And so this is what the author of Hebrews is referring to. When he talks about the people in the desert that failed because of unbelief, what happened was because they didn't believe, because they grumbled, Moses' generation that were the chief grumblers passed away. That's why God kept them in the desert for 40 years because he was waiting for that generation to go away so that the following faithful generation would be the one that would enter into the promised land. Those who grumbled and fell away and cursed God and built the golden calf and walked away in disbelief, those who walked away from their faith in the desert, they didn't enter into God's promised land. They never entered into God's rest. And so he's using that to encourage the Hebrew people in the first century A. Because they know the story very well. They know what happened in the desert. They don't need the robust explanation of these tight verses. Because they know good and well what happened to those people. They know what the author of Hebrews is referring to. And remember that they're facing persecution. They're facing violence and threats. If you proclaim Christ, they could take your life. They could arrest you. They could throw you in jail. They could harm your family. It was a really perilous time to be a believer. Their culture is ostracizing them and trying to woo them back to their old way of life, to what they would consider their heritage. You had to really, really want it to be a Christian. And you get the sense that there were some people within these churches to whom the letter was written that were falling away. You get the sense that these churches were going through a season of contraction, not expansion. You get the sense that it would have been really, really easy to just kind of quietly walk away from the faith and embrace an old way of life. And remember I told you last week that Hebrews is written to compel a persecuted church to persevere in their faith. And so in these chapters, he's trying to convince them to persevere by saying, remember the generation that came before you. Remember the story of your forefathers in the desert and how the ones who fell away, the ones who walked away from their faith, never entered into the promised land, never entered into God's rest. Well, now the same is at stake for you. Stay true to the faith, Hebrews. Don't walk away from the faith. Don't give in to persecution. Don't give in to ostracization. Don't give in to isolation. Stay true to the faith because there is a rest waiting for you. There is an eternity waiting for you. And he warns them at the end. He's imploring them and pleading with them. Hang in there. Don't give up on your faith. Don't walk away from God. I know it's hard. Stand firm in your faith. Look what happened in the previous generations. Don't you want to be the people who entered into the promised land instead of the people who perished in the desert, never experiencing God's rest. Hang in there. And I think that that's a remarkable message for us. The thing I love about that point, about what the author is doing here in chapters 3 and 4, is that it doesn't just apply to them. It doesn't just apply to this generation of believers. It applies to every generation of believers. This message echoes throughout the millennia since it was first preached to hang in there, to persevere in our faith. It applies to us as well. As a matter of fact, the biggest thing I take out of these passages is that your faith will never face a storm a previous generation hasn't weathered. Your faith, as you walk through this life, as you in a sense wander through the desert waiting for your turn to enter into the promised land, to enter into God's rest, your faith will not face a trial that a previous generation has not weathered. It is not unique to you. Consider the ones who came before you who persevered. If you have a godly parent or a grandparent, you stand on their shoulders, you watch them persevere. Do you think that their faith was always easy to them? Do you think that the spiritual heroes that you have in your life, that they didn't at some point in their life have a crisis of faith where they felt like walking away? I think now, as much as ever, there are those of us in our church. I mean, with the size church that we are, which is totally uncertain to me right now, there has to be people who feel like they're on the brink of just giving up on their faith. There has to be some of you here or watching or listening later in the week where 2020 has been really hard on your faith. I know that I had my own crisis of faith this year. I didn't realize it at the time, but when we had to go dark and only pre-record messages, and there was no people in the room when I would preach. At first, it wasn't that big of a deal to me because in my previous context at my old church, we used to pre-record our messages for our other campuses on Thursday every week anyways. We couldn't live stream. That was in the early times of live stream, and we just couldn't do it. And so it wasn't a big deal to me to come record a message in a room. That was fine. But it came to begin to feel like a performance instead of a spiritual exercise. And what I realized is when there's people in the room, when I get to look you in the eye, when I get to see head nods, when I get to sometimes see tears, when I know that the things that are connecting with me are also connecting with you, I feel like a pastor. I feel like I'm helping. I feel like I show up on Sunday morning, and maybe this isn't for everybody, and maybe everybody doesn't walk out of here going, man, Nate pitched a fastball today. Maybe you walk out going, that was terrible. That was the worst one he's ever done. But maybe for somebody else, it connected in such a way that was incredibly spiritually encouraging. And that's so much fun for me. That's so nourishing to me. And so in the week when I'm prepping and when I'm searching and when I'm praying, it's so helpful to me to know that when I get up and preach, it's going to be a spiritual exercise. If I've seemed more emotional since we've come back and began to gather again, that's why. Because when I just record onto a camera on Thursday or show up on Sunday with no one in the room, it just becomes a performance. And it was sucking me dry of anything spiritual that I had. And I don't say that for your sympathy. I say it so that you know I can offer you mine. So that if you've walked through a crisis of faith this year, that you know that you have company. The isolation that we felt this year, it would be really easy to fall away from faith. Matter of fact, my biggest fear in preaching this is that the people who need it most have already wandered off and are not going to hear it. And I would just say, if this is the first message you're listening to in a long time, this is why, pal. I'm glad you're here. I have spent a lot of time this year concerned about the people of our church beginning to drift away from God because the regularity of schedule hasn't been there that continues to draw us back into him. The meeting every week I think is powerful and effective. That's why we're told in Hebrews not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. There's an efficacy to that that I don't think we all the time understand on a head level. It's more of a soul thing. And the ease with which we could just simply drift away. Stop watching on Sunday and no one will know. Stop paying attention to small group because we're not meeting in person and we can't go anyways. Just how easy it would be to drift away from faith this last year has made me think that these chapters should resonate with us more deeply than maybe they ever have. And maybe some of us have walked through grief. Grief is always this big crucible of faith. I'm inclined to believe that faith isn't really mature and hardened and steadfast until it's walked through some sort of grief that makes you question the foundation of it. But then when we come through the other side of that strong, that's good, but some of us find ourselves in the middle of questioning. Some of us have doubts that we just continually push away and we never confront out of fear. And those work to weaken our faith. And you may be thinking, Nate, listen, man, yeah, sure, there's temptations to fall away from faith, but gosh, it's kind of difficult to compare us to those generations. Like, we're not wandering through the desert eating nutrition bricks every day, and we're not facing death and persecution for coming here on a Sunday morning. So take it easy on comparing us to that generation, and that's fair. But I actually think that all of us face a testing of our faith that those people never had to encounter. And I would actually argue with you that atrophy may be the biggest test of our faith. I think the atrophy of our faith may be the actual biggest test of our faith. I've been talking with some folks recently about sometimes I develop theories on life that are not really worth public consumption. But for the sake of an illustration, I'll share this one. I have this theory that our ability to handle stress and manage tasks atrophies as we get older and life doesn't require us to do as many things. So I think that if we go through life and we don't have daily demands on our schedule, we don't have problems that we have to solve, there's not stress that sits on us, that eventually what happens is our ability to manage tasks and to manage having full days and our ability to manage stress actually atrophies. So that when you get older, and I'm sorry, I'm going to get blowback from the generation that is my parents' age and older. I'm sorry. But what I've noticed is that sometimes you'll ask folks like, what are you doing Wednesday? And they're like, well, I was a kid. It's a busy day. I'm like, oh yeah, what are you doing? And they're like, well, you know, I gotta take my friend to the doctor at two. Okay, and then what? They're like, well, I'll probably just pack it in after that. All right, yeah, no, that's, get some good sleep on Tuesday, you know. And I think to them it feels full, but it's because for a long time they haven't had to have the fullness of schedule that I think, I would argue that when you have little kids and when you have kids in middle school, life demands a lot of you. Your capacity to handle stress and tasks is as high as it's going to get. But if you don't flex that muscle, it goes into atrophy so that taking a friend to the doctor at 2 o'clock feels busy. And that's fine. But it happens. I think our faith works the same way. I think when we're not forced to exercise our faith, it begins to atrophy. So that little tasks, little things that require little amounts of faith feel like these huge hills of godliness that we have to climb. Their life, the life of the people in these chapters, they required faith. Those people wandering through the desert, they don't make it through the day without faith. God literally lands food on their front yard every day. That requires faith to be hungry at night and believe that it's going to be there when I wake up in the morning. They're literally, they're formed in the desert. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night. They have to trust that that pillar is actually God and is actually taking them where they wanted to go. At one point or another, there was snakes in the camp and if they would bite you, you would die. And the only way to not die was to look at a cross with bronze serpents on it and know that that was God's blessing to you. You had to look at that cross in faith. It's the only way to heal you from death. Every day of their lives required their faith. Some of them got tired of that exercise and walked away. For the Hebrew people, every day of their lives required that faith. God, I am going to go walk in your presence today. I'm going to go proclaim your name today, and I'm trusting you to protect me and to protect my family. And if you don't, I trust that's okay too. It required faith. It is entirely possible to be a good Christian and yet have a life that requires very little faith. Parents, you want your kids to be Christians. And here's the good news. Statistically speaking, kids that grow up in a Christian home with a mom and a dad who both love Jesus, they're going to love Jesus too. The statistics are on your side that that child will accept Christ as their Savior. And that's a good thing. That's the most effective plan for evangelism that's ever existed. I love that truth. But I would also argue that because that's true, it doesn't really take a lot of faith on our part, a lot of hitting our knees and pleading with God to reach the hearts of our children and to enliven them to him. Because if we just bring them to church and put them around other people who love Jesus, they're probably going to get on board too. Raising good kids doesn't require a lot of faith. But if you want to release adults into the world, unleash disciples of Jesus who will impact their community and draw others to faith like a magnet and go and spend the rest of their lives making disciples. If you want to release eternity changers into the wild, then you better hit your knees. You better pray over that because that task is too big for you. We need to live lives that require faith of us. We need to set goals for our children that aren't easily attained by just coming to church every week, but by requiring us, by compelling us to get on our knees and pray for them and pour over them during the week while they sleep in their beds. Let's go into their rooms and let's get on our knees and let's plead with God to make them exactly who he created them to be and let's plead that they're better than us and that we don't get in the way. That takes faith. You want to go to work? Be a good worker. Be a good employee, employer. Have a good influence on the people around you. That's great. You don't really need faith to do that. You can figure that out all on your own. We know how to play the game and say the right things and not cuss when we're not supposed to and not get mad when we want to be mad. We know how to do that. You want to be a pastor and evangelist in your workplace? You want the people who work around you to come to know Jesus because they see him shining through you? You want that person that when you started that job who is very far from God, who is a militant atheist, you want them to come to faith? You better do more than just show up and be nice. You better hit your knees and pray for them. Grace, listen, American Christians have this unique privilege of living lives that look like good Christianity that really require very little soul-searching faith of us. And I'm deathly afraid that because of that, our faiths have atrophied to a place where one task, where one little thing seems like a mountain climb of faith. I would implore you this morning, not just to persevere in your faith, but to choose to live lives that require it. To dream God-sized dreams about, not about things that you will accomplish, but about people that you can impact, about things that you see happen in the lives of those around you. Let's begin to live lives that require faith. Anybody can lead a small group by just showing up and having a discussion and being nice. It doesn't require any faith. But what about if you decide that you want to disciple these people and see them have vibrant spiritual lives and vibrant marriages and see them disciple their children and see them radically reprioritize your lives? Then we need to pray. Let's choose to live lives that require faith of us. The other encouragement that he gives is the one that we actually started with today that Jordan read for us. It's the lone encouragement he gives in the chapter or piece of advice he gives in the chapter. He basically says, hey, hang in there. Stick with it. Don't fall away like the people in the desert. Be like the people who entered into the promised land. Persevere in your faith. He givesverance is virtually impossible without community. Perseverance is virtually impossible without community. And I just included that word virtually there because I was scared to say totally impossible without community, but that's really what I think. And I love it. Brothers and sisters, encourage one another in your faith today as long as it is called today. Every day, encourage the people around you. You may be listening to this sermon and think, Nate, you know, listen, I know other people are faltering in their faith. I've certainly moved through those seasons in my life, but I feel good right now. Me and God, like I'm walking with God and there's things I need to improve on, but like my faith is strong and that's great. Use that faith to encourage the people around you every day as long as it's called today. If you're struggling in your faith, if it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, then I did. I'm just kidding. If it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, if you feel weak in your faith, then draw on the strength of others. Look at other people who might be weak and say, listen, we don't have this all figured out, but let's encourage each other. There's practical ways to encourage each other. I don't want to get caught up in doing that because you're smart adults and you can figure that out. But I will say that one of the things that I'm in the practice of doing when I'm really focused on God and when I'm pursuing Him well is in my quiet times and in my prayers, He will always bring people to my mind. Oftentimes it's folks I haven't thought about in a number of months or a year or more. And I try to be obedient to sit down and to text them or to sit down and write them an email and just let them know I'm thinking about them and I'm praying for them. And you'd be surprised the number of times I get an email back that says, man, I can't believe the Lord put you on my heart this morning. This is what I'm dealing with. So I would leave you today with two encouragements. Let the message from Hebrews 3 and 4 echo down through the millennia to you and hang in there with your faith. Persevere. Don't walk away. Face your doubts. Face your fears. Face your grief. Persevere in your faith. One of the ways we can do that is to live lives that require it. The other way that we do that is to encourage those around us to live out their faith today as long as it is called today. This is something I think that grace is so good at. Let's lean on our community and use our community not just to make people feel welcome, not just to make people feel loved, but let us use and leverage our community to encourage one another in our faith. Let's infuse our friendships with spiritual encouragement. And let's be obedient and inspired, obedient to and inspired by the message of Hebrews 3 and 4. My prayer for you this week is that if any of you are on the brink of walking away, if any of you have been struggling in your faith, that this would be a week that encourages you to hang in there. And that the people around you would come around you even without you saying anything to them and they would encourage you in your faith today as long as it's called today. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for you. We are grateful for how big you are. We are grateful for how much you love us, for how much you strengthen us. God, I pray that we would see the shoulders that we stand on, the generations that come before us and the storms that they have weathered, that we would be heartened by that and that we would stand firm in our faith lest we fall away. God, for those of us for whom our faith is in atrophy, which is such an easy thing now, would you help us and show us how to choose lives that require faith? That force us to lean on you, knowing that if you don't come through, we will fall. God, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We know that it is in him that we can hope, that that is the hope that will not put us to shame, that that is the faith that we can have. I pray that if anyone doesn't know who he is, that they would today. For those of us who do know God but are tempted to walk away, would you help us to stand firm, pick us up by attending angels and draw our souls near to you even as we sing here in a minute. It's in your son's name that we pray these things. Amen.
Thank you, guys. Thank you, band. Thank you, Jordan, for the scripture reading this morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. It's so good to see everybody. You know, normally I've been making a very intentional choice to try not to differentiate between the in-person crowd and the online crowd, because I want folks who are not able to attend in person to feel no guilt or feel like second-class citizens for choosing to watch online, because I understand that's a necessity for a lot of you. But I will make an exception this morning and say that if you are here in person on Time Change Sunday, showered and attractive in appearance, you are a better Christian than the people who are at home watching. That's just how it goes. And I want you to know that. That's an encouragement to you from your pastor. This is week two of our series called Greater as we move through the book of Hebrews together. And it's called Greater because the author of Hebrews approaches the book through a lens of comparisons, of four main comparisons. Last week was a comparison to angels. We didn't get there. I don't regret it. You can read it in the Bible yourself. I think where we ended last week was more necessary and effective for the church. And this week we arrive at this comparison with Moses. And because of the way I'm wired, once I finish one sermon, I immediately begin to think about the next one because it's just, that's the life of the pastor. It's coming up in a week. You better get it together, pal. You got this many days to do the next one and do your thing. And so normally I finish prepping a sermon on a Wednesday or a Thursday, which means Thursday afternoon of last week, my mind immediately starts to work on this sermon that I'm giving you this week. And I know that it's on Moses. So I'm working out in my head this comparison to try to help us understand how important Moses was to the Hebrews in this culture. You'll remember that the letter of Hebrews was written to Hellenistic Jews who had converted to Christianity. So remember, a Hellenistic Jew is a Jewish person who grew up practicing Judaism or the Jewish faith, and then at some point or another converted to Christianity. And they're called Hellenistic Jews because they live outside of Israel. They grew up in a Greek context while being practicing Jews and then converted to the faith. And it's important that we also remember from last week that the recipients of this letter were undergoing persecution from without and within, from the Roman Empire violently persecuting them for declaring their faith, and from within, from their own Jewish communities that were trying to lull them and lure them back into a Jewish faith to walk away from this new radical Christian faith that they were claiming. So as we approach chapter 2, he makes a comparison that we're going to read in a second of Jesus to Moses and makes the point that Jesus is greater than Moses. And to help a 21st century American church understand the weight of this comparison. I was working on an illustration in my head that had to do with the framers of the Constitution and the original document of the United States and trying to figure out which founding father is Moses most like, which I've landed on George Washington, even though that is a perilous stance, I understand. But this is where I am. So I'm working all this out in preparation for the sermon. And then I sit down on Tuesday and really start to get into the text to figure out how I'm going to marry all the pieces together. And I read through chapters 3 and 4. And I realize the comparison that the author of Hebrews makes of Jesus to Moses is an important one, and we will look at it. But it's really a jumping off point to another comparison that he makes of the people of Hebrews to the ancient Hebrews in the desert. And that comparison actually allows us to apply this text to our lives today and is going to give us today a plea and an encouragement about our faith that I hope will inspire us and help us walk out the door more determined than ever to continue to walk in our Christian faith. And what I found in these chapters is actually this beautiful message of encouragement that I hope inspires you this morning. But to get there, we need to start where the author starts at the beginning of chapter 3 and look at the comparison that he makes between Jesus and Moses. And then I think what we'll do is we'll find something unexpected in the following text. Look with me in Hebrews chapter 3, verses 3 through 6. If you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. We're going to be all over chapter 3 and a little to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son, and we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope. So let me explain what's happening in these verses as he begins this comparison to Moses. He brings up Moses because, again, the audience is trying to be lured back into their old faith, into their heritage. And the author of that faith is presumed by the Jewish people to be Moses. He's the founding father of their faith. You can make a good argument for Abraham, but Moses is the one that wrote the first five books of the Bible. The first five books of the Bible are called the books of Moses, the books of the law that were authored by him. He's the George Washington. To a Hebrew person, Moses is what George Washington is to an American, like the founding father. This is the guy. That's how we understand him. We still look back on him. He was one of the framers of the Constitution. He helped with all that stuff. And like Thomas Jefferson, he's like a combo platter there. But that's the reverence that they had for him times like 10. He's the framer of everything that they believe. They would have said that Moses was the framer of the religion that they practiced. And what the author of Hebrews is saying is, no, no, no, no, no. He didn't frame this house. He didn't start that religion that they're trying to lure you back into. He didn't write those rules himself. That came from God. God built that house. He gets the honor from that. And the house isn't even the laws that you follow. The house is you. The house is the church. We are the kingdom of God and the body of Christ. The house persists now, 2,000 years later on a whole different continent. That's the house. And Moses wasn't the builder of the house. It's actually kind of shocking that he would say this. He's a servant in the house. But the beautiful part is, if Moses could be there in the audience hearing this read aloud, because that's what they would do with these letters, is they would, the pastor, the equivalent of the pastor would stand up and read the letter to them. And if Moses were in the audience hearing that letter, he would go, amen, I'm just a servant, you guys make too big of a deal out of me. I was just doing what God asked me to do. Jesus is the one that we should focus on. And so he sets their expectations from the very beginning by saying, it's not Moses that we should focus on. It's Christ. Christ is the framer of the house. You are the house. And Moses is no different than you. He's a servant within the house. We're cut from the same cloth. Peter tells us that you and Abraham, you and all the heroes of our faith are hewn from the same quarry by God. We all have the stuff in us of Moses. There was nothing special about Moses. Moses murdered a dude, went and hid out in the wilderness for 40 years, and then was called by a bush that wouldn't stop being on fire. And he argued with God five times until God finally says, just go do it, man. It says the wrath of the Lord was kindled against Moses, so then he went, okay? He stepped into the role that God asked him to play, but there's nothing fundamentally different about Moses than you. He was just obedient. He was a servant in the house. And this is what the author of Hebrews is setting up. But after he sets this up, he pretty much leaves the topic of Moses. It's kind of dumbfounding if you think about it. You think you're about to enter into this discourse about Moses. I've got this whole thing in my head about, okay, yeah, good. Let's dive into this Moses thing more. And I'm trying to figure out why does it matter to the American church, to the 21st century church, that Jesus is greater than Moses? Because listen, you all know that's not a new thing for you. You're not having a problem about which one to prioritize like they were. But then as you read the rest of the chapter, the comparison of Jesus to Moses is really not his focus in these next two chapters. He really jumps to another comparison that encourages them in a unique way and I think encourages us today. And so what we see is that Hebrews 3 and 4 are designed to be an encouragement by comparison. And not by comparison of Jesus to Moses, but by a comparison of generation to generation. He's not really going to belabor the point about Jesus being superior to Moses and all the ramifications of that. He jumps right from Moses into talking about the perils that were faced by the generation of Moses and the perils that are being faced by the Hebrews in this generation that he's writing to now. And I think that if we pay attention, then we can be encouraged in the same way the Hebrew audience was encouraged. He jumps right into this discourse that's summed up at the end of chapter 3. Chapter 3, verse 16 through chapter 4, the first verse. Chapter 4, 1. When we look at this verse, this is a good summary of what's going on in these two chapters. And I'm going to read it, and there's a good chance that a lot of us won't really know what any of it means. But then I'm going to explain it for several minutes because I really want us to understand what's going on here. In the time of Moses, you guys are probably familiar. If you go all the way back, second book of the Bible, you can read through the story of Moses. It is one of the most prolific stories in the Bible. If you've never read it, I would highly encourage you to do it. At my house, we have gotten into the habit of telling Lily a Bible story almost every night before bed. Before you go, oh man, that's impressive. We just started it like three weeks ago, okay? Because I realized I am way behind the eight ball in teaching the Bible to my own kids, so we need to get this started. And we started into the story of Moses, and I told it to her in like six parts, and she loves it. And it's really hard to tell the story of Moses to a five-year-old dodging, dancing through, like there is the inconvenient part about God killing the firstborn of all the Egyptian people. Probably not going to cover that with a five-year-old yet. So you kind of pick the parts that you can share, but we've walked through the story of Moses and she's compelled by it and I think you would be too. So if you never read it, you need to do it. And in the story of Moses, what we find is that after his time in the desert, God tells him, calls him through the burning bush, go back to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. The Hebrew people had lived as slaves in Egypt for 400 years, generation after generation of slaves. They never knew what it was to be free. And so Moses takes his brother Aaron, goes back to Pharaoh, insists that Pharaoh lets his people go. Pharaoh refuses. Then we have the 10 plagues that culminate in Passover that we still celebrate to this day. And Pharaoh lets the people go. The armies of Egypt who are in pursuit of the people perish in the Red Sea. And now they are in the desert and they're wandering through the desert for 40 years. And they're wandering through the desert until God feels like it is time for them to enter into the promised land. You've probably heard that phrase, the promised land. We throw it around in pop culture meaning different things in different places. But it really means the land that was promised to the descendants of Abraham. Back in Genesis 12, God makes three promises to Abraham. One of them is land. Your people will inherit this land on which you are standing, which is the land of Canaan, modern day Israel. And so they are working their way back to the promised land. And the way that it's phrased in Hebrews chapters three and four, the author talks about entering into that land as entering into rest. Because it's this idea of when it was Abraham and his family, they were nomads. They didn't set up permanent camp. They didn't have civilization to set up camp in Israel then. And eventually they had to move down to Egypt because of famine. And then in Egypt they lived as slaves. And now they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years, unpacking their stuff, setting up their tent, doing life for a couple of days, and then packing everything back up and moving down the road. Can you imagine trying to do that with elderly people and with children and how difficult that way of life would be? So 400 years of being slaves, 40 years of living in the desert, these people were not a people who knew what rest was. And so he says you're going to enter into rest because now you can finally, you can cross over the Jordan River, you can go into the promised land, you can build a permanent home, all the women can nest and do the things. I'm sure there was ancient Hebrew Kirklands where you could go buy all the clutter that you wanted and put it on your shelf, and now my house looks great. And they wanted to do this, and the men could go outside and work in the yard and all the stuff. Now we can set up camp, and we can do life, and we can just rest. And that's good. But all of that, while it was literally going on for the Hebrew people at the time of Moses, they were wandering through the desert, and there were struggles in the desert, and they were anticipating entering rest, entering into the promised land, and when they got there, they could finally rest. All that was literally true, but it's also one big, long metaphor for your salvation. The time in Egypt under slavery is when we are slaves to sin. It's a part of our life when we don't know Jesus. When we don't know who it is, we have no choice but to sin. Romans at length, in Romans, Paul tells us about how we are slaves to sin. We have no choice but to do evil, even when we want to do good. And then once we come to know Jesus, we're freed. We skip like a calf loosed from its stall, says Malachi. We're free to walk in the freedom of Jesus and to follow him. But in that freedom, we're in the desert. We're in life. We're going to face trials and struggles. We just talked about that in Ecclesiastes. But if we persevere, we will enter into the promised land. We will enter into God's rest. If you were here or paying attention in January, you'll remember that we did a whole week on Sabbath and what it means. And that this Sabbath rest is really a picture and a reminder of the eternity that waits on us after death, this eternal rest that we enter into with God. And I even in that sermon referred to Hebrews 3 and 4 and talked about the rest that this author describes. And so it's important to understand as we think about that story of Moses, they were intentionally taken through those seasons to mimic the seasons of your life, your time before Christ, and your time with Christ in this life in the desert when we're still not in eternity yet, and then entering into God's rest in eternity, spending eternity in heaven with God in the promised land. It's a metaphor for you and me. Do you understand? And it's important to understand that because one of the things that happened in the desert was that people would groan and complain. They were fed every day by manna. They would wake up in the morning and manna had fallen from the sky and that's what they ate. And the word manna literally in Hebrew means, what is it? We don't know what it is. It's just this nutrition brick that sits on the ground and everybody eats it. And as I was telling this story to Lily, she said, what's manna? I said, it's just a thing. Like we don't really know what it is. And she was like, I would get tired of that. I would want God to give me other food, like chicken nuggets and goldfish. That's what I want. And I thought, well, that's what the Hebrew people wanted too. They got ticked. God gave them quail and it made them sick. It's a whole different story. We didn't get into it. But they started to grumble, as would be natural. They were really thirsty sometimes. And they weren't being led to water. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night and they're just hoping that maybe tomorrow is the day that we get to the oasis of the river and we can finally drink some more and we can fill our vats again. Maybe that's when that will happen. We're sick and tired of man and there's all these struggles of living out in the desert and if you put yourself in that life, you can understand very quickly why people would complain about that. But in their complaining, they began to betray God. In their complaining, they began to say things like, Moses, take us back to Egypt. We would rather be slaves than live in the desert with you because at least there we had access to water every day. At least there I could cook, like, I don't know, a radish. Like, at least we had options back in Egypt. This stinks. One time they got so fed up with life in the desert that while Moses was away, they pulled all the gold that they had stolen from the Egyptian people and melted it down and fashioned it into a golden calf because they thought maybe this God will take better care of us in the desert than our current God. And they began to betray the very God that brought them out of slavery. And so this is what the author of Hebrews is referring to. When he talks about the people in the desert that failed because of unbelief, what happened was because they didn't believe, because they grumbled, Moses' generation that were the chief grumblers passed away. That's why God kept them in the desert for 40 years because he was waiting for that generation to go away so that the following faithful generation would be the one that would enter into the promised land. Those who grumbled and fell away and cursed God and built the golden calf and walked away in disbelief, those who walked away from their faith in the desert, they didn't enter into God's promised land. They never entered into God's rest. And so he's using that to encourage the Hebrew people in the first century A. Because they know the story very well. They know what happened in the desert. They don't need the robust explanation of these tight verses. Because they know good and well what happened to those people. They know what the author of Hebrews is referring to. And remember that they're facing persecution. They're facing violence and threats. If you proclaim Christ, they could take your life. They could arrest you. They could throw you in jail. They could harm your family. It was a really perilous time to be a believer. Their culture is ostracizing them and trying to woo them back to their old way of life, to what they would consider their heritage. You had to really, really want it to be a Christian. And you get the sense that there were some people within these churches to whom the letter was written that were falling away. You get the sense that these churches were going through a season of contraction, not expansion. You get the sense that it would have been really, really easy to just kind of quietly walk away from the faith and embrace an old way of life. And remember I told you last week that Hebrews is written to compel a persecuted church to persevere in their faith. And so in these chapters, he's trying to convince them to persevere by saying, remember the generation that came before you. Remember the story of your forefathers in the desert and how the ones who fell away, the ones who walked away from their faith, never entered into the promised land, never entered into God's rest. Well, now the same is at stake for you. Stay true to the faith, Hebrews. Don't walk away from the faith. Don't give in to persecution. Don't give in to ostracization. Don't give in to isolation. Stay true to the faith because there is a rest waiting for you. There is an eternity waiting for you. And he warns them at the end. He's imploring them and pleading with them. Hang in there. Don't give up on your faith. Don't walk away from God. I know it's hard. Stand firm in your faith. Look what happened in the previous generations. Don't you want to be the people who entered into the promised land instead of the people who perished in the desert, never experiencing God's rest. Hang in there. And I think that that's a remarkable message for us. The thing I love about that point, about what the author is doing here in chapters 3 and 4, is that it doesn't just apply to them. It doesn't just apply to this generation of believers. It applies to every generation of believers. This message echoes throughout the millennia since it was first preached to hang in there, to persevere in our faith. It applies to us as well. As a matter of fact, the biggest thing I take out of these passages is that your faith will never face a storm a previous generation hasn't weathered. Your faith, as you walk through this life, as you in a sense wander through the desert waiting for your turn to enter into the promised land, to enter into God's rest, your faith will not face a trial that a previous generation has not weathered. It is not unique to you. Consider the ones who came before you who persevered. If you have a godly parent or a grandparent, you stand on their shoulders, you watch them persevere. Do you think that their faith was always easy to them? Do you think that the spiritual heroes that you have in your life, that they didn't at some point in their life have a crisis of faith where they felt like walking away? I think now, as much as ever, there are those of us in our church. I mean, with the size church that we are, which is totally uncertain to me right now, there has to be people who feel like they're on the brink of just giving up on their faith. There has to be some of you here or watching or listening later in the week where 2020 has been really hard on your faith. I know that I had my own crisis of faith this year. I didn't realize it at the time, but when we had to go dark and only pre-record messages, and there was no people in the room when I would preach. At first, it wasn't that big of a deal to me because in my previous context at my old church, we used to pre-record our messages for our other campuses on Thursday every week anyways. We couldn't live stream. That was in the early times of live stream, and we just couldn't do it. And so it wasn't a big deal to me to come record a message in a room. That was fine. But it came to begin to feel like a performance instead of a spiritual exercise. And what I realized is when there's people in the room, when I get to look you in the eye, when I get to see head nods, when I get to sometimes see tears, when I know that the things that are connecting with me are also connecting with you, I feel like a pastor. I feel like I'm helping. I feel like I show up on Sunday morning, and maybe this isn't for everybody, and maybe everybody doesn't walk out of here going, man, Nate pitched a fastball today. Maybe you walk out going, that was terrible. That was the worst one he's ever done. But maybe for somebody else, it connected in such a way that was incredibly spiritually encouraging. And that's so much fun for me. That's so nourishing to me. And so in the week when I'm prepping and when I'm searching and when I'm praying, it's so helpful to me to know that when I get up and preach, it's going to be a spiritual exercise. If I've seemed more emotional since we've come back and began to gather again, that's why. Because when I just record onto a camera on Thursday or show up on Sunday with no one in the room, it just becomes a performance. And it was sucking me dry of anything spiritual that I had. And I don't say that for your sympathy. I say it so that you know I can offer you mine. So that if you've walked through a crisis of faith this year, that you know that you have company. The isolation that we felt this year, it would be really easy to fall away from faith. Matter of fact, my biggest fear in preaching this is that the people who need it most have already wandered off and are not going to hear it. And I would just say, if this is the first message you're listening to in a long time, this is why, pal. I'm glad you're here. I have spent a lot of time this year concerned about the people of our church beginning to drift away from God because the regularity of schedule hasn't been there that continues to draw us back into him. The meeting every week I think is powerful and effective. That's why we're told in Hebrews not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. There's an efficacy to that that I don't think we all the time understand on a head level. It's more of a soul thing. And the ease with which we could just simply drift away. Stop watching on Sunday and no one will know. Stop paying attention to small group because we're not meeting in person and we can't go anyways. Just how easy it would be to drift away from faith this last year has made me think that these chapters should resonate with us more deeply than maybe they ever have. And maybe some of us have walked through grief. Grief is always this big crucible of faith. I'm inclined to believe that faith isn't really mature and hardened and steadfast until it's walked through some sort of grief that makes you question the foundation of it. But then when we come through the other side of that strong, that's good, but some of us find ourselves in the middle of questioning. Some of us have doubts that we just continually push away and we never confront out of fear. And those work to weaken our faith. And you may be thinking, Nate, listen, man, yeah, sure, there's temptations to fall away from faith, but gosh, it's kind of difficult to compare us to those generations. Like, we're not wandering through the desert eating nutrition bricks every day, and we're not facing death and persecution for coming here on a Sunday morning. So take it easy on comparing us to that generation, and that's fair. But I actually think that all of us face a testing of our faith that those people never had to encounter. And I would actually argue with you that atrophy may be the biggest test of our faith. I think the atrophy of our faith may be the actual biggest test of our faith. I've been talking with some folks recently about sometimes I develop theories on life that are not really worth public consumption. But for the sake of an illustration, I'll share this one. I have this theory that our ability to handle stress and manage tasks atrophies as we get older and life doesn't require us to do as many things. So I think that if we go through life and we don't have daily demands on our schedule, we don't have problems that we have to solve, there's not stress that sits on us, that eventually what happens is our ability to manage tasks and to manage having full days and our ability to manage stress actually atrophies. So that when you get older, and I'm sorry, I'm going to get blowback from the generation that is my parents' age and older. I'm sorry. But what I've noticed is that sometimes you'll ask folks like, what are you doing Wednesday? And they're like, well, I was a kid. It's a busy day. I'm like, oh yeah, what are you doing? And they're like, well, you know, I gotta take my friend to the doctor at two. Okay, and then what? They're like, well, I'll probably just pack it in after that. All right, yeah, no, that's, get some good sleep on Tuesday, you know. And I think to them it feels full, but it's because for a long time they haven't had to have the fullness of schedule that I think, I would argue that when you have little kids and when you have kids in middle school, life demands a lot of you. Your capacity to handle stress and tasks is as high as it's going to get. But if you don't flex that muscle, it goes into atrophy so that taking a friend to the doctor at 2 o'clock feels busy. And that's fine. But it happens. I think our faith works the same way. I think when we're not forced to exercise our faith, it begins to atrophy. So that little tasks, little things that require little amounts of faith feel like these huge hills of godliness that we have to climb. Their life, the life of the people in these chapters, they required faith. Those people wandering through the desert, they don't make it through the day without faith. God literally lands food on their front yard every day. That requires faith to be hungry at night and believe that it's going to be there when I wake up in the morning. They're literally, they're formed in the desert. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night. They have to trust that that pillar is actually God and is actually taking them where they wanted to go. At one point or another, there was snakes in the camp and if they would bite you, you would die. And the only way to not die was to look at a cross with bronze serpents on it and know that that was God's blessing to you. You had to look at that cross in faith. It's the only way to heal you from death. Every day of their lives required their faith. Some of them got tired of that exercise and walked away. For the Hebrew people, every day of their lives required that faith. God, I am going to go walk in your presence today. I'm going to go proclaim your name today, and I'm trusting you to protect me and to protect my family. And if you don't, I trust that's okay too. It required faith. It is entirely possible to be a good Christian and yet have a life that requires very little faith. Parents, you want your kids to be Christians. And here's the good news. Statistically speaking, kids that grow up in a Christian home with a mom and a dad who both love Jesus, they're going to love Jesus too. The statistics are on your side that that child will accept Christ as their Savior. And that's a good thing. That's the most effective plan for evangelism that's ever existed. I love that truth. But I would also argue that because that's true, it doesn't really take a lot of faith on our part, a lot of hitting our knees and pleading with God to reach the hearts of our children and to enliven them to him. Because if we just bring them to church and put them around other people who love Jesus, they're probably going to get on board too. Raising good kids doesn't require a lot of faith. But if you want to release adults into the world, unleash disciples of Jesus who will impact their community and draw others to faith like a magnet and go and spend the rest of their lives making disciples. If you want to release eternity changers into the wild, then you better hit your knees. You better pray over that because that task is too big for you. We need to live lives that require faith of us. We need to set goals for our children that aren't easily attained by just coming to church every week, but by requiring us, by compelling us to get on our knees and pray for them and pour over them during the week while they sleep in their beds. Let's go into their rooms and let's get on our knees and let's plead with God to make them exactly who he created them to be and let's plead that they're better than us and that we don't get in the way. That takes faith. You want to go to work? Be a good worker. Be a good employee, employer. Have a good influence on the people around you. That's great. You don't really need faith to do that. You can figure that out all on your own. We know how to play the game and say the right things and not cuss when we're not supposed to and not get mad when we want to be mad. We know how to do that. You want to be a pastor and evangelist in your workplace? You want the people who work around you to come to know Jesus because they see him shining through you? You want that person that when you started that job who is very far from God, who is a militant atheist, you want them to come to faith? You better do more than just show up and be nice. You better hit your knees and pray for them. Grace, listen, American Christians have this unique privilege of living lives that look like good Christianity that really require very little soul-searching faith of us. And I'm deathly afraid that because of that, our faiths have atrophied to a place where one task, where one little thing seems like a mountain climb of faith. I would implore you this morning, not just to persevere in your faith, but to choose to live lives that require it. To dream God-sized dreams about, not about things that you will accomplish, but about people that you can impact, about things that you see happen in the lives of those around you. Let's begin to live lives that require faith. Anybody can lead a small group by just showing up and having a discussion and being nice. It doesn't require any faith. But what about if you decide that you want to disciple these people and see them have vibrant spiritual lives and vibrant marriages and see them disciple their children and see them radically reprioritize your lives? Then we need to pray. Let's choose to live lives that require faith of us. The other encouragement that he gives is the one that we actually started with today that Jordan read for us. It's the lone encouragement he gives in the chapter or piece of advice he gives in the chapter. He basically says, hey, hang in there. Stick with it. Don't fall away like the people in the desert. Be like the people who entered into the promised land. Persevere in your faith. He givesverance is virtually impossible without community. Perseverance is virtually impossible without community. And I just included that word virtually there because I was scared to say totally impossible without community, but that's really what I think. And I love it. Brothers and sisters, encourage one another in your faith today as long as it is called today. Every day, encourage the people around you. You may be listening to this sermon and think, Nate, you know, listen, I know other people are faltering in their faith. I've certainly moved through those seasons in my life, but I feel good right now. Me and God, like I'm walking with God and there's things I need to improve on, but like my faith is strong and that's great. Use that faith to encourage the people around you every day as long as it's called today. If you're struggling in your faith, if it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, then I did. I'm just kidding. If it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, if you feel weak in your faith, then draw on the strength of others. Look at other people who might be weak and say, listen, we don't have this all figured out, but let's encourage each other. There's practical ways to encourage each other. I don't want to get caught up in doing that because you're smart adults and you can figure that out. But I will say that one of the things that I'm in the practice of doing when I'm really focused on God and when I'm pursuing Him well is in my quiet times and in my prayers, He will always bring people to my mind. Oftentimes it's folks I haven't thought about in a number of months or a year or more. And I try to be obedient to sit down and to text them or to sit down and write them an email and just let them know I'm thinking about them and I'm praying for them. And you'd be surprised the number of times I get an email back that says, man, I can't believe the Lord put you on my heart this morning. This is what I'm dealing with. So I would leave you today with two encouragements. Let the message from Hebrews 3 and 4 echo down through the millennia to you and hang in there with your faith. Persevere. Don't walk away. Face your doubts. Face your fears. Face your grief. Persevere in your faith. One of the ways we can do that is to live lives that require it. The other way that we do that is to encourage those around us to live out their faith today as long as it is called today. This is something I think that grace is so good at. Let's lean on our community and use our community not just to make people feel welcome, not just to make people feel loved, but let us use and leverage our community to encourage one another in our faith. Let's infuse our friendships with spiritual encouragement. And let's be obedient and inspired, obedient to and inspired by the message of Hebrews 3 and 4. My prayer for you this week is that if any of you are on the brink of walking away, if any of you have been struggling in your faith, that this would be a week that encourages you to hang in there. And that the people around you would come around you even without you saying anything to them and they would encourage you in your faith today as long as it's called today. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for you. We are grateful for how big you are. We are grateful for how much you love us, for how much you strengthen us. God, I pray that we would see the shoulders that we stand on, the generations that come before us and the storms that they have weathered, that we would be heartened by that and that we would stand firm in our faith lest we fall away. God, for those of us for whom our faith is in atrophy, which is such an easy thing now, would you help us and show us how to choose lives that require faith? That force us to lean on you, knowing that if you don't come through, we will fall. God, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We know that it is in him that we can hope, that that is the hope that will not put us to shame, that that is the faith that we can have. I pray that if anyone doesn't know who he is, that they would today. For those of us who do know God but are tempted to walk away, would you help us to stand firm, pick us up by attending angels and draw our souls near to you even as we sing here in a minute. It's in your son's name that we pray these things. Amen.
Good morning. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh. And I just got to be up front with you first and foremost. It's been a little while since I've done something like this, since I've talked in front of a congregation like this. In fact, I think we have a picture of the last time I did it. That's me on the right. Okay, that was my bar mitzvah. That was several years ago. And a few things have changed since then, so I'm trying to adapt with that. So last week, Nate brought the first installment in our series of best practices. He talked about reading the Bible. And I don't know about you, but I felt convicted about that. And I, even as a pastor, do not spend as much time in the Bible as I think that I should. And I dedicated more time this week in the Bible, and I feel extremely blessed because of that. I've also heard that many of you are doing the same thing and that it's a blessing as well. I would like to encourage you to keep going with that, to keep on. And if those of you that haven't jumped in yet, it's not too late to start reading your Bible. Jump in, start today. I'm sure it will be a blessing in your lives. So a few months ago when we were talking about this series on best practices, Nate said to me, Steve, we're going to be doing one on worship. And as the worship pastor at Grace, I would like you to take that one. And I immediately said, oh, this is great. This is great. This is what I do. This is going to be so easy. This is low-hanging fruit. I've wanted to share with you for a long time. I really only get about a minute or so during each service each Sunday, so I get to share everything that I want to about worship. So I sat down, and I started putting my thoughts together, started doing some research, looking in the Bible, looking in my textbooks, and I quickly realized that if I were to share everything that I want to share with you guys about worship, we would easily be here for half the day. So we're not going to do that today. I can see all the... Okay, good. No, we're not going to do that today. What we're going to do today is just focus on what I think would be a good starting point on worship, and that is to talk about authentic worship. So we're going to be talking about authentic worship today. So when I was 12 years old, my uncle made me a tape. He dubbed it. Do you remember how to do that with the buttons and the this and then you undo it? Yeah. Okay. So he made me a tape of Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey. And if you're not familiar with this concert, this is the one where he hit the scene and he lit his guitar on fire, okay? So 12-year-old Steve hearing this for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. I immediately, immediately ran down to the garage. I grabbed my wiffle ball bat. I grabbed some string. I grabbed some tape. I ran back up to my room. I put the string on the bat. I put on the bat. I put on sunglasses, my best Hard Rock Cafe shirt, and I pretended to be Jimi Hendrix in the mirror. I had to be a part of it. Music has that way of affecting us deeply. Music goes into us. It affects us. Have you ever seen people who have Alzheimer's or maybe dementia, that they're living in another reality, and then somebody plays Amazing Grace or Just As I Am for them, and they have this moment of clarity, and they can sing every word and every note. This is how music affects us. The first time that I went to church with my wife, for those of you who don't know, we were separated at one point. We were heading toward divorce. We started going to church together. It was the music, when I walked in, the music that broke down those walls that I could hear the good news of Jesus. This is the effect that music has on us. But is all music worship? No. Is God looking just for music? No. He's looking for worship. So we're going to be talking about worship today. But worship is kind of a broad term. We can worship all kinds of things. We can worship God. That's good. We can worship other gods. Not so good. We can worship the universe, nature, our finances, our careers, our spouses, our children. So today I thought it would be good to kind of hone in on what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about authentic worship in the church, corporate worship. And so I have a definition for us that worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and hearts. So worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, bodies, and hearts. Did you know that praise and worship is mentioned over 400 times in the Bible? That we're commanded to worship over 50 times in the Bible? So anything that's mentioned that much in the Bible I think deserves for us to take a look at. So first of all, we want to look at why we don't praise the Lord with our breath, Psalm 98 says that the rocks will cry out and the rivers will clap their hands. Now we live close enough to the mountains here in Raleigh. Have you ever been next to a river and listened to the sound of that? Does it not sound like applause? And the rivers clap their hands for God. All of creation praises God. The next time that you're walking along a river, maybe taking a hike, take a moment and worship God right there. Not only did he create worship here, he created it in heaven. You understand? All of this goes away. But not worship. Worship is our primary activity in heaven. So he created it. Also, he is worthy of it. He is worthy of worship. Great is the Lord, most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. That's Psalm 145. He's the only one worthy of worship. Now, we sometimes get that wrong. We sometimes misstep. We sometimes put things ahead of God when maybe we shouldn't. If you do that, listen, you're not alone. John, we just did a series in John. He wrote the Gospel of John. He also wrote some letters and Revelation. John, in Revelation, And you know that this is true. And why do we know it's true? He wrote the book. He could have left that part out, but he didn't. He chose to keep it in there so that we can know that we're not alone in this. He's also present in worship. What did we talk about earlier for our definition? Worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. He's present in worship. This is something that I think we kind of take for granted nowadays, that he's present in worship, okay? Before Christ, to be in the presence of God was not a common thing. Before Christ, God dwelled in the Holy of Holies. Now, you have to understand that in Israel, there was the temple. Most people could not go into the inner part of the temple, the holy place. They were on the outskirts. They could not even be close to the presence of God there. Then, within that holy place, there was something called the Holy of Holies. And that's where the Ark of the Covenant was. The only person, there was only one person that could go in there. That was the high priest. Only one person could go into the presence of God, and that only happened once a year on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur. Once a year, one person could be in the presence of God. Okay? And let me give you an idea of how serious they were about this. They were so serious that they would tie a rope around him when he went in so that in case he died while in there, they could pull him out. That's pretty amazing. I mean, the fact that that's how serious it was to be in the presence of God. Now, through Jesus, we're able to be in the presence of God. He says that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. So how do we do this? Well, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. So with our voices, we can sing. The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts and I am helped. My heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him. That's Psalm 28. We know this. There's time dedicated in our service to this. There are billboard charts called praise and worship. Singing connects us to God. It connects our hearts to our minds. In fact, praise is mentioned in multiple ways, this singing in the Old and New Testaments. We have tehillah, to praise vocally in song or shouts. Hallelujah, you might be familiar with. This is a shouting call for corporate praise. We have tada, which is to sing praises together as one community in harmony. This is what we do when we gather each week in worship. So we worship God in his presence with our voices and with our bodies also. We see this multiple times. Now I'm going to say a few verses here. I just want you to know that I'm not making this stuff up. I mean, this stuff is in the Bible as worthy offerings to God. I mean, this is acceptable worship to God. You can bow your head to God. The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, Genesis 24. You can lift your hands. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift my hand, Psalm 63. This word is yadah, to lift or throw arms upward in praise and surrender. A similar one to this is spreading out your hands, like this. This is sabah, to reach out with affection to God, to feel his hold on us. This is almost like you're reaching out for a hug from God. This is I need you, God. Bowing your knee. praising God. We're getting excited about God. Clap your hands, all people. Shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47. Here's one of my personal favorites. Falling on your face before the Lord. Leviticus 9. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offerings and the pieces of fat on the altar.. If you put your envelope in there, and the Lord's fire came and consumed it, I think we'd all shout and hit the floor, right? And you know what? We would be worshiping. Okay, dancing. Uh-oh. Dancing. Okay. And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was wearing a linen ephod. This is 2 Samuel 6. David is king of Israel. He's returning with the Ark of the Covenant to put it in the Holy of Holies. He's built a tabernacle for it. He's super excited. And how excited is he? He rips off his clothes and basically dances in his underwear through the streets. And I think we have a video of this. Anybody catch who that was? Richard Gere? You should go find that on Netflix. So what he's doing is halal. This is to boast foolishly, to make a show of it. But what do we see there, right? So he's dancing through the streets. He doesn't have his clothes on. Everybody's cheering and shouting, right? But what else did we see? We saw his wife looking out the window, right? Okay, and this is actually, ouch, right? Right? But David retorted to Michal, I was dancing before the Lord who chose me above your father and all his family. He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord. So I celebrate before the Lord. And then he goes one step further. Yes, I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes. But those servant girls who you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished. He was dancing with abandonment before the Lord. How often have we been in this place? I'm sure we've all been there at some point in our lives where we've done something maybe vulnerable or something that we believed in or just put ourselves out there and people criticize that. They look down on us for it. It's happened to all of us. It's not a good feeling. On the other side of things, how often are we the Michal in that story where we look at someone and go, why are they doing that? Why are they acting that way? Maybe don't they know that we don't do that here? It's easy to see ourselves in both situations here. So we talked about worship is the activity of praising, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. This is the authentic part I want to talk about. We worship with our hearts. It's good for us to worship. God created us to delight in him. We experience this delight a great deal in worship. In fact, Psalm 92 says, it is good to give thanks to, a few years ago, I was at a worship conference in Orlando. And it was one of the big conferences that they do every year. There are about 1,500 worship leaders there. And all the popular worship artists were there too. So we had like Hillsong and Bethel, Phil Wickham, Chris Tomlin, Elevation. I mean, it's a lot of the songs that we do here, those artists were there. And the times of worship were very powerful. I mean, they know how to usher you into the presence of God. And it was powerful. But at one point during the conference, the power went out. And everybody in the room, all 1,500 of us laughed first because, you know, we're all in worship ministry. It's like, ha, ha, ha, like we're elbowing each other. Like, it even happens to them. You know, look at them squirm. And so we were laughing. And then we see all the people dressed in all black coming, like running around the stage and everything with their flashlights trying to figure out what the problem is. And when it was obvious that the power wasn't going to just come back on, we kind of settled down a little bit. And out of the front of the room, there were maybe eight people or so, started singing, How Great Thou Art. We sang that this morning. Worship doesn't need the lights and the sound and all the stuff. Worship is about our voices, our bodies, and our hearts in God's presence. They started singing. It started rippling out as the verse was going. Everybody knows this song. We're all worship leaders. There's 1,500 of us singing relatively well in harmony. Okay? This moment was amazing. I'm singing my heart out. It gets to everybody singing and worshiping. The room is erupting in worship. We get to the chorus, and I go to sing, and nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I'm so overwhelmed by what's happening that I fall to my knees and just lift my hands and try to whisper the words. I had never heard anything so beautiful, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven. That really was, I believe, a taste of what heaven is going to sound like. It's not going to sound like acoustic guitars and drums. It's going to sound like God's created people worshiping with our breath. This was authentic worship. So our authentic worship here is going to be us. It's not going to be what the church down the street is doing. If we copy what the church down the street is doing, it's not authentic, right? If we copy what they're doing online at megachurches and see how they're worshiping, it's not going to be authentic, because authentic worship comes from the heart. So we need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. We need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. Now, also, feeling something in your heart. Did you notice something in all this worship that I mentioned in the Bible that it's all actions? It's all things that you feel in your heart and you do. So authentic worship isn't going to be feeling something in your heart and not doing anything about it. That's not authentic either. Authentic worship is feeling it in your heart and expressing it. But are we going to look like the church down the street? No, we're not. We're going to look like us. So, we are going to have a time of worship here at the end of our service. And let me just tell you, as we go into that time, you know, grace is a very unique church, I think. Grace has been through a lot over the years. Grace is full of people who love each other. I will say that most people who come here for the first time, one of the first comments that they have is how much a family it feels like here, how friendly people are, how included they feel. What I'm trying to say is that this is a safe place. This is a place where family can be family with each other. If you are feeling a way to express yourself, let's not be the Michals in the story and say, what are they doing? We don't do that here. And listen, I know that it's going to look different. It's going to look different. It's going to look like us. And all that we want as a church is to worship God with all of our hearts. So I'd like to ask you all to stand and join me as we pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we get the opportunity to glorify you in your presence. What an amazing thing it is that we can come into your presence and use the breath that you have given to us to just give back to you. Lord, we know that you work deeply in us, that you love us, that you knew us before we were born, that you know every hair on our heads. So Lord, we ask that that love just come through us now in a powerful way. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's worship together. You give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only you give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only is your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only he's so good and worthy of our praise. Let it pour out of you. will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing great are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing pray are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Hey, are you Lord? It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath. In our lives. So we pour out our praise to you only. What a gift it is to be able to praise God freely and openly. And we can only do that because he allows us to. He created us to worship him and to glorify him. And he does that because he loves us. He is jealous of me. Love's like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are How great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us all. He is jealous of me, loves like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us Oh, how He loves us Oh are his portion and he is our prize drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes if his grace is an ocean we're all sinking and heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that he loves us oh how he loves us oh how he loves us Oh Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves Oh Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves.
Good morning. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh. And I just got to be up front with you first and foremost. It's been a little while since I've done something like this, since I've talked in front of a congregation like this. In fact, I think we have a picture of the last time I did it. That's me on the right. Okay, that was my bar mitzvah. That was several years ago. And a few things have changed since then, so I'm trying to adapt with that. So last week, Nate brought the first installment in our series of best practices. He talked about reading the Bible. And I don't know about you, but I felt convicted about that. And I, even as a pastor, do not spend as much time in the Bible as I think that I should. And I dedicated more time this week in the Bible, and I feel extremely blessed because of that. I've also heard that many of you are doing the same thing and that it's a blessing as well. I would like to encourage you to keep going with that, to keep on. And if those of you that haven't jumped in yet, it's not too late to start reading your Bible. Jump in, start today. I'm sure it will be a blessing in your lives. So a few months ago when we were talking about this series on best practices, Nate said to me, Steve, we're going to be doing one on worship. And as the worship pastor at Grace, I would like you to take that one. And I immediately said, oh, this is great. This is great. This is what I do. This is going to be so easy. This is low-hanging fruit. I've wanted to share with you for a long time. I really only get about a minute or so during each service each Sunday, so I get to share everything that I want to about worship. So I sat down, and I started putting my thoughts together, started doing some research, looking in the Bible, looking in my textbooks, and I quickly realized that if I were to share everything that I want to share with you guys about worship, we would easily be here for half the day. So we're not going to do that today. I can see all the... Okay, good. No, we're not going to do that today. What we're going to do today is just focus on what I think would be a good starting point on worship, and that is to talk about authentic worship. So we're going to be talking about authentic worship today. So when I was 12 years old, my uncle made me a tape. He dubbed it. Do you remember how to do that with the buttons and the this and then you undo it? Yeah. Okay. So he made me a tape of Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey. And if you're not familiar with this concert, this is the one where he hit the scene and he lit his guitar on fire, okay? So 12-year-old Steve hearing this for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. I immediately, immediately ran down to the garage. I grabbed my wiffle ball bat. I grabbed some string. I grabbed some tape. I ran back up to my room. I put the string on the bat. I put on the bat. I put on sunglasses, my best Hard Rock Cafe shirt, and I pretended to be Jimi Hendrix in the mirror. I had to be a part of it. Music has that way of affecting us deeply. Music goes into us. It affects us. Have you ever seen people who have Alzheimer's or maybe dementia, that they're living in another reality, and then somebody plays Amazing Grace or Just As I Am for them, and they have this moment of clarity, and they can sing every word and every note. This is how music affects us. The first time that I went to church with my wife, for those of you who don't know, we were separated at one point. We were heading toward divorce. We started going to church together. It was the music, when I walked in, the music that broke down those walls that I could hear the good news of Jesus. This is the effect that music has on us. But is all music worship? No. Is God looking just for music? No. He's looking for worship. So we're going to be talking about worship today. But worship is kind of a broad term. We can worship all kinds of things. We can worship God. That's good. We can worship other gods. Not so good. We can worship the universe, nature, our finances, our careers, our spouses, our children. So today I thought it would be good to kind of hone in on what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about authentic worship in the church, corporate worship. And so I have a definition for us that worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and hearts. So worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, bodies, and hearts. Did you know that praise and worship is mentioned over 400 times in the Bible? That we're commanded to worship over 50 times in the Bible? So anything that's mentioned that much in the Bible I think deserves for us to take a look at. So first of all, we want to look at why we don't praise the Lord with our breath, Psalm 98 says that the rocks will cry out and the rivers will clap their hands. Now we live close enough to the mountains here in Raleigh. Have you ever been next to a river and listened to the sound of that? Does it not sound like applause? And the rivers clap their hands for God. All of creation praises God. The next time that you're walking along a river, maybe taking a hike, take a moment and worship God right there. Not only did he create worship here, he created it in heaven. You understand? All of this goes away. But not worship. Worship is our primary activity in heaven. So he created it. Also, he is worthy of it. He is worthy of worship. Great is the Lord, most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. That's Psalm 145. He's the only one worthy of worship. Now, we sometimes get that wrong. We sometimes misstep. We sometimes put things ahead of God when maybe we shouldn't. If you do that, listen, you're not alone. John, we just did a series in John. He wrote the Gospel of John. He also wrote some letters and Revelation. John, in Revelation, And you know that this is true. And why do we know it's true? He wrote the book. He could have left that part out, but he didn't. He chose to keep it in there so that we can know that we're not alone in this. He's also present in worship. What did we talk about earlier for our definition? Worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. He's present in worship. This is something that I think we kind of take for granted nowadays, that he's present in worship, okay? Before Christ, to be in the presence of God was not a common thing. Before Christ, God dwelled in the Holy of Holies. Now, you have to understand that in Israel, there was the temple. Most people could not go into the inner part of the temple, the holy place. They were on the outskirts. They could not even be close to the presence of God there. Then, within that holy place, there was something called the Holy of Holies. And that's where the Ark of the Covenant was. The only person, there was only one person that could go in there. That was the high priest. Only one person could go into the presence of God, and that only happened once a year on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur. Once a year, one person could be in the presence of God. Okay? And let me give you an idea of how serious they were about this. They were so serious that they would tie a rope around him when he went in so that in case he died while in there, they could pull him out. That's pretty amazing. I mean, the fact that that's how serious it was to be in the presence of God. Now, through Jesus, we're able to be in the presence of God. He says that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. So how do we do this? Well, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. So with our voices, we can sing. The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts and I am helped. My heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him. That's Psalm 28. We know this. There's time dedicated in our service to this. There are billboard charts called praise and worship. Singing connects us to God. It connects our hearts to our minds. In fact, praise is mentioned in multiple ways, this singing in the Old and New Testaments. We have tehillah, to praise vocally in song or shouts. Hallelujah, you might be familiar with. This is a shouting call for corporate praise. We have tada, which is to sing praises together as one community in harmony. This is what we do when we gather each week in worship. So we worship God in his presence with our voices and with our bodies also. We see this multiple times. Now I'm going to say a few verses here. I just want you to know that I'm not making this stuff up. I mean, this stuff is in the Bible as worthy offerings to God. I mean, this is acceptable worship to God. You can bow your head to God. The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, Genesis 24. You can lift your hands. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift my hand, Psalm 63. This word is yadah, to lift or throw arms upward in praise and surrender. A similar one to this is spreading out your hands, like this. This is sabah, to reach out with affection to God, to feel his hold on us. This is almost like you're reaching out for a hug from God. This is I need you, God. Bowing your knee. praising God. We're getting excited about God. Clap your hands, all people. Shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47. Here's one of my personal favorites. Falling on your face before the Lord. Leviticus 9. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offerings and the pieces of fat on the altar.. If you put your envelope in there, and the Lord's fire came and consumed it, I think we'd all shout and hit the floor, right? And you know what? We would be worshiping. Okay, dancing. Uh-oh. Dancing. Okay. And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was wearing a linen ephod. This is 2 Samuel 6. David is king of Israel. He's returning with the Ark of the Covenant to put it in the Holy of Holies. He's built a tabernacle for it. He's super excited. And how excited is he? He rips off his clothes and basically dances in his underwear through the streets. And I think we have a video of this. Anybody catch who that was? Richard Gere? You should go find that on Netflix. So what he's doing is halal. This is to boast foolishly, to make a show of it. But what do we see there, right? So he's dancing through the streets. He doesn't have his clothes on. Everybody's cheering and shouting, right? But what else did we see? We saw his wife looking out the window, right? Okay, and this is actually, ouch, right? Right? But David retorted to Michal, I was dancing before the Lord who chose me above your father and all his family. He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord. So I celebrate before the Lord. And then he goes one step further. Yes, I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes. But those servant girls who you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished. He was dancing with abandonment before the Lord. How often have we been in this place? I'm sure we've all been there at some point in our lives where we've done something maybe vulnerable or something that we believed in or just put ourselves out there and people criticize that. They look down on us for it. It's happened to all of us. It's not a good feeling. On the other side of things, how often are we the Michal in that story where we look at someone and go, why are they doing that? Why are they acting that way? Maybe don't they know that we don't do that here? It's easy to see ourselves in both situations here. So we talked about worship is the activity of praising, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. This is the authentic part I want to talk about. We worship with our hearts. It's good for us to worship. God created us to delight in him. We experience this delight a great deal in worship. In fact, Psalm 92 says, it is good to give thanks to, a few years ago, I was at a worship conference in Orlando. And it was one of the big conferences that they do every year. There are about 1,500 worship leaders there. And all the popular worship artists were there too. So we had like Hillsong and Bethel, Phil Wickham, Chris Tomlin, Elevation. I mean, it's a lot of the songs that we do here, those artists were there. And the times of worship were very powerful. I mean, they know how to usher you into the presence of God. And it was powerful. But at one point during the conference, the power went out. And everybody in the room, all 1,500 of us laughed first because, you know, we're all in worship ministry. It's like, ha, ha, ha, like we're elbowing each other. Like, it even happens to them. You know, look at them squirm. And so we were laughing. And then we see all the people dressed in all black coming, like running around the stage and everything with their flashlights trying to figure out what the problem is. And when it was obvious that the power wasn't going to just come back on, we kind of settled down a little bit. And out of the front of the room, there were maybe eight people or so, started singing, How Great Thou Art. We sang that this morning. Worship doesn't need the lights and the sound and all the stuff. Worship is about our voices, our bodies, and our hearts in God's presence. They started singing. It started rippling out as the verse was going. Everybody knows this song. We're all worship leaders. There's 1,500 of us singing relatively well in harmony. Okay? This moment was amazing. I'm singing my heart out. It gets to everybody singing and worshiping. The room is erupting in worship. We get to the chorus, and I go to sing, and nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I'm so overwhelmed by what's happening that I fall to my knees and just lift my hands and try to whisper the words. I had never heard anything so beautiful, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven. That really was, I believe, a taste of what heaven is going to sound like. It's not going to sound like acoustic guitars and drums. It's going to sound like God's created people worshiping with our breath. This was authentic worship. So our authentic worship here is going to be us. It's not going to be what the church down the street is doing. If we copy what the church down the street is doing, it's not authentic, right? If we copy what they're doing online at megachurches and see how they're worshiping, it's not going to be authentic, because authentic worship comes from the heart. So we need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. We need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. Now, also, feeling something in your heart. Did you notice something in all this worship that I mentioned in the Bible that it's all actions? It's all things that you feel in your heart and you do. So authentic worship isn't going to be feeling something in your heart and not doing anything about it. That's not authentic either. Authentic worship is feeling it in your heart and expressing it. But are we going to look like the church down the street? No, we're not. We're going to look like us. So, we are going to have a time of worship here at the end of our service. And let me just tell you, as we go into that time, you know, grace is a very unique church, I think. Grace has been through a lot over the years. Grace is full of people who love each other. I will say that most people who come here for the first time, one of the first comments that they have is how much a family it feels like here, how friendly people are, how included they feel. What I'm trying to say is that this is a safe place. This is a place where family can be family with each other. If you are feeling a way to express yourself, let's not be the Michals in the story and say, what are they doing? We don't do that here. And listen, I know that it's going to look different. It's going to look different. It's going to look like us. And all that we want as a church is to worship God with all of our hearts. So I'd like to ask you all to stand and join me as we pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we get the opportunity to glorify you in your presence. What an amazing thing it is that we can come into your presence and use the breath that you have given to us to just give back to you. Lord, we know that you work deeply in us, that you love us, that you knew us before we were born, that you know every hair on our heads. So Lord, we ask that that love just come through us now in a powerful way. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's worship together. You give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only you give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only is your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only he's so good and worthy of our praise. Let it pour out of you. will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing great are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing pray are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Hey, are you Lord? It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath. In our lives. So we pour out our praise to you only. What a gift it is to be able to praise God freely and openly. And we can only do that because he allows us to. He created us to worship him and to glorify him. And he does that because he loves us. He is jealous of me. Love's like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are How great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us all. He is jealous of me, loves like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us Oh, how He loves us Oh are his portion and he is our prize drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes if his grace is an ocean we're all sinking and heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that he loves us oh how he loves us oh how he loves us Oh Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves Oh Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves.
Good morning. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh. And I just got to be up front with you first and foremost. It's been a little while since I've done something like this, since I've talked in front of a congregation like this. In fact, I think we have a picture of the last time I did it. That's me on the right. Okay, that was my bar mitzvah. That was several years ago. And a few things have changed since then, so I'm trying to adapt with that. So last week, Nate brought the first installment in our series of best practices. He talked about reading the Bible. And I don't know about you, but I felt convicted about that. And I, even as a pastor, do not spend as much time in the Bible as I think that I should. And I dedicated more time this week in the Bible, and I feel extremely blessed because of that. I've also heard that many of you are doing the same thing and that it's a blessing as well. I would like to encourage you to keep going with that, to keep on. And if those of you that haven't jumped in yet, it's not too late to start reading your Bible. Jump in, start today. I'm sure it will be a blessing in your lives. So a few months ago when we were talking about this series on best practices, Nate said to me, Steve, we're going to be doing one on worship. And as the worship pastor at Grace, I would like you to take that one. And I immediately said, oh, this is great. This is great. This is what I do. This is going to be so easy. This is low-hanging fruit. I've wanted to share with you for a long time. I really only get about a minute or so during each service each Sunday, so I get to share everything that I want to about worship. So I sat down, and I started putting my thoughts together, started doing some research, looking in the Bible, looking in my textbooks, and I quickly realized that if I were to share everything that I want to share with you guys about worship, we would easily be here for half the day. So we're not going to do that today. I can see all the... Okay, good. No, we're not going to do that today. What we're going to do today is just focus on what I think would be a good starting point on worship, and that is to talk about authentic worship. So we're going to be talking about authentic worship today. So when I was 12 years old, my uncle made me a tape. He dubbed it. Do you remember how to do that with the buttons and the this and then you undo it? Yeah. Okay. So he made me a tape of Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey. And if you're not familiar with this concert, this is the one where he hit the scene and he lit his guitar on fire, okay? So 12-year-old Steve hearing this for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. I immediately, immediately ran down to the garage. I grabbed my wiffle ball bat. I grabbed some string. I grabbed some tape. I ran back up to my room. I put the string on the bat. I put on the bat. I put on sunglasses, my best Hard Rock Cafe shirt, and I pretended to be Jimi Hendrix in the mirror. I had to be a part of it. Music has that way of affecting us deeply. Music goes into us. It affects us. Have you ever seen people who have Alzheimer's or maybe dementia, that they're living in another reality, and then somebody plays Amazing Grace or Just As I Am for them, and they have this moment of clarity, and they can sing every word and every note. This is how music affects us. The first time that I went to church with my wife, for those of you who don't know, we were separated at one point. We were heading toward divorce. We started going to church together. It was the music, when I walked in, the music that broke down those walls that I could hear the good news of Jesus. This is the effect that music has on us. But is all music worship? No. Is God looking just for music? No. He's looking for worship. So we're going to be talking about worship today. But worship is kind of a broad term. We can worship all kinds of things. We can worship God. That's good. We can worship other gods. Not so good. We can worship the universe, nature, our finances, our careers, our spouses, our children. So today I thought it would be good to kind of hone in on what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about authentic worship in the church, corporate worship. And so I have a definition for us that worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and hearts. So worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, bodies, and hearts. Did you know that praise and worship is mentioned over 400 times in the Bible? That we're commanded to worship over 50 times in the Bible? So anything that's mentioned that much in the Bible I think deserves for us to take a look at. So first of all, we want to look at why we don't praise the Lord with our breath, Psalm 98 says that the rocks will cry out and the rivers will clap their hands. Now we live close enough to the mountains here in Raleigh. Have you ever been next to a river and listened to the sound of that? Does it not sound like applause? And the rivers clap their hands for God. All of creation praises God. The next time that you're walking along a river, maybe taking a hike, take a moment and worship God right there. Not only did he create worship here, he created it in heaven. You understand? All of this goes away. But not worship. Worship is our primary activity in heaven. So he created it. Also, he is worthy of it. He is worthy of worship. Great is the Lord, most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. That's Psalm 145. He's the only one worthy of worship. Now, we sometimes get that wrong. We sometimes misstep. We sometimes put things ahead of God when maybe we shouldn't. If you do that, listen, you're not alone. John, we just did a series in John. He wrote the Gospel of John. He also wrote some letters and Revelation. John, in Revelation, And you know that this is true. And why do we know it's true? He wrote the book. He could have left that part out, but he didn't. He chose to keep it in there so that we can know that we're not alone in this. He's also present in worship. What did we talk about earlier for our definition? Worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. He's present in worship. This is something that I think we kind of take for granted nowadays, that he's present in worship, okay? Before Christ, to be in the presence of God was not a common thing. Before Christ, God dwelled in the Holy of Holies. Now, you have to understand that in Israel, there was the temple. Most people could not go into the inner part of the temple, the holy place. They were on the outskirts. They could not even be close to the presence of God there. Then, within that holy place, there was something called the Holy of Holies. And that's where the Ark of the Covenant was. The only person, there was only one person that could go in there. That was the high priest. Only one person could go into the presence of God, and that only happened once a year on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur. Once a year, one person could be in the presence of God. Okay? And let me give you an idea of how serious they were about this. They were so serious that they would tie a rope around him when he went in so that in case he died while in there, they could pull him out. That's pretty amazing. I mean, the fact that that's how serious it was to be in the presence of God. Now, through Jesus, we're able to be in the presence of God. He says that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. So how do we do this? Well, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. So with our voices, we can sing. The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts and I am helped. My heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him. That's Psalm 28. We know this. There's time dedicated in our service to this. There are billboard charts called praise and worship. Singing connects us to God. It connects our hearts to our minds. In fact, praise is mentioned in multiple ways, this singing in the Old and New Testaments. We have tehillah, to praise vocally in song or shouts. Hallelujah, you might be familiar with. This is a shouting call for corporate praise. We have tada, which is to sing praises together as one community in harmony. This is what we do when we gather each week in worship. So we worship God in his presence with our voices and with our bodies also. We see this multiple times. Now I'm going to say a few verses here. I just want you to know that I'm not making this stuff up. I mean, this stuff is in the Bible as worthy offerings to God. I mean, this is acceptable worship to God. You can bow your head to God. The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, Genesis 24. You can lift your hands. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift my hand, Psalm 63. This word is yadah, to lift or throw arms upward in praise and surrender. A similar one to this is spreading out your hands, like this. This is sabah, to reach out with affection to God, to feel his hold on us. This is almost like you're reaching out for a hug from God. This is I need you, God. Bowing your knee. praising God. We're getting excited about God. Clap your hands, all people. Shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47. Here's one of my personal favorites. Falling on your face before the Lord. Leviticus 9. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offerings and the pieces of fat on the altar.. If you put your envelope in there, and the Lord's fire came and consumed it, I think we'd all shout and hit the floor, right? And you know what? We would be worshiping. Okay, dancing. Uh-oh. Dancing. Okay. And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was wearing a linen ephod. This is 2 Samuel 6. David is king of Israel. He's returning with the Ark of the Covenant to put it in the Holy of Holies. He's built a tabernacle for it. He's super excited. And how excited is he? He rips off his clothes and basically dances in his underwear through the streets. And I think we have a video of this. Anybody catch who that was? Richard Gere? You should go find that on Netflix. So what he's doing is halal. This is to boast foolishly, to make a show of it. But what do we see there, right? So he's dancing through the streets. He doesn't have his clothes on. Everybody's cheering and shouting, right? But what else did we see? We saw his wife looking out the window, right? Okay, and this is actually, ouch, right? Right? But David retorted to Michal, I was dancing before the Lord who chose me above your father and all his family. He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord. So I celebrate before the Lord. And then he goes one step further. Yes, I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes. But those servant girls who you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished. He was dancing with abandonment before the Lord. How often have we been in this place? I'm sure we've all been there at some point in our lives where we've done something maybe vulnerable or something that we believed in or just put ourselves out there and people criticize that. They look down on us for it. It's happened to all of us. It's not a good feeling. On the other side of things, how often are we the Michal in that story where we look at someone and go, why are they doing that? Why are they acting that way? Maybe don't they know that we don't do that here? It's easy to see ourselves in both situations here. So we talked about worship is the activity of praising, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. This is the authentic part I want to talk about. We worship with our hearts. It's good for us to worship. God created us to delight in him. We experience this delight a great deal in worship. In fact, Psalm 92 says, it is good to give thanks to, a few years ago, I was at a worship conference in Orlando. And it was one of the big conferences that they do every year. There are about 1,500 worship leaders there. And all the popular worship artists were there too. So we had like Hillsong and Bethel, Phil Wickham, Chris Tomlin, Elevation. I mean, it's a lot of the songs that we do here, those artists were there. And the times of worship were very powerful. I mean, they know how to usher you into the presence of God. And it was powerful. But at one point during the conference, the power went out. And everybody in the room, all 1,500 of us laughed first because, you know, we're all in worship ministry. It's like, ha, ha, ha, like we're elbowing each other. Like, it even happens to them. You know, look at them squirm. And so we were laughing. And then we see all the people dressed in all black coming, like running around the stage and everything with their flashlights trying to figure out what the problem is. And when it was obvious that the power wasn't going to just come back on, we kind of settled down a little bit. And out of the front of the room, there were maybe eight people or so, started singing, How Great Thou Art. We sang that this morning. Worship doesn't need the lights and the sound and all the stuff. Worship is about our voices, our bodies, and our hearts in God's presence. They started singing. It started rippling out as the verse was going. Everybody knows this song. We're all worship leaders. There's 1,500 of us singing relatively well in harmony. Okay? This moment was amazing. I'm singing my heart out. It gets to everybody singing and worshiping. The room is erupting in worship. We get to the chorus, and I go to sing, and nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I'm so overwhelmed by what's happening that I fall to my knees and just lift my hands and try to whisper the words. I had never heard anything so beautiful, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven. That really was, I believe, a taste of what heaven is going to sound like. It's not going to sound like acoustic guitars and drums. It's going to sound like God's created people worshiping with our breath. This was authentic worship. So our authentic worship here is going to be us. It's not going to be what the church down the street is doing. If we copy what the church down the street is doing, it's not authentic, right? If we copy what they're doing online at megachurches and see how they're worshiping, it's not going to be authentic, because authentic worship comes from the heart. So we need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. We need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. Now, also, feeling something in your heart. Did you notice something in all this worship that I mentioned in the Bible that it's all actions? It's all things that you feel in your heart and you do. So authentic worship isn't going to be feeling something in your heart and not doing anything about it. That's not authentic either. Authentic worship is feeling it in your heart and expressing it. But are we going to look like the church down the street? No, we're not. We're going to look like us. So, we are going to have a time of worship here at the end of our service. And let me just tell you, as we go into that time, you know, grace is a very unique church, I think. Grace has been through a lot over the years. Grace is full of people who love each other. I will say that most people who come here for the first time, one of the first comments that they have is how much a family it feels like here, how friendly people are, how included they feel. What I'm trying to say is that this is a safe place. This is a place where family can be family with each other. If you are feeling a way to express yourself, let's not be the Michals in the story and say, what are they doing? We don't do that here. And listen, I know that it's going to look different. It's going to look different. It's going to look like us. And all that we want as a church is to worship God with all of our hearts. So I'd like to ask you all to stand and join me as we pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we get the opportunity to glorify you in your presence. What an amazing thing it is that we can come into your presence and use the breath that you have given to us to just give back to you. Lord, we know that you work deeply in us, that you love us, that you knew us before we were born, that you know every hair on our heads. So Lord, we ask that that love just come through us now in a powerful way. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's worship together. You give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only you give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only is your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only he's so good and worthy of our praise. Let it pour out of you. will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing great are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing pray are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Hey, are you Lord? It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath. In our lives. So we pour out our praise to you only. What a gift it is to be able to praise God freely and openly. And we can only do that because he allows us to. He created us to worship him and to glorify him. And he does that because he loves us. He is jealous of me. Love's like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are How great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us all. He is jealous of me, loves like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us Oh, how He loves us Oh are his portion and he is our prize drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes if his grace is an ocean we're all sinking and heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that he loves us oh how he loves us oh how he loves us Oh Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves Oh Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this November. Whenever I'm supposed to come up without a bumper video, the video that we played between the last song and the sermon is called a bumper video. Whenever I'm supposed to come up during a prayer and there's not a bumper video, I'm always terrified that I'm standing on the stage at the wrong time. There was a time at my old church where I was the host. I had Haley's job. They paid me for it. She does it for free. And I was in the front row, and I thought that the guy gave me the nod. You know, just this is it after this. And I was like, okay. So I come up, and he's standing back looking at me, and he goes, and he just strums the next song and goes, and I literally just walked up and looked at him in horror and then walked off the other side of the stage and sat down over there. And that was a congregation of like 700 people and they were all laughing at me. And I deserved it. That's germane to nothing. I'm just inviting you into the fear that I still fear, feel when I'm standing right here as Aaron is praying. Thank you to Kyle, our student pastor, who stepped in for me last week and did a phenomenal job as he continued on with the series. I appreciate that, man. We are in a series called The Songs We Sing, looking at some of the songs that we sing as a congregation, finding them in Scripture, allowing Scripture to imbue them with a greater meaning for us. And it's been really, really fun to move through this series, hear you guys responding, hear you guys singing, know that these things are connecting and that these songs can have deeper meaning for us. I continue to believe and emphasize that getting together and singing together on a Sunday morning as a body of believers is the most important thing that we do on Sunday mornings together. So I'm glad that we're continuing to do that. This week, we're looking at a song called The Battle Belongs. Next week, I'm preaching on a Christmas song, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, kind of to transition us into the Christmas season. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you guys next week. But this week, as I said, we're focused on a song called The Battle Belongs. It's one that we've sung around here for a while. You probably know it, but in case you don't, I'm just going to read you the chorus. This will not be on the screen, so you'll just be forced to pay attention to me. But the chorus goes like this. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees with my hands lifted high. Did you guys think I was going to sing this to you? No way. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. In every fear I lay at your feet, I'll sing through the night. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. This song comes directly out of, I think, two stories in the Old Testament. Now, as we sing this song, there's songs about you guiding me through the shadow and through the valley. That comes from Psalm 23. There's words about his ways being higher than our ways. That comes from Romans 11, that if God is for us, who can be against us? That comes from Romans 8. So there's different lyrics in the song that come from different places in scripture, but the heart of the song itself comes from two fantastic stories in the Old Testament. Now, if you spent any time at all at Grace, you know that I love my Old Testament. I love my Old Testament stories. It's a really, it tends to be a more entertaining read than the New Testament once you get past Acts, right? So I love the narrative stories of the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, the one I'm going to focus on primarily today is in 2 Chronicles chapter 20. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. 2 Chronicles can be hard for some of us to find because maybe we don't have a lot of experience there. It's in the first third of the Bible. There's a lot of pages in 1 and 2 Chronicles, so you're bound to find it if you thumb through a little bit. If you see kings, you're gaining on it. And if you see Ezra or Nehemiah, you've gone too far. All right. So Chronicles chapter 20. And in Chronicles chapter 20, there's a guy who's the king named Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat is the king of Judah. By this point in history, the kingdom has split. After David, we have Solomon. And after Solomon is the king, we have Rehoboam. Rehoboam was a cruddy king. He was a jerk. He was a dummy. And so Jeroboam took the northern kingdoms referred to for the rest of the Old Testament typically as Israel. And Rehoboam kept the southern kingdom typically referred to as Judah. For the rest of the lines of those kings and those stories are told in 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The northern tribes of Israel had no good kings. They all did what was right in their own eyes. They all betrayed God. Southern Israel, depending on who you talk to, Judah had between three and five good kings. As I kind of dug into the research, in my opinion, they had three good kings. We're going to talk about two of them this morning. One of them was Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat, 2 Chronicles chapter 20, receives word that the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Ammonites and the Meubites, I don't know how to say the last one, Meubites, were gathering together to attack him. Clearly, they felt like they had seen a weakness and they were ready to exploit it. Now, Judah is not a geopolitical player. They're just trying to carve out their place in the world. They're by no means a superpower. They're not scaring anyone. And so these three tribes assemble against him and decide now's the time we're going to strike. We're going to come in and we're going to conquer Judah. We're going to conquer Jerusalem and overthrow Jehoshaphat. And so word of this planned attack and the three tribes uniting against Jehoshaphat gets back to him., these three tribes have amassed against you. They're coming in to take over. They probably have the advantage. What do you want to do? His very first reaction is he was afraid. After he processes the fact that he's afraid, what should I do? He prays. He prays and he assembles all of Judah. Everyone from the different towns, the different tribes in Judah, come to Jerusalem, fast with me. Implicit in fasting is praying. Pray with me. Let's seek the face of the Lord and what we should do. So that's what they did. All the people of Judah gathered in Jerusalem. And they got on their hands and their knees and they cried out to God and they said, what do we do? God, what do we do here? We're going to be attacked. What should we do? And so they respond in prayer. And God answers them in this way on down the passage, verses 15 through 18. And he said, We say the battle belongs to the Lord. That's where it comes from. It's from the high priest reassuring Jehoshaphat, don't worry about it. Do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This battle's not yours anyways. This battle belongs to God. Verse 16. And here's the scene. Jehoshaphat gets word that the Moabites, Ammonites, and the Miites are coming to attack them and overthrow them. He's scared. He prays. He gathers the people of Judah to pray with him. Father, what would you have us do here? At the end of the prayer, the high priest says, the Lord has directed me. And you're supposed to do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This is not your battle. This is God's. Go out and align yourself for battle. And the instructions that follow are, lead with the Levites and let them sing worship. Lead with worship and lead with praise. And that's what they did. He fell on his face. He praised God with all the people. And it's important that we understand that worship isn't just singing. Worship can be praying. Worship can be a posture. Worship is living a life of sacrifice. Worship has a large definition. And so he falls on his face. If you're hearing these instructions, he falls on his face with the rest of Judah and they pray to God. And then the next morning they get up. They're not fearful. They go out to the battle lines. They put in front of them the worship pastors, which has to be the worst possible idea, right? Like if we needed to defend grace, would you want Aaron and Greg to do it? Or would you want people with like military experience? I'm just asking the question. I don't think you would want me to do it, but they're not the tops on the list is all I'm saying. But they put the skinny jeans and the beards out in front. This is who we're going to lead with. By the way, all these jokes, none of this is my insight. These are all Aaron's jokes. I'm stealing them. This is a sermon he's done before, this part of it. So I'm authorized to use these things. I mean, just so we're all clear about how tough I am, I raked for like 45 minutes last week. My arm was sore for a day, and I got a blister on one of my fingies, even though I was wearing gloves. All right, so that's what we're dealing with here. But they put the worship leaders out in front, and they praise God. And as they praise God, God incites a riot in the camp of the three different tribes. They conquer each other, and they walk away dismayed. God's army doesn't have to fire a single arrow or throw a single spear. The battle is won because it belongs to the Lord. There's another wonderful example of this, and I believe it's referenced in the chorus when it says, everything I lay at your feet. And I think the most descriptive example of this is in 2 Kings chapter 19. It's a story of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was another one of the good kings of Jerusalem, or yeah, of Jerusalem and of Judah. And what's going on here is that Hezekiah receives word that the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, is sweeping through the Middle East and is storming towards Jerusalem intent on conquering it. And this isn't three random roving tribes that happen to exist around you, Moab and Amman. It's not those places. This is Assyria, the precursor to the Persian empire. This is Sennacherib, a name that strikes fear in everyone that hears it. This is a big deal. And Sennacherib on his way deploys basically propaganda in Jerusalem. It's a letter that he sends that he writes to the people of Jerusalem that says, hey, you're going to want to get out of Dodge because I'm coming to wreck shop. And if you're still there when I get there, you and your family's going to die, just so you know. And someone takes that letter and they hand it to Hezekiah. And this is Hezekiah's response in verse 14. Verse 19. The propaganda letter is brought to King Hezekiah. Hezekiah knows. If Sennacherib wants Jerusalem, he's going to take it. They have as much chance of defending Jerusalem from Sennacherib as my daughter Lily has defending her Reese's peanut butter cups at Halloween from me. I'm going to win that fight. And so what does Hezekiah do? He doesn't do what you think he should do. What he should do is assemble the generals right away. Assemble the quartermaster right away. Assemble the treasurer right away. Whoever's in charge of agriculture, how we're going to feed the people, get them in the room. He needs to assemble the cabinet right away. How do we defend Jerusalem? Someone start boiling some oil. I saw that on Netflix one time. That seems to be a thing you should do when you're defending the city. Get everybody together and let's come up with a plan to repel the Assyrian army. That's what we need to do. That's not what he does. He takes the letter. He goes to the temple. He lays it down at the feet of the Lord, and he prays. And he says, God, this is an affront to you. What would you have us do? His first response is to pray. And similarly to Jehoshaphat, God directs Hezekiah, don't do anything. Don't fire an arrow. Just watch, and I'll win. And the next morning, he incites a riot in the camp of the Assyrians. They rout each other, and they walk back to Assyria licking their wounds. God's armies didn't have to fire an arrow. Because they're good kings, Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah responded in prayer to everything that came their way. And so, of course, when I read these stories and I reflect on them, and I think about these were put here over a thousand years ago for us today. What is it that I should take from them? I think there's myriad applications here. But the biggest one to me is to simply ask, is this what I do? Is this what we do? When I encounter a situation that gives me pause, is my reflexive response to pray? When I'm fearful, like Jehoshaphat was, is my first response to go and pray, or is my first response to go and plan? I don't know about you, but when I'm in a stressful situation, when I feel disappointed or when I feel overwhelmed or when I feel like there's a big task in front of me, the very first thing I do is come up with a plan that I believe in. As soon as I have a plan that I can work, I feel very comforted in life. So the first thing I do in stress is I sit down, I think it through, I make a plan, and then I begin to work the plan. The problem is, prayer didn't precede that plan. It didn't follow that plan. It's just my plan. And I'm not, certainly didn't bring anybody here to make you feel bad about your prayer life. So I'll let you join in judging me about mine. And if it applies to you, fine. But when I read these passages, I can't help but ask myself, how much of my parenthood is prayerless and just reflexive? How much of my marriage and my love for Jen is prayerless and just a representation of my effort? How much of my career? How much of my interactions with others? How many of my important, maybe even difficult conversations? How many small groups in Bible studies have I led prayerlessly just going into them on my own? Is it my reflex in times of stress, in times of trepidation, in times of challenge, in times of fear, in times of uncertainty? Is my reflex to pray or is it to plan? Is it to seek the face of the Lord? Or is it to call a friend? How much in your life, this is where I'll put it on you, how much in your life, in your coming and in your going, as you enter into situations, as you face new situations, when you get phone calls, as you respond, how much in your life do you stop and you pause and you lay down at the foot of God and you say, God, I need you here. I'm not big enough for this. How much of that do you do and how much of it do you just take on yourself and charge right ahead without ever once stopping to pause and pray? I've joked often, and I will do it one day, that one day I'm going to give a sermon on reading the Bible. And I'm going to come out. I'm going to say, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You should read your Bible more. Let's pray. I'm going to do that one day. Because I genuinely think that when I come out here and I tell a group full of Christians who in your heart love and seek out God's word, when I say, hey guys, we should read the Bible more often, that the Holy Spirit can take it from there. He doesn't need me to talk for 29 and a half more minutes to make that an effective message. I'm probably just going to mess it up. That's enough for the Holy Spirit to go and work. And similarly, this morning is simply that. Hey guys, pray more. Pray more reflexively. Pray more regularly. And grain it into yourselves. Let the Holy Spirit work it into your psyche. Pray more. Because here's what happens when we pray more. I was reflecting as I was preparing. If we can be more like Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, if we can be people who respond in prayer and not panic or plans, what can happen for us? Because remember, everything that God tells us to do, he tells us to do because it's best for us. So why is it best for us to stop at every moment, every day, and pray multiple times a day? Why is it better for us to pray and consider more? Here's what I think. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Not for nothing. That's the greatest alliterative sentence I've ever written in my life. I'm going to graduate now as a pastor. I've reached the mountaintop, I think. Prayer provides us with perspective. It puts things in their proper focus. I have a son, John, he's two and a half, and he's in that season where every time we go up the stairs, it's an adventure, right? And you always ask him when you're about to go up the stairs, you don't want to upset his delicate sensibilities. Johnny, do you want to hold my hand? You want to do it yourself? And he usually says, I do it myself. Okay. And so he uses the wall and the railings and different things, and he takes the steps one at a time. And I'm right behind him. If he falls, I'm going to catch him. It's going to be okay. But he likes to say, I do it myself. And then I let him do it himself. Listen, every time we go into a situation or circumstance or a scenario, and we do it prayerlessly, what we've just done is we've looked at God and we've said, I do it myself. Do you need help with your career? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. Do you need help in your marriage? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. I can hold your hand. I can guide you through this. I can show you the way. No, it's good. I'll do it myself. This big goal in your life, I'll do it myself. Reconciling a relationship, I'll do it myself. Raising your children, I'll do it myself. Every time we enter into anything prayerlessly, we are saying to God, I'll do it myself. Thanks. When we don't pray, we make ourselves too big and God too small. When we don't pray, when we don't pray about whatever it is, about a health issue, about a relationship, about a career, about parenthood, about our marriage, about trying to transition into being adult parents of adult kids, and that relationship is different, and I don't really know what to do with my hands anymore. I just need to know I need to give them some space. When we approach that prayerlessly, we make God too big and ourselves too small. We forget who we are and who he is. But I want us to actually acknowledge and admit that that any time we approach anything, whether it's just a small sales meeting, a regular business meeting in our place of work, a board meeting or an elder meeting, when we approach a small group, when we approach a delicate conversation with our spouse or with our kids, when we sit at our desk or wherever it is we sit on Monday morning and think about the week ahead, when we do any of those things prayerlessly, we make ourselves far too big and God far too small. And we say to him, I've got this. I'll do it myself. God in his goodness climbs those stairs right behind us, but he's willing to hold our hand and walk us up there if we'll reach for him in prayer. So not only does prayer give us perspective, but prayer puts everything in its proper place, right? Because when we pray, here's what we admit, whether we consciously acknowledge this or not. God is in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. When we pray, that's what we acknowledge. God's in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. God's the creator of the universe. I'm not the creator of the universe. He's in charge. I am not. And this situation is in his hands and better off for it. When I think about this, that prayer puts us in our proper place, I'm reminded of Genesis 1. Genesis 1.1. God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I love to ask the question, why does the Bible begin that way? I don't think it just begins that way because that's where the story begins. I think it begins that way because it sets up the fundamental relationship throughout all of Bible and all of life. God is the creator. We are the creation. This is it. All sin in our life is getting confused about that relationship. That's all it is. God is the Lord. I am not. God is the creator. I am the created. All sin in our life is when we choose to ignore that and say, no, no, no, I'm more important than him. That's it. And so what prayer does is put us in our proper place. What prayer does for us in a humble, quiet way is what God had to do for Job in a bombastic way in Job chapter 38. When Job's tired of life, he's tired of suffering and goes to God and he's like, hey man, you owe me some answers. And so in Job 38 and on, God gives Job those answers, but they're not the ones he wants. He says, Job, you've forgotten your place, pal. You don't know who you are and who I am. You've forgotten. And then Paul reiterates this in Romans 11, when he says, who can understand the mind of God? His ways are higher than our ways. And so when we humble ourselves in prayer, particularly when we bow on our knees if we can, it puts everything in its proper place. You are God. I am not. You're in charge. I'm reliant on you. The situation is bigger than me. It is not bigger than you. I know that you know my kids better than I could ever know them. I know you love them more than I could ever love them. So I'm trusting them with you. Tell me what my part is and I'll do it. Often your part is to hang back and sing worship music and let God do the dirty work. I know that you know my wife better than I'll ever know her and that you love her more than I can ever love her. So can you just show me what my part is in loving her? Can you just help me with that? God, I know that my career, for whatever reason, is important to you. I don't know why it's important to you. I don't know what the end game of it is. I don't know what you would have me to learn or gain there, but I know that it matters to you where I work, who I work for, and how I carry myself in the workplace. I know that matters to you, God. So I'm going to trust you with it and walk in the steps that you would lay out for me. When we pray, it gives us the proper perspective and it puts everything in its proper place. And then, when everything's in its proper place, prayer gives us peace. It offers us peace. I love that in worship, sometimes the Holy Spirit does things like this. In worship, Aaron referenced Philippians 4, 8. Finally, brothers, whatsoever things are true, noble, of good report, honorable, godly, trustworthy, think upon these things. And he was right. That verse is preceded by two verses that tell us what we should do in times of worry. Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and supplication, 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 Christ Jesus. So Paul writes in Philippians, don't be anxious for anything, which for most dudes, it's like, okay. And for most women, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm anxious about you saying that. Be anxious for nothing. But in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And what will happen when in everything we present our request to God, when in everything we pray, when in every circumstance we reflectively fall on our feet and say, God, what would you have us do? What happens when for everything we present our petitions to God and we have the proper perspective with that thing and who God is and we put ourselves in our proper place and we put God in his proper place and we put the situation in its proper place, then what happens is we are given the peace of God that passes all understanding and he guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. Prayerful people are able to walk in a peace that no one else can understand. Why? Because that peace is guarded by God. Because they walk in an understanding that God's got this and I don't and it's okay. The people in your life who pray the most are probably the most peaceful. They have the hardest feathers to ruffle. Now some of my friends are the most anxious and the most prayerful. Those things go hand in hand for them. But at least they've learned to reflexively pray. But when we are people of prayer and we're assured of perspective and place, we can't help but feel peace that follows that. I remember very vividly coming to Grace in April of 2017. And when I got here, I made this point before, I will not belabor it. Things were comically bad. We were going to shut the, if they didn't hire a senior pastor in April, they weren't making it out of May, no doubt about it. And no one who was here at that time would argue that. And I remember getting here and finding out more about how dire it was and going, whoa, well, this is career suicide because no one is going to look at the resume of a guy who's been a senior pastor exactly one time and ran it into the ground in six weeks. That's lifelong small group pastor territory. And then when I get old, they make me care pastor. That's what that is. But in prayer, I honestly, like I wasn't nervous. I wasn't worried. I didn't even really care because it was out of my hands. I knew that God loved this place. I knew that God cares about me and he cares about the people who call this place home. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is where God wanted me to be. And so I literally thought back in April of 2017, well, God, you brought me here on purpose. I know you did. It was either to grow it or to kill it. Either way, it's what you want. Let's ride. Let's see what happens. Now, we still don't know that he didn't bring me here to kill it, but so far, it's been to grow. So far, he's walked alongside us, and he's shown up again and again. Whenever we sing that song, Evidence, those are the kinds of things I think about. When we put things in their proper perspective, and we put ourselves in our place through prayer, we can be given the peace of God through prayer. And once we are walking in the peace of God through prayer, when we reflexively go to pray, we can pray with the proper perspective. It gives us the right perspective from which to pray. Because if I want to kneel down and pray for my children, John and Lily, I need to first acknowledge, God, you know them better than I'll ever know them. You see their entire future laid out in front of them. I don't know what they're going to do today. Hopefully, shut up, because we have a seven-hour drive. But I don't know what they're going to do today. You know what they're going to do in 30 years. I don't know how to best love their little hearts and souls. You knit them together. You know them intimately. So it inclines me with that admission to say, God, how would you have me pray for my children? God, what should my heart for Lily be? God, how can I best pray for John? And so when we walk in prayer, it inclines us towards his wisdom and we begin to blanket our prayers with this question of what is wise to pray. Not reflexively, what do I want to pray? What do I feel like praying? What do I want most in the moment? But God, because I know that you know this situation, you know me, you know the other people, you know everything happening, you know them intimately, because I that you know way more than I do about all the things what God is wise to pray. And that question begins to mature our prayers. When I pray for Sunday mornings, I never ever pray that the sermon would be good. I've never once prayed that I would do well. I think that's the wrong perspective. I pray and I write it every week to the elders. Every week to the elders I send out, let's all on these days, let's pray for this thing together. And Sunday has never changed. The prayer for Sunday is always, would the service be exactly what God wants it to be? Good, bad, or ugly, would what happens in here be what God wants to happen in here? When I pray for the band, when we have our pre-service meeting at 915, and sometimes I'm asked to pray over that, I always pray, God, would you help us to care about the things that you care about and not care about the things that you don't care about? Which is code speak for, if the host messes up, but it doesn't detract from the spiritual point of the service, who cares? If the basis starts with the wrong note, don't get bent out of shape about it. God doesn't care about it. You shouldn't either. Let's pursue the throne and praise God together. God, help us to care about what you care about and not care about what you don't care about. The more we walk in prayer, the more we keep the perspective in place right, the more peace we experience. And in that peace, we begin to pray wise prayers. God, how can I pray in accordance with your will about this? So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to invite Aaron and the band, Greg, back up. Back up. And instead of me finishing my sermon on prayer in prayer, I'm going to invite you to a time of prayer. I'm pretty certain if you're a thinking person that at some point during this sermon as I've talked about, hey, in this situation do you respond in prayer? Have you offered that up to prayer? Have you been trying to do this prayerlessly or with your own plans? I would be willing to bet that God has brought something to mind for you. That there's something or someone or some things in your life that probably do need some prayer. And maybe you haven't given them the prayer that they need. Maybe there are things you've been praying for very regularly for a long time, but you just want to lift them up again. So I'm going to step off the stage, and I'm going to give us all some time to pray. Lift those things up to God. Your children, your spouse, your loved ones, the family you'll see this Thanksgiving, that career thing that's just been eating at you, the bills that you don't know how you're going to pay, the health issues of you and your loved one that are just driving you nuts. Whatever it might be that God's brought to mind, take a few minutes and pray for that. And as you pray, Aaron's going to sing over us a little bit, and then at some point he'll invite us to stand. And we'll close out singing The Battle Belongs. And we'll let that be our battle cry that reminds us that our very first reaction, our very first reflex, no matter what's happening in our life, should be to go to God in prayer. Let's pray together, silently.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this November. Whenever I'm supposed to come up without a bumper video, the video that we played between the last song and the sermon is called a bumper video. Whenever I'm supposed to come up during a prayer and there's not a bumper video, I'm always terrified that I'm standing on the stage at the wrong time. There was a time at my old church where I was the host. I had Haley's job. They paid me for it. She does it for free. And I was in the front row, and I thought that the guy gave me the nod. You know, just this is it after this. And I was like, okay. So I come up, and he's standing back looking at me, and he goes, and he just strums the next song and goes, and I literally just walked up and looked at him in horror and then walked off the other side of the stage and sat down over there. And that was a congregation of like 700 people and they were all laughing at me. And I deserved it. That's germane to nothing. I'm just inviting you into the fear that I still fear, feel when I'm standing right here as Aaron is praying. Thank you to Kyle, our student pastor, who stepped in for me last week and did a phenomenal job as he continued on with the series. I appreciate that, man. We are in a series called The Songs We Sing, looking at some of the songs that we sing as a congregation, finding them in Scripture, allowing Scripture to imbue them with a greater meaning for us. And it's been really, really fun to move through this series, hear you guys responding, hear you guys singing, know that these things are connecting and that these songs can have deeper meaning for us. I continue to believe and emphasize that getting together and singing together on a Sunday morning as a body of believers is the most important thing that we do on Sunday mornings together. So I'm glad that we're continuing to do that. This week, we're looking at a song called The Battle Belongs. Next week, I'm preaching on a Christmas song, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, kind of to transition us into the Christmas season. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you guys next week. But this week, as I said, we're focused on a song called The Battle Belongs. It's one that we've sung around here for a while. You probably know it, but in case you don't, I'm just going to read you the chorus. This will not be on the screen, so you'll just be forced to pay attention to me. But the chorus goes like this. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees with my hands lifted high. Did you guys think I was going to sing this to you? No way. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. In every fear I lay at your feet, I'll sing through the night. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. This song comes directly out of, I think, two stories in the Old Testament. Now, as we sing this song, there's songs about you guiding me through the shadow and through the valley. That comes from Psalm 23. There's words about his ways being higher than our ways. That comes from Romans 11, that if God is for us, who can be against us? That comes from Romans 8. So there's different lyrics in the song that come from different places in scripture, but the heart of the song itself comes from two fantastic stories in the Old Testament. Now, if you spent any time at all at Grace, you know that I love my Old Testament. I love my Old Testament stories. It's a really, it tends to be a more entertaining read than the New Testament once you get past Acts, right? So I love the narrative stories of the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, the one I'm going to focus on primarily today is in 2 Chronicles chapter 20. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. 2 Chronicles can be hard for some of us to find because maybe we don't have a lot of experience there. It's in the first third of the Bible. There's a lot of pages in 1 and 2 Chronicles, so you're bound to find it if you thumb through a little bit. If you see kings, you're gaining on it. And if you see Ezra or Nehemiah, you've gone too far. All right. So Chronicles chapter 20. And in Chronicles chapter 20, there's a guy who's the king named Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat is the king of Judah. By this point in history, the kingdom has split. After David, we have Solomon. And after Solomon is the king, we have Rehoboam. Rehoboam was a cruddy king. He was a jerk. He was a dummy. And so Jeroboam took the northern kingdoms referred to for the rest of the Old Testament typically as Israel. And Rehoboam kept the southern kingdom typically referred to as Judah. For the rest of the lines of those kings and those stories are told in 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The northern tribes of Israel had no good kings. They all did what was right in their own eyes. They all betrayed God. Southern Israel, depending on who you talk to, Judah had between three and five good kings. As I kind of dug into the research, in my opinion, they had three good kings. We're going to talk about two of them this morning. One of them was Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat, 2 Chronicles chapter 20, receives word that the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Ammonites and the Meubites, I don't know how to say the last one, Meubites, were gathering together to attack him. Clearly, they felt like they had seen a weakness and they were ready to exploit it. Now, Judah is not a geopolitical player. They're just trying to carve out their place in the world. They're by no means a superpower. They're not scaring anyone. And so these three tribes assemble against him and decide now's the time we're going to strike. We're going to come in and we're going to conquer Judah. We're going to conquer Jerusalem and overthrow Jehoshaphat. And so word of this planned attack and the three tribes uniting against Jehoshaphat gets back to him., these three tribes have amassed against you. They're coming in to take over. They probably have the advantage. What do you want to do? His very first reaction is he was afraid. After he processes the fact that he's afraid, what should I do? He prays. He prays and he assembles all of Judah. Everyone from the different towns, the different tribes in Judah, come to Jerusalem, fast with me. Implicit in fasting is praying. Pray with me. Let's seek the face of the Lord and what we should do. So that's what they did. All the people of Judah gathered in Jerusalem. And they got on their hands and their knees and they cried out to God and they said, what do we do? God, what do we do here? We're going to be attacked. What should we do? And so they respond in prayer. And God answers them in this way on down the passage, verses 15 through 18. And he said, We say the battle belongs to the Lord. That's where it comes from. It's from the high priest reassuring Jehoshaphat, don't worry about it. Do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This battle's not yours anyways. This battle belongs to God. Verse 16. And here's the scene. Jehoshaphat gets word that the Moabites, Ammonites, and the Miites are coming to attack them and overthrow them. He's scared. He prays. He gathers the people of Judah to pray with him. Father, what would you have us do here? At the end of the prayer, the high priest says, the Lord has directed me. And you're supposed to do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This is not your battle. This is God's. Go out and align yourself for battle. And the instructions that follow are, lead with the Levites and let them sing worship. Lead with worship and lead with praise. And that's what they did. He fell on his face. He praised God with all the people. And it's important that we understand that worship isn't just singing. Worship can be praying. Worship can be a posture. Worship is living a life of sacrifice. Worship has a large definition. And so he falls on his face. If you're hearing these instructions, he falls on his face with the rest of Judah and they pray to God. And then the next morning they get up. They're not fearful. They go out to the battle lines. They put in front of them the worship pastors, which has to be the worst possible idea, right? Like if we needed to defend grace, would you want Aaron and Greg to do it? Or would you want people with like military experience? I'm just asking the question. I don't think you would want me to do it, but they're not the tops on the list is all I'm saying. But they put the skinny jeans and the beards out in front. This is who we're going to lead with. By the way, all these jokes, none of this is my insight. These are all Aaron's jokes. I'm stealing them. This is a sermon he's done before, this part of it. So I'm authorized to use these things. I mean, just so we're all clear about how tough I am, I raked for like 45 minutes last week. My arm was sore for a day, and I got a blister on one of my fingies, even though I was wearing gloves. All right, so that's what we're dealing with here. But they put the worship leaders out in front, and they praise God. And as they praise God, God incites a riot in the camp of the three different tribes. They conquer each other, and they walk away dismayed. God's army doesn't have to fire a single arrow or throw a single spear. The battle is won because it belongs to the Lord. There's another wonderful example of this, and I believe it's referenced in the chorus when it says, everything I lay at your feet. And I think the most descriptive example of this is in 2 Kings chapter 19. It's a story of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was another one of the good kings of Jerusalem, or yeah, of Jerusalem and of Judah. And what's going on here is that Hezekiah receives word that the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, is sweeping through the Middle East and is storming towards Jerusalem intent on conquering it. And this isn't three random roving tribes that happen to exist around you, Moab and Amman. It's not those places. This is Assyria, the precursor to the Persian empire. This is Sennacherib, a name that strikes fear in everyone that hears it. This is a big deal. And Sennacherib on his way deploys basically propaganda in Jerusalem. It's a letter that he sends that he writes to the people of Jerusalem that says, hey, you're going to want to get out of Dodge because I'm coming to wreck shop. And if you're still there when I get there, you and your family's going to die, just so you know. And someone takes that letter and they hand it to Hezekiah. And this is Hezekiah's response in verse 14. Verse 19. The propaganda letter is brought to King Hezekiah. Hezekiah knows. If Sennacherib wants Jerusalem, he's going to take it. They have as much chance of defending Jerusalem from Sennacherib as my daughter Lily has defending her Reese's peanut butter cups at Halloween from me. I'm going to win that fight. And so what does Hezekiah do? He doesn't do what you think he should do. What he should do is assemble the generals right away. Assemble the quartermaster right away. Assemble the treasurer right away. Whoever's in charge of agriculture, how we're going to feed the people, get them in the room. He needs to assemble the cabinet right away. How do we defend Jerusalem? Someone start boiling some oil. I saw that on Netflix one time. That seems to be a thing you should do when you're defending the city. Get everybody together and let's come up with a plan to repel the Assyrian army. That's what we need to do. That's not what he does. He takes the letter. He goes to the temple. He lays it down at the feet of the Lord, and he prays. And he says, God, this is an affront to you. What would you have us do? His first response is to pray. And similarly to Jehoshaphat, God directs Hezekiah, don't do anything. Don't fire an arrow. Just watch, and I'll win. And the next morning, he incites a riot in the camp of the Assyrians. They rout each other, and they walk back to Assyria licking their wounds. God's armies didn't have to fire an arrow. Because they're good kings, Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah responded in prayer to everything that came their way. And so, of course, when I read these stories and I reflect on them, and I think about these were put here over a thousand years ago for us today. What is it that I should take from them? I think there's myriad applications here. But the biggest one to me is to simply ask, is this what I do? Is this what we do? When I encounter a situation that gives me pause, is my reflexive response to pray? When I'm fearful, like Jehoshaphat was, is my first response to go and pray, or is my first response to go and plan? I don't know about you, but when I'm in a stressful situation, when I feel disappointed or when I feel overwhelmed or when I feel like there's a big task in front of me, the very first thing I do is come up with a plan that I believe in. As soon as I have a plan that I can work, I feel very comforted in life. So the first thing I do in stress is I sit down, I think it through, I make a plan, and then I begin to work the plan. The problem is, prayer didn't precede that plan. It didn't follow that plan. It's just my plan. And I'm not, certainly didn't bring anybody here to make you feel bad about your prayer life. So I'll let you join in judging me about mine. And if it applies to you, fine. But when I read these passages, I can't help but ask myself, how much of my parenthood is prayerless and just reflexive? How much of my marriage and my love for Jen is prayerless and just a representation of my effort? How much of my career? How much of my interactions with others? How many of my important, maybe even difficult conversations? How many small groups in Bible studies have I led prayerlessly just going into them on my own? Is it my reflex in times of stress, in times of trepidation, in times of challenge, in times of fear, in times of uncertainty? Is my reflex to pray or is it to plan? Is it to seek the face of the Lord? Or is it to call a friend? How much in your life, this is where I'll put it on you, how much in your life, in your coming and in your going, as you enter into situations, as you face new situations, when you get phone calls, as you respond, how much in your life do you stop and you pause and you lay down at the foot of God and you say, God, I need you here. I'm not big enough for this. How much of that do you do and how much of it do you just take on yourself and charge right ahead without ever once stopping to pause and pray? I've joked often, and I will do it one day, that one day I'm going to give a sermon on reading the Bible. And I'm going to come out. I'm going to say, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You should read your Bible more. Let's pray. I'm going to do that one day. Because I genuinely think that when I come out here and I tell a group full of Christians who in your heart love and seek out God's word, when I say, hey guys, we should read the Bible more often, that the Holy Spirit can take it from there. He doesn't need me to talk for 29 and a half more minutes to make that an effective message. I'm probably just going to mess it up. That's enough for the Holy Spirit to go and work. And similarly, this morning is simply that. Hey guys, pray more. Pray more reflexively. Pray more regularly. And grain it into yourselves. Let the Holy Spirit work it into your psyche. Pray more. Because here's what happens when we pray more. I was reflecting as I was preparing. If we can be more like Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, if we can be people who respond in prayer and not panic or plans, what can happen for us? Because remember, everything that God tells us to do, he tells us to do because it's best for us. So why is it best for us to stop at every moment, every day, and pray multiple times a day? Why is it better for us to pray and consider more? Here's what I think. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Not for nothing. That's the greatest alliterative sentence I've ever written in my life. I'm going to graduate now as a pastor. I've reached the mountaintop, I think. Prayer provides us with perspective. It puts things in their proper focus. I have a son, John, he's two and a half, and he's in that season where every time we go up the stairs, it's an adventure, right? And you always ask him when you're about to go up the stairs, you don't want to upset his delicate sensibilities. Johnny, do you want to hold my hand? You want to do it yourself? And he usually says, I do it myself. Okay. And so he uses the wall and the railings and different things, and he takes the steps one at a time. And I'm right behind him. If he falls, I'm going to catch him. It's going to be okay. But he likes to say, I do it myself. And then I let him do it himself. Listen, every time we go into a situation or circumstance or a scenario, and we do it prayerlessly, what we've just done is we've looked at God and we've said, I do it myself. Do you need help with your career? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. Do you need help in your marriage? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. I can hold your hand. I can guide you through this. I can show you the way. No, it's good. I'll do it myself. This big goal in your life, I'll do it myself. Reconciling a relationship, I'll do it myself. Raising your children, I'll do it myself. Every time we enter into anything prayerlessly, we are saying to God, I'll do it myself. Thanks. When we don't pray, we make ourselves too big and God too small. When we don't pray, when we don't pray about whatever it is, about a health issue, about a relationship, about a career, about parenthood, about our marriage, about trying to transition into being adult parents of adult kids, and that relationship is different, and I don't really know what to do with my hands anymore. I just need to know I need to give them some space. When we approach that prayerlessly, we make God too big and ourselves too small. We forget who we are and who he is. But I want us to actually acknowledge and admit that that any time we approach anything, whether it's just a small sales meeting, a regular business meeting in our place of work, a board meeting or an elder meeting, when we approach a small group, when we approach a delicate conversation with our spouse or with our kids, when we sit at our desk or wherever it is we sit on Monday morning and think about the week ahead, when we do any of those things prayerlessly, we make ourselves far too big and God far too small. And we say to him, I've got this. I'll do it myself. God in his goodness climbs those stairs right behind us, but he's willing to hold our hand and walk us up there if we'll reach for him in prayer. So not only does prayer give us perspective, but prayer puts everything in its proper place, right? Because when we pray, here's what we admit, whether we consciously acknowledge this or not. God is in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. When we pray, that's what we acknowledge. God's in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. God's the creator of the universe. I'm not the creator of the universe. He's in charge. I am not. And this situation is in his hands and better off for it. When I think about this, that prayer puts us in our proper place, I'm reminded of Genesis 1. Genesis 1.1. God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I love to ask the question, why does the Bible begin that way? I don't think it just begins that way because that's where the story begins. I think it begins that way because it sets up the fundamental relationship throughout all of Bible and all of life. God is the creator. We are the creation. This is it. All sin in our life is getting confused about that relationship. That's all it is. God is the Lord. I am not. God is the creator. I am the created. All sin in our life is when we choose to ignore that and say, no, no, no, I'm more important than him. That's it. And so what prayer does is put us in our proper place. What prayer does for us in a humble, quiet way is what God had to do for Job in a bombastic way in Job chapter 38. When Job's tired of life, he's tired of suffering and goes to God and he's like, hey man, you owe me some answers. And so in Job 38 and on, God gives Job those answers, but they're not the ones he wants. He says, Job, you've forgotten your place, pal. You don't know who you are and who I am. You've forgotten. And then Paul reiterates this in Romans 11, when he says, who can understand the mind of God? His ways are higher than our ways. And so when we humble ourselves in prayer, particularly when we bow on our knees if we can, it puts everything in its proper place. You are God. I am not. You're in charge. I'm reliant on you. The situation is bigger than me. It is not bigger than you. I know that you know my kids better than I could ever know them. I know you love them more than I could ever love them. So I'm trusting them with you. Tell me what my part is and I'll do it. Often your part is to hang back and sing worship music and let God do the dirty work. I know that you know my wife better than I'll ever know her and that you love her more than I can ever love her. So can you just show me what my part is in loving her? Can you just help me with that? God, I know that my career, for whatever reason, is important to you. I don't know why it's important to you. I don't know what the end game of it is. I don't know what you would have me to learn or gain there, but I know that it matters to you where I work, who I work for, and how I carry myself in the workplace. I know that matters to you, God. So I'm going to trust you with it and walk in the steps that you would lay out for me. When we pray, it gives us the proper perspective and it puts everything in its proper place. And then, when everything's in its proper place, prayer gives us peace. It offers us peace. I love that in worship, sometimes the Holy Spirit does things like this. In worship, Aaron referenced Philippians 4, 8. Finally, brothers, whatsoever things are true, noble, of good report, honorable, godly, trustworthy, think upon these things. And he was right. That verse is preceded by two verses that tell us what we should do in times of worry. Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and supplication, 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 Christ Jesus. So Paul writes in Philippians, don't be anxious for anything, which for most dudes, it's like, okay. And for most women, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm anxious about you saying that. Be anxious for nothing. But in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And what will happen when in everything we present our request to God, when in everything we pray, when in every circumstance we reflectively fall on our feet and say, God, what would you have us do? What happens when for everything we present our petitions to God and we have the proper perspective with that thing and who God is and we put ourselves in our proper place and we put God in his proper place and we put the situation in its proper place, then what happens is we are given the peace of God that passes all understanding and he guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. Prayerful people are able to walk in a peace that no one else can understand. Why? Because that peace is guarded by God. Because they walk in an understanding that God's got this and I don't and it's okay. The people in your life who pray the most are probably the most peaceful. They have the hardest feathers to ruffle. Now some of my friends are the most anxious and the most prayerful. Those things go hand in hand for them. But at least they've learned to reflexively pray. But when we are people of prayer and we're assured of perspective and place, we can't help but feel peace that follows that. I remember very vividly coming to Grace in April of 2017. And when I got here, I made this point before, I will not belabor it. Things were comically bad. We were going to shut the, if they didn't hire a senior pastor in April, they weren't making it out of May, no doubt about it. And no one who was here at that time would argue that. And I remember getting here and finding out more about how dire it was and going, whoa, well, this is career suicide because no one is going to look at the resume of a guy who's been a senior pastor exactly one time and ran it into the ground in six weeks. That's lifelong small group pastor territory. And then when I get old, they make me care pastor. That's what that is. But in prayer, I honestly, like I wasn't nervous. I wasn't worried. I didn't even really care because it was out of my hands. I knew that God loved this place. I knew that God cares about me and he cares about the people who call this place home. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is where God wanted me to be. And so I literally thought back in April of 2017, well, God, you brought me here on purpose. I know you did. It was either to grow it or to kill it. Either way, it's what you want. Let's ride. Let's see what happens. Now, we still don't know that he didn't bring me here to kill it, but so far, it's been to grow. So far, he's walked alongside us, and he's shown up again and again. Whenever we sing that song, Evidence, those are the kinds of things I think about. When we put things in their proper perspective, and we put ourselves in our place through prayer, we can be given the peace of God through prayer. And once we are walking in the peace of God through prayer, when we reflexively go to pray, we can pray with the proper perspective. It gives us the right perspective from which to pray. Because if I want to kneel down and pray for my children, John and Lily, I need to first acknowledge, God, you know them better than I'll ever know them. You see their entire future laid out in front of them. I don't know what they're going to do today. Hopefully, shut up, because we have a seven-hour drive. But I don't know what they're going to do today. You know what they're going to do in 30 years. I don't know how to best love their little hearts and souls. You knit them together. You know them intimately. So it inclines me with that admission to say, God, how would you have me pray for my children? God, what should my heart for Lily be? God, how can I best pray for John? And so when we walk in prayer, it inclines us towards his wisdom and we begin to blanket our prayers with this question of what is wise to pray. Not reflexively, what do I want to pray? What do I feel like praying? What do I want most in the moment? But God, because I know that you know this situation, you know me, you know the other people, you know everything happening, you know them intimately, because I that you know way more than I do about all the things what God is wise to pray. And that question begins to mature our prayers. When I pray for Sunday mornings, I never ever pray that the sermon would be good. I've never once prayed that I would do well. I think that's the wrong perspective. I pray and I write it every week to the elders. Every week to the elders I send out, let's all on these days, let's pray for this thing together. And Sunday has never changed. The prayer for Sunday is always, would the service be exactly what God wants it to be? Good, bad, or ugly, would what happens in here be what God wants to happen in here? When I pray for the band, when we have our pre-service meeting at 915, and sometimes I'm asked to pray over that, I always pray, God, would you help us to care about the things that you care about and not care about the things that you don't care about? Which is code speak for, if the host messes up, but it doesn't detract from the spiritual point of the service, who cares? If the basis starts with the wrong note, don't get bent out of shape about it. God doesn't care about it. You shouldn't either. Let's pursue the throne and praise God together. God, help us to care about what you care about and not care about what you don't care about. The more we walk in prayer, the more we keep the perspective in place right, the more peace we experience. And in that peace, we begin to pray wise prayers. God, how can I pray in accordance with your will about this? So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to invite Aaron and the band, Greg, back up. Back up. And instead of me finishing my sermon on prayer in prayer, I'm going to invite you to a time of prayer. I'm pretty certain if you're a thinking person that at some point during this sermon as I've talked about, hey, in this situation do you respond in prayer? Have you offered that up to prayer? Have you been trying to do this prayerlessly or with your own plans? I would be willing to bet that God has brought something to mind for you. That there's something or someone or some things in your life that probably do need some prayer. And maybe you haven't given them the prayer that they need. Maybe there are things you've been praying for very regularly for a long time, but you just want to lift them up again. So I'm going to step off the stage, and I'm going to give us all some time to pray. Lift those things up to God. Your children, your spouse, your loved ones, the family you'll see this Thanksgiving, that career thing that's just been eating at you, the bills that you don't know how you're going to pay, the health issues of you and your loved one that are just driving you nuts. Whatever it might be that God's brought to mind, take a few minutes and pray for that. And as you pray, Aaron's going to sing over us a little bit, and then at some point he'll invite us to stand. And we'll close out singing The Battle Belongs. And we'll let that be our battle cry that reminds us that our very first reaction, our very first reflex, no matter what's happening in our life, should be to go to God in prayer. Let's pray together, silently.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this November. Whenever I'm supposed to come up without a bumper video, the video that we played between the last song and the sermon is called a bumper video. Whenever I'm supposed to come up during a prayer and there's not a bumper video, I'm always terrified that I'm standing on the stage at the wrong time. There was a time at my old church where I was the host. I had Haley's job. They paid me for it. She does it for free. And I was in the front row, and I thought that the guy gave me the nod. You know, just this is it after this. And I was like, okay. So I come up, and he's standing back looking at me, and he goes, and he just strums the next song and goes, and I literally just walked up and looked at him in horror and then walked off the other side of the stage and sat down over there. And that was a congregation of like 700 people and they were all laughing at me. And I deserved it. That's germane to nothing. I'm just inviting you into the fear that I still fear, feel when I'm standing right here as Aaron is praying. Thank you to Kyle, our student pastor, who stepped in for me last week and did a phenomenal job as he continued on with the series. I appreciate that, man. We are in a series called The Songs We Sing, looking at some of the songs that we sing as a congregation, finding them in Scripture, allowing Scripture to imbue them with a greater meaning for us. And it's been really, really fun to move through this series, hear you guys responding, hear you guys singing, know that these things are connecting and that these songs can have deeper meaning for us. I continue to believe and emphasize that getting together and singing together on a Sunday morning as a body of believers is the most important thing that we do on Sunday mornings together. So I'm glad that we're continuing to do that. This week, we're looking at a song called The Battle Belongs. Next week, I'm preaching on a Christmas song, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, kind of to transition us into the Christmas season. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you guys next week. But this week, as I said, we're focused on a song called The Battle Belongs. It's one that we've sung around here for a while. You probably know it, but in case you don't, I'm just going to read you the chorus. This will not be on the screen, so you'll just be forced to pay attention to me. But the chorus goes like this. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees with my hands lifted high. Did you guys think I was going to sing this to you? No way. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. In every fear I lay at your feet, I'll sing through the night. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. This song comes directly out of, I think, two stories in the Old Testament. Now, as we sing this song, there's songs about you guiding me through the shadow and through the valley. That comes from Psalm 23. There's words about his ways being higher than our ways. That comes from Romans 11, that if God is for us, who can be against us? That comes from Romans 8. So there's different lyrics in the song that come from different places in scripture, but the heart of the song itself comes from two fantastic stories in the Old Testament. Now, if you spent any time at all at Grace, you know that I love my Old Testament. I love my Old Testament stories. It's a really, it tends to be a more entertaining read than the New Testament once you get past Acts, right? So I love the narrative stories of the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, the one I'm going to focus on primarily today is in 2 Chronicles chapter 20. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. 2 Chronicles can be hard for some of us to find because maybe we don't have a lot of experience there. It's in the first third of the Bible. There's a lot of pages in 1 and 2 Chronicles, so you're bound to find it if you thumb through a little bit. If you see kings, you're gaining on it. And if you see Ezra or Nehemiah, you've gone too far. All right. So Chronicles chapter 20. And in Chronicles chapter 20, there's a guy who's the king named Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat is the king of Judah. By this point in history, the kingdom has split. After David, we have Solomon. And after Solomon is the king, we have Rehoboam. Rehoboam was a cruddy king. He was a jerk. He was a dummy. And so Jeroboam took the northern kingdoms referred to for the rest of the Old Testament typically as Israel. And Rehoboam kept the southern kingdom typically referred to as Judah. For the rest of the lines of those kings and those stories are told in 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The northern tribes of Israel had no good kings. They all did what was right in their own eyes. They all betrayed God. Southern Israel, depending on who you talk to, Judah had between three and five good kings. As I kind of dug into the research, in my opinion, they had three good kings. We're going to talk about two of them this morning. One of them was Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat, 2 Chronicles chapter 20, receives word that the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Ammonites and the Meubites, I don't know how to say the last one, Meubites, were gathering together to attack him. Clearly, they felt like they had seen a weakness and they were ready to exploit it. Now, Judah is not a geopolitical player. They're just trying to carve out their place in the world. They're by no means a superpower. They're not scaring anyone. And so these three tribes assemble against him and decide now's the time we're going to strike. We're going to come in and we're going to conquer Judah. We're going to conquer Jerusalem and overthrow Jehoshaphat. And so word of this planned attack and the three tribes uniting against Jehoshaphat gets back to him., these three tribes have amassed against you. They're coming in to take over. They probably have the advantage. What do you want to do? His very first reaction is he was afraid. After he processes the fact that he's afraid, what should I do? He prays. He prays and he assembles all of Judah. Everyone from the different towns, the different tribes in Judah, come to Jerusalem, fast with me. Implicit in fasting is praying. Pray with me. Let's seek the face of the Lord and what we should do. So that's what they did. All the people of Judah gathered in Jerusalem. And they got on their hands and their knees and they cried out to God and they said, what do we do? God, what do we do here? We're going to be attacked. What should we do? And so they respond in prayer. And God answers them in this way on down the passage, verses 15 through 18. And he said, We say the battle belongs to the Lord. That's where it comes from. It's from the high priest reassuring Jehoshaphat, don't worry about it. Do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This battle's not yours anyways. This battle belongs to God. Verse 16. And here's the scene. Jehoshaphat gets word that the Moabites, Ammonites, and the Miites are coming to attack them and overthrow them. He's scared. He prays. He gathers the people of Judah to pray with him. Father, what would you have us do here? At the end of the prayer, the high priest says, the Lord has directed me. And you're supposed to do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This is not your battle. This is God's. Go out and align yourself for battle. And the instructions that follow are, lead with the Levites and let them sing worship. Lead with worship and lead with praise. And that's what they did. He fell on his face. He praised God with all the people. And it's important that we understand that worship isn't just singing. Worship can be praying. Worship can be a posture. Worship is living a life of sacrifice. Worship has a large definition. And so he falls on his face. If you're hearing these instructions, he falls on his face with the rest of Judah and they pray to God. And then the next morning they get up. They're not fearful. They go out to the battle lines. They put in front of them the worship pastors, which has to be the worst possible idea, right? Like if we needed to defend grace, would you want Aaron and Greg to do it? Or would you want people with like military experience? I'm just asking the question. I don't think you would want me to do it, but they're not the tops on the list is all I'm saying. But they put the skinny jeans and the beards out in front. This is who we're going to lead with. By the way, all these jokes, none of this is my insight. These are all Aaron's jokes. I'm stealing them. This is a sermon he's done before, this part of it. So I'm authorized to use these things. I mean, just so we're all clear about how tough I am, I raked for like 45 minutes last week. My arm was sore for a day, and I got a blister on one of my fingies, even though I was wearing gloves. All right, so that's what we're dealing with here. But they put the worship leaders out in front, and they praise God. And as they praise God, God incites a riot in the camp of the three different tribes. They conquer each other, and they walk away dismayed. God's army doesn't have to fire a single arrow or throw a single spear. The battle is won because it belongs to the Lord. There's another wonderful example of this, and I believe it's referenced in the chorus when it says, everything I lay at your feet. And I think the most descriptive example of this is in 2 Kings chapter 19. It's a story of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was another one of the good kings of Jerusalem, or yeah, of Jerusalem and of Judah. And what's going on here is that Hezekiah receives word that the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, is sweeping through the Middle East and is storming towards Jerusalem intent on conquering it. And this isn't three random roving tribes that happen to exist around you, Moab and Amman. It's not those places. This is Assyria, the precursor to the Persian empire. This is Sennacherib, a name that strikes fear in everyone that hears it. This is a big deal. And Sennacherib on his way deploys basically propaganda in Jerusalem. It's a letter that he sends that he writes to the people of Jerusalem that says, hey, you're going to want to get out of Dodge because I'm coming to wreck shop. And if you're still there when I get there, you and your family's going to die, just so you know. And someone takes that letter and they hand it to Hezekiah. And this is Hezekiah's response in verse 14. Verse 19. The propaganda letter is brought to King Hezekiah. Hezekiah knows. If Sennacherib wants Jerusalem, he's going to take it. They have as much chance of defending Jerusalem from Sennacherib as my daughter Lily has defending her Reese's peanut butter cups at Halloween from me. I'm going to win that fight. And so what does Hezekiah do? He doesn't do what you think he should do. What he should do is assemble the generals right away. Assemble the quartermaster right away. Assemble the treasurer right away. Whoever's in charge of agriculture, how we're going to feed the people, get them in the room. He needs to assemble the cabinet right away. How do we defend Jerusalem? Someone start boiling some oil. I saw that on Netflix one time. That seems to be a thing you should do when you're defending the city. Get everybody together and let's come up with a plan to repel the Assyrian army. That's what we need to do. That's not what he does. He takes the letter. He goes to the temple. He lays it down at the feet of the Lord, and he prays. And he says, God, this is an affront to you. What would you have us do? His first response is to pray. And similarly to Jehoshaphat, God directs Hezekiah, don't do anything. Don't fire an arrow. Just watch, and I'll win. And the next morning, he incites a riot in the camp of the Assyrians. They rout each other, and they walk back to Assyria licking their wounds. God's armies didn't have to fire an arrow. Because they're good kings, Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah responded in prayer to everything that came their way. And so, of course, when I read these stories and I reflect on them, and I think about these were put here over a thousand years ago for us today. What is it that I should take from them? I think there's myriad applications here. But the biggest one to me is to simply ask, is this what I do? Is this what we do? When I encounter a situation that gives me pause, is my reflexive response to pray? When I'm fearful, like Jehoshaphat was, is my first response to go and pray, or is my first response to go and plan? I don't know about you, but when I'm in a stressful situation, when I feel disappointed or when I feel overwhelmed or when I feel like there's a big task in front of me, the very first thing I do is come up with a plan that I believe in. As soon as I have a plan that I can work, I feel very comforted in life. So the first thing I do in stress is I sit down, I think it through, I make a plan, and then I begin to work the plan. The problem is, prayer didn't precede that plan. It didn't follow that plan. It's just my plan. And I'm not, certainly didn't bring anybody here to make you feel bad about your prayer life. So I'll let you join in judging me about mine. And if it applies to you, fine. But when I read these passages, I can't help but ask myself, how much of my parenthood is prayerless and just reflexive? How much of my marriage and my love for Jen is prayerless and just a representation of my effort? How much of my career? How much of my interactions with others? How many of my important, maybe even difficult conversations? How many small groups in Bible studies have I led prayerlessly just going into them on my own? Is it my reflex in times of stress, in times of trepidation, in times of challenge, in times of fear, in times of uncertainty? Is my reflex to pray or is it to plan? Is it to seek the face of the Lord? Or is it to call a friend? How much in your life, this is where I'll put it on you, how much in your life, in your coming and in your going, as you enter into situations, as you face new situations, when you get phone calls, as you respond, how much in your life do you stop and you pause and you lay down at the foot of God and you say, God, I need you here. I'm not big enough for this. How much of that do you do and how much of it do you just take on yourself and charge right ahead without ever once stopping to pause and pray? I've joked often, and I will do it one day, that one day I'm going to give a sermon on reading the Bible. And I'm going to come out. I'm going to say, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You should read your Bible more. Let's pray. I'm going to do that one day. Because I genuinely think that when I come out here and I tell a group full of Christians who in your heart love and seek out God's word, when I say, hey guys, we should read the Bible more often, that the Holy Spirit can take it from there. He doesn't need me to talk for 29 and a half more minutes to make that an effective message. I'm probably just going to mess it up. That's enough for the Holy Spirit to go and work. And similarly, this morning is simply that. Hey guys, pray more. Pray more reflexively. Pray more regularly. And grain it into yourselves. Let the Holy Spirit work it into your psyche. Pray more. Because here's what happens when we pray more. I was reflecting as I was preparing. If we can be more like Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, if we can be people who respond in prayer and not panic or plans, what can happen for us? Because remember, everything that God tells us to do, he tells us to do because it's best for us. So why is it best for us to stop at every moment, every day, and pray multiple times a day? Why is it better for us to pray and consider more? Here's what I think. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Not for nothing. That's the greatest alliterative sentence I've ever written in my life. I'm going to graduate now as a pastor. I've reached the mountaintop, I think. Prayer provides us with perspective. It puts things in their proper focus. I have a son, John, he's two and a half, and he's in that season where every time we go up the stairs, it's an adventure, right? And you always ask him when you're about to go up the stairs, you don't want to upset his delicate sensibilities. Johnny, do you want to hold my hand? You want to do it yourself? And he usually says, I do it myself. Okay. And so he uses the wall and the railings and different things, and he takes the steps one at a time. And I'm right behind him. If he falls, I'm going to catch him. It's going to be okay. But he likes to say, I do it myself. And then I let him do it himself. Listen, every time we go into a situation or circumstance or a scenario, and we do it prayerlessly, what we've just done is we've looked at God and we've said, I do it myself. Do you need help with your career? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. Do you need help in your marriage? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. I can hold your hand. I can guide you through this. I can show you the way. No, it's good. I'll do it myself. This big goal in your life, I'll do it myself. Reconciling a relationship, I'll do it myself. Raising your children, I'll do it myself. Every time we enter into anything prayerlessly, we are saying to God, I'll do it myself. Thanks. When we don't pray, we make ourselves too big and God too small. When we don't pray, when we don't pray about whatever it is, about a health issue, about a relationship, about a career, about parenthood, about our marriage, about trying to transition into being adult parents of adult kids, and that relationship is different, and I don't really know what to do with my hands anymore. I just need to know I need to give them some space. When we approach that prayerlessly, we make God too big and ourselves too small. We forget who we are and who he is. But I want us to actually acknowledge and admit that that any time we approach anything, whether it's just a small sales meeting, a regular business meeting in our place of work, a board meeting or an elder meeting, when we approach a small group, when we approach a delicate conversation with our spouse or with our kids, when we sit at our desk or wherever it is we sit on Monday morning and think about the week ahead, when we do any of those things prayerlessly, we make ourselves far too big and God far too small. And we say to him, I've got this. I'll do it myself. God in his goodness climbs those stairs right behind us, but he's willing to hold our hand and walk us up there if we'll reach for him in prayer. So not only does prayer give us perspective, but prayer puts everything in its proper place, right? Because when we pray, here's what we admit, whether we consciously acknowledge this or not. God is in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. When we pray, that's what we acknowledge. God's in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. God's the creator of the universe. I'm not the creator of the universe. He's in charge. I am not. And this situation is in his hands and better off for it. When I think about this, that prayer puts us in our proper place, I'm reminded of Genesis 1. Genesis 1.1. God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I love to ask the question, why does the Bible begin that way? I don't think it just begins that way because that's where the story begins. I think it begins that way because it sets up the fundamental relationship throughout all of Bible and all of life. God is the creator. We are the creation. This is it. All sin in our life is getting confused about that relationship. That's all it is. God is the Lord. I am not. God is the creator. I am the created. All sin in our life is when we choose to ignore that and say, no, no, no, I'm more important than him. That's it. And so what prayer does is put us in our proper place. What prayer does for us in a humble, quiet way is what God had to do for Job in a bombastic way in Job chapter 38. When Job's tired of life, he's tired of suffering and goes to God and he's like, hey man, you owe me some answers. And so in Job 38 and on, God gives Job those answers, but they're not the ones he wants. He says, Job, you've forgotten your place, pal. You don't know who you are and who I am. You've forgotten. And then Paul reiterates this in Romans 11, when he says, who can understand the mind of God? His ways are higher than our ways. And so when we humble ourselves in prayer, particularly when we bow on our knees if we can, it puts everything in its proper place. You are God. I am not. You're in charge. I'm reliant on you. The situation is bigger than me. It is not bigger than you. I know that you know my kids better than I could ever know them. I know you love them more than I could ever love them. So I'm trusting them with you. Tell me what my part is and I'll do it. Often your part is to hang back and sing worship music and let God do the dirty work. I know that you know my wife better than I'll ever know her and that you love her more than I can ever love her. So can you just show me what my part is in loving her? Can you just help me with that? God, I know that my career, for whatever reason, is important to you. I don't know why it's important to you. I don't know what the end game of it is. I don't know what you would have me to learn or gain there, but I know that it matters to you where I work, who I work for, and how I carry myself in the workplace. I know that matters to you, God. So I'm going to trust you with it and walk in the steps that you would lay out for me. When we pray, it gives us the proper perspective and it puts everything in its proper place. And then, when everything's in its proper place, prayer gives us peace. It offers us peace. I love that in worship, sometimes the Holy Spirit does things like this. In worship, Aaron referenced Philippians 4, 8. Finally, brothers, whatsoever things are true, noble, of good report, honorable, godly, trustworthy, think upon these things. And he was right. That verse is preceded by two verses that tell us what we should do in times of worry. Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and supplication, 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 Christ Jesus. So Paul writes in Philippians, don't be anxious for anything, which for most dudes, it's like, okay. And for most women, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm anxious about you saying that. Be anxious for nothing. But in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And what will happen when in everything we present our request to God, when in everything we pray, when in every circumstance we reflectively fall on our feet and say, God, what would you have us do? What happens when for everything we present our petitions to God and we have the proper perspective with that thing and who God is and we put ourselves in our proper place and we put God in his proper place and we put the situation in its proper place, then what happens is we are given the peace of God that passes all understanding and he guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. Prayerful people are able to walk in a peace that no one else can understand. Why? Because that peace is guarded by God. Because they walk in an understanding that God's got this and I don't and it's okay. The people in your life who pray the most are probably the most peaceful. They have the hardest feathers to ruffle. Now some of my friends are the most anxious and the most prayerful. Those things go hand in hand for them. But at least they've learned to reflexively pray. But when we are people of prayer and we're assured of perspective and place, we can't help but feel peace that follows that. I remember very vividly coming to Grace in April of 2017. And when I got here, I made this point before, I will not belabor it. Things were comically bad. We were going to shut the, if they didn't hire a senior pastor in April, they weren't making it out of May, no doubt about it. And no one who was here at that time would argue that. And I remember getting here and finding out more about how dire it was and going, whoa, well, this is career suicide because no one is going to look at the resume of a guy who's been a senior pastor exactly one time and ran it into the ground in six weeks. That's lifelong small group pastor territory. And then when I get old, they make me care pastor. That's what that is. But in prayer, I honestly, like I wasn't nervous. I wasn't worried. I didn't even really care because it was out of my hands. I knew that God loved this place. I knew that God cares about me and he cares about the people who call this place home. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is where God wanted me to be. And so I literally thought back in April of 2017, well, God, you brought me here on purpose. I know you did. It was either to grow it or to kill it. Either way, it's what you want. Let's ride. Let's see what happens. Now, we still don't know that he didn't bring me here to kill it, but so far, it's been to grow. So far, he's walked alongside us, and he's shown up again and again. Whenever we sing that song, Evidence, those are the kinds of things I think about. When we put things in their proper perspective, and we put ourselves in our place through prayer, we can be given the peace of God through prayer. And once we are walking in the peace of God through prayer, when we reflexively go to pray, we can pray with the proper perspective. It gives us the right perspective from which to pray. Because if I want to kneel down and pray for my children, John and Lily, I need to first acknowledge, God, you know them better than I'll ever know them. You see their entire future laid out in front of them. I don't know what they're going to do today. Hopefully, shut up, because we have a seven-hour drive. But I don't know what they're going to do today. You know what they're going to do in 30 years. I don't know how to best love their little hearts and souls. You knit them together. You know them intimately. So it inclines me with that admission to say, God, how would you have me pray for my children? God, what should my heart for Lily be? God, how can I best pray for John? And so when we walk in prayer, it inclines us towards his wisdom and we begin to blanket our prayers with this question of what is wise to pray. Not reflexively, what do I want to pray? What do I feel like praying? What do I want most in the moment? But God, because I know that you know this situation, you know me, you know the other people, you know everything happening, you know them intimately, because I that you know way more than I do about all the things what God is wise to pray. And that question begins to mature our prayers. When I pray for Sunday mornings, I never ever pray that the sermon would be good. I've never once prayed that I would do well. I think that's the wrong perspective. I pray and I write it every week to the elders. Every week to the elders I send out, let's all on these days, let's pray for this thing together. And Sunday has never changed. The prayer for Sunday is always, would the service be exactly what God wants it to be? Good, bad, or ugly, would what happens in here be what God wants to happen in here? When I pray for the band, when we have our pre-service meeting at 915, and sometimes I'm asked to pray over that, I always pray, God, would you help us to care about the things that you care about and not care about the things that you don't care about? Which is code speak for, if the host messes up, but it doesn't detract from the spiritual point of the service, who cares? If the basis starts with the wrong note, don't get bent out of shape about it. God doesn't care about it. You shouldn't either. Let's pursue the throne and praise God together. God, help us to care about what you care about and not care about what you don't care about. The more we walk in prayer, the more we keep the perspective in place right, the more peace we experience. And in that peace, we begin to pray wise prayers. God, how can I pray in accordance with your will about this? So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to invite Aaron and the band, Greg, back up. Back up. And instead of me finishing my sermon on prayer in prayer, I'm going to invite you to a time of prayer. I'm pretty certain if you're a thinking person that at some point during this sermon as I've talked about, hey, in this situation do you respond in prayer? Have you offered that up to prayer? Have you been trying to do this prayerlessly or with your own plans? I would be willing to bet that God has brought something to mind for you. That there's something or someone or some things in your life that probably do need some prayer. And maybe you haven't given them the prayer that they need. Maybe there are things you've been praying for very regularly for a long time, but you just want to lift them up again. So I'm going to step off the stage, and I'm going to give us all some time to pray. Lift those things up to God. Your children, your spouse, your loved ones, the family you'll see this Thanksgiving, that career thing that's just been eating at you, the bills that you don't know how you're going to pay, the health issues of you and your loved one that are just driving you nuts. Whatever it might be that God's brought to mind, take a few minutes and pray for that. And as you pray, Aaron's going to sing over us a little bit, and then at some point he'll invite us to stand. And we'll close out singing The Battle Belongs. And we'll let that be our battle cry that reminds us that our very first reaction, our very first reflex, no matter what's happening in our life, should be to go to God in prayer. Let's pray together, silently.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this November. Whenever I'm supposed to come up without a bumper video, the video that we played between the last song and the sermon is called a bumper video. Whenever I'm supposed to come up during a prayer and there's not a bumper video, I'm always terrified that I'm standing on the stage at the wrong time. There was a time at my old church where I was the host. I had Haley's job. They paid me for it. She does it for free. And I was in the front row, and I thought that the guy gave me the nod. You know, just this is it after this. And I was like, okay. So I come up, and he's standing back looking at me, and he goes, and he just strums the next song and goes, and I literally just walked up and looked at him in horror and then walked off the other side of the stage and sat down over there. And that was a congregation of like 700 people and they were all laughing at me. And I deserved it. That's germane to nothing. I'm just inviting you into the fear that I still fear, feel when I'm standing right here as Aaron is praying. Thank you to Kyle, our student pastor, who stepped in for me last week and did a phenomenal job as he continued on with the series. I appreciate that, man. We are in a series called The Songs We Sing, looking at some of the songs that we sing as a congregation, finding them in Scripture, allowing Scripture to imbue them with a greater meaning for us. And it's been really, really fun to move through this series, hear you guys responding, hear you guys singing, know that these things are connecting and that these songs can have deeper meaning for us. I continue to believe and emphasize that getting together and singing together on a Sunday morning as a body of believers is the most important thing that we do on Sunday mornings together. So I'm glad that we're continuing to do that. This week, we're looking at a song called The Battle Belongs. Next week, I'm preaching on a Christmas song, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, kind of to transition us into the Christmas season. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you guys next week. But this week, as I said, we're focused on a song called The Battle Belongs. It's one that we've sung around here for a while. You probably know it, but in case you don't, I'm just going to read you the chorus. This will not be on the screen, so you'll just be forced to pay attention to me. But the chorus goes like this. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees with my hands lifted high. Did you guys think I was going to sing this to you? No way. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. In every fear I lay at your feet, I'll sing through the night. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. This song comes directly out of, I think, two stories in the Old Testament. Now, as we sing this song, there's songs about you guiding me through the shadow and through the valley. That comes from Psalm 23. There's words about his ways being higher than our ways. That comes from Romans 11, that if God is for us, who can be against us? That comes from Romans 8. So there's different lyrics in the song that come from different places in scripture, but the heart of the song itself comes from two fantastic stories in the Old Testament. Now, if you spent any time at all at Grace, you know that I love my Old Testament. I love my Old Testament stories. It's a really, it tends to be a more entertaining read than the New Testament once you get past Acts, right? So I love the narrative stories of the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, the one I'm going to focus on primarily today is in 2 Chronicles chapter 20. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. 2 Chronicles can be hard for some of us to find because maybe we don't have a lot of experience there. It's in the first third of the Bible. There's a lot of pages in 1 and 2 Chronicles, so you're bound to find it if you thumb through a little bit. If you see kings, you're gaining on it. And if you see Ezra or Nehemiah, you've gone too far. All right. So Chronicles chapter 20. And in Chronicles chapter 20, there's a guy who's the king named Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat is the king of Judah. By this point in history, the kingdom has split. After David, we have Solomon. And after Solomon is the king, we have Rehoboam. Rehoboam was a cruddy king. He was a jerk. He was a dummy. And so Jeroboam took the northern kingdoms referred to for the rest of the Old Testament typically as Israel. And Rehoboam kept the southern kingdom typically referred to as Judah. For the rest of the lines of those kings and those stories are told in 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The northern tribes of Israel had no good kings. They all did what was right in their own eyes. They all betrayed God. Southern Israel, depending on who you talk to, Judah had between three and five good kings. As I kind of dug into the research, in my opinion, they had three good kings. We're going to talk about two of them this morning. One of them was Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat, 2 Chronicles chapter 20, receives word that the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Ammonites and the Meubites, I don't know how to say the last one, Meubites, were gathering together to attack him. Clearly, they felt like they had seen a weakness and they were ready to exploit it. Now, Judah is not a geopolitical player. They're just trying to carve out their place in the world. They're by no means a superpower. They're not scaring anyone. And so these three tribes assemble against him and decide now's the time we're going to strike. We're going to come in and we're going to conquer Judah. We're going to conquer Jerusalem and overthrow Jehoshaphat. And so word of this planned attack and the three tribes uniting against Jehoshaphat gets back to him., these three tribes have amassed against you. They're coming in to take over. They probably have the advantage. What do you want to do? His very first reaction is he was afraid. After he processes the fact that he's afraid, what should I do? He prays. He prays and he assembles all of Judah. Everyone from the different towns, the different tribes in Judah, come to Jerusalem, fast with me. Implicit in fasting is praying. Pray with me. Let's seek the face of the Lord and what we should do. So that's what they did. All the people of Judah gathered in Jerusalem. And they got on their hands and their knees and they cried out to God and they said, what do we do? God, what do we do here? We're going to be attacked. What should we do? And so they respond in prayer. And God answers them in this way on down the passage, verses 15 through 18. And he said, We say the battle belongs to the Lord. That's where it comes from. It's from the high priest reassuring Jehoshaphat, don't worry about it. Do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This battle's not yours anyways. This battle belongs to God. Verse 16. And here's the scene. Jehoshaphat gets word that the Moabites, Ammonites, and the Miites are coming to attack them and overthrow them. He's scared. He prays. He gathers the people of Judah to pray with him. Father, what would you have us do here? At the end of the prayer, the high priest says, the Lord has directed me. And you're supposed to do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This is not your battle. This is God's. Go out and align yourself for battle. And the instructions that follow are, lead with the Levites and let them sing worship. Lead with worship and lead with praise. And that's what they did. He fell on his face. He praised God with all the people. And it's important that we understand that worship isn't just singing. Worship can be praying. Worship can be a posture. Worship is living a life of sacrifice. Worship has a large definition. And so he falls on his face. If you're hearing these instructions, he falls on his face with the rest of Judah and they pray to God. And then the next morning they get up. They're not fearful. They go out to the battle lines. They put in front of them the worship pastors, which has to be the worst possible idea, right? Like if we needed to defend grace, would you want Aaron and Greg to do it? Or would you want people with like military experience? I'm just asking the question. I don't think you would want me to do it, but they're not the tops on the list is all I'm saying. But they put the skinny jeans and the beards out in front. This is who we're going to lead with. By the way, all these jokes, none of this is my insight. These are all Aaron's jokes. I'm stealing them. This is a sermon he's done before, this part of it. So I'm authorized to use these things. I mean, just so we're all clear about how tough I am, I raked for like 45 minutes last week. My arm was sore for a day, and I got a blister on one of my fingies, even though I was wearing gloves. All right, so that's what we're dealing with here. But they put the worship leaders out in front, and they praise God. And as they praise God, God incites a riot in the camp of the three different tribes. They conquer each other, and they walk away dismayed. God's army doesn't have to fire a single arrow or throw a single spear. The battle is won because it belongs to the Lord. There's another wonderful example of this, and I believe it's referenced in the chorus when it says, everything I lay at your feet. And I think the most descriptive example of this is in 2 Kings chapter 19. It's a story of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was another one of the good kings of Jerusalem, or yeah, of Jerusalem and of Judah. And what's going on here is that Hezekiah receives word that the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, is sweeping through the Middle East and is storming towards Jerusalem intent on conquering it. And this isn't three random roving tribes that happen to exist around you, Moab and Amman. It's not those places. This is Assyria, the precursor to the Persian empire. This is Sennacherib, a name that strikes fear in everyone that hears it. This is a big deal. And Sennacherib on his way deploys basically propaganda in Jerusalem. It's a letter that he sends that he writes to the people of Jerusalem that says, hey, you're going to want to get out of Dodge because I'm coming to wreck shop. And if you're still there when I get there, you and your family's going to die, just so you know. And someone takes that letter and they hand it to Hezekiah. And this is Hezekiah's response in verse 14. Verse 19. The propaganda letter is brought to King Hezekiah. Hezekiah knows. If Sennacherib wants Jerusalem, he's going to take it. They have as much chance of defending Jerusalem from Sennacherib as my daughter Lily has defending her Reese's peanut butter cups at Halloween from me. I'm going to win that fight. And so what does Hezekiah do? He doesn't do what you think he should do. What he should do is assemble the generals right away. Assemble the quartermaster right away. Assemble the treasurer right away. Whoever's in charge of agriculture, how we're going to feed the people, get them in the room. He needs to assemble the cabinet right away. How do we defend Jerusalem? Someone start boiling some oil. I saw that on Netflix one time. That seems to be a thing you should do when you're defending the city. Get everybody together and let's come up with a plan to repel the Assyrian army. That's what we need to do. That's not what he does. He takes the letter. He goes to the temple. He lays it down at the feet of the Lord, and he prays. And he says, God, this is an affront to you. What would you have us do? His first response is to pray. And similarly to Jehoshaphat, God directs Hezekiah, don't do anything. Don't fire an arrow. Just watch, and I'll win. And the next morning, he incites a riot in the camp of the Assyrians. They rout each other, and they walk back to Assyria licking their wounds. God's armies didn't have to fire an arrow. Because they're good kings, Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah responded in prayer to everything that came their way. And so, of course, when I read these stories and I reflect on them, and I think about these were put here over a thousand years ago for us today. What is it that I should take from them? I think there's myriad applications here. But the biggest one to me is to simply ask, is this what I do? Is this what we do? When I encounter a situation that gives me pause, is my reflexive response to pray? When I'm fearful, like Jehoshaphat was, is my first response to go and pray, or is my first response to go and plan? I don't know about you, but when I'm in a stressful situation, when I feel disappointed or when I feel overwhelmed or when I feel like there's a big task in front of me, the very first thing I do is come up with a plan that I believe in. As soon as I have a plan that I can work, I feel very comforted in life. So the first thing I do in stress is I sit down, I think it through, I make a plan, and then I begin to work the plan. The problem is, prayer didn't precede that plan. It didn't follow that plan. It's just my plan. And I'm not, certainly didn't bring anybody here to make you feel bad about your prayer life. So I'll let you join in judging me about mine. And if it applies to you, fine. But when I read these passages, I can't help but ask myself, how much of my parenthood is prayerless and just reflexive? How much of my marriage and my love for Jen is prayerless and just a representation of my effort? How much of my career? How much of my interactions with others? How many of my important, maybe even difficult conversations? How many small groups in Bible studies have I led prayerlessly just going into them on my own? Is it my reflex in times of stress, in times of trepidation, in times of challenge, in times of fear, in times of uncertainty? Is my reflex to pray or is it to plan? Is it to seek the face of the Lord? Or is it to call a friend? How much in your life, this is where I'll put it on you, how much in your life, in your coming and in your going, as you enter into situations, as you face new situations, when you get phone calls, as you respond, how much in your life do you stop and you pause and you lay down at the foot of God and you say, God, I need you here. I'm not big enough for this. How much of that do you do and how much of it do you just take on yourself and charge right ahead without ever once stopping to pause and pray? I've joked often, and I will do it one day, that one day I'm going to give a sermon on reading the Bible. And I'm going to come out. I'm going to say, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You should read your Bible more. Let's pray. I'm going to do that one day. Because I genuinely think that when I come out here and I tell a group full of Christians who in your heart love and seek out God's word, when I say, hey guys, we should read the Bible more often, that the Holy Spirit can take it from there. He doesn't need me to talk for 29 and a half more minutes to make that an effective message. I'm probably just going to mess it up. That's enough for the Holy Spirit to go and work. And similarly, this morning is simply that. Hey guys, pray more. Pray more reflexively. Pray more regularly. And grain it into yourselves. Let the Holy Spirit work it into your psyche. Pray more. Because here's what happens when we pray more. I was reflecting as I was preparing. If we can be more like Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, if we can be people who respond in prayer and not panic or plans, what can happen for us? Because remember, everything that God tells us to do, he tells us to do because it's best for us. So why is it best for us to stop at every moment, every day, and pray multiple times a day? Why is it better for us to pray and consider more? Here's what I think. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Not for nothing. That's the greatest alliterative sentence I've ever written in my life. I'm going to graduate now as a pastor. I've reached the mountaintop, I think. Prayer provides us with perspective. It puts things in their proper focus. I have a son, John, he's two and a half, and he's in that season where every time we go up the stairs, it's an adventure, right? And you always ask him when you're about to go up the stairs, you don't want to upset his delicate sensibilities. Johnny, do you want to hold my hand? You want to do it yourself? And he usually says, I do it myself. Okay. And so he uses the wall and the railings and different things, and he takes the steps one at a time. And I'm right behind him. If he falls, I'm going to catch him. It's going to be okay. But he likes to say, I do it myself. And then I let him do it himself. Listen, every time we go into a situation or circumstance or a scenario, and we do it prayerlessly, what we've just done is we've looked at God and we've said, I do it myself. Do you need help with your career? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. Do you need help in your marriage? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. I can hold your hand. I can guide you through this. I can show you the way. No, it's good. I'll do it myself. This big goal in your life, I'll do it myself. Reconciling a relationship, I'll do it myself. Raising your children, I'll do it myself. Every time we enter into anything prayerlessly, we are saying to God, I'll do it myself. Thanks. When we don't pray, we make ourselves too big and God too small. When we don't pray, when we don't pray about whatever it is, about a health issue, about a relationship, about a career, about parenthood, about our marriage, about trying to transition into being adult parents of adult kids, and that relationship is different, and I don't really know what to do with my hands anymore. I just need to know I need to give them some space. When we approach that prayerlessly, we make God too big and ourselves too small. We forget who we are and who he is. But I want us to actually acknowledge and admit that that any time we approach anything, whether it's just a small sales meeting, a regular business meeting in our place of work, a board meeting or an elder meeting, when we approach a small group, when we approach a delicate conversation with our spouse or with our kids, when we sit at our desk or wherever it is we sit on Monday morning and think about the week ahead, when we do any of those things prayerlessly, we make ourselves far too big and God far too small. And we say to him, I've got this. I'll do it myself. God in his goodness climbs those stairs right behind us, but he's willing to hold our hand and walk us up there if we'll reach for him in prayer. So not only does prayer give us perspective, but prayer puts everything in its proper place, right? Because when we pray, here's what we admit, whether we consciously acknowledge this or not. God is in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. When we pray, that's what we acknowledge. God's in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. God's the creator of the universe. I'm not the creator of the universe. He's in charge. I am not. And this situation is in his hands and better off for it. When I think about this, that prayer puts us in our proper place, I'm reminded of Genesis 1. Genesis 1.1. God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I love to ask the question, why does the Bible begin that way? I don't think it just begins that way because that's where the story begins. I think it begins that way because it sets up the fundamental relationship throughout all of Bible and all of life. God is the creator. We are the creation. This is it. All sin in our life is getting confused about that relationship. That's all it is. God is the Lord. I am not. God is the creator. I am the created. All sin in our life is when we choose to ignore that and say, no, no, no, I'm more important than him. That's it. And so what prayer does is put us in our proper place. What prayer does for us in a humble, quiet way is what God had to do for Job in a bombastic way in Job chapter 38. When Job's tired of life, he's tired of suffering and goes to God and he's like, hey man, you owe me some answers. And so in Job 38 and on, God gives Job those answers, but they're not the ones he wants. He says, Job, you've forgotten your place, pal. You don't know who you are and who I am. You've forgotten. And then Paul reiterates this in Romans 11, when he says, who can understand the mind of God? His ways are higher than our ways. And so when we humble ourselves in prayer, particularly when we bow on our knees if we can, it puts everything in its proper place. You are God. I am not. You're in charge. I'm reliant on you. The situation is bigger than me. It is not bigger than you. I know that you know my kids better than I could ever know them. I know you love them more than I could ever love them. So I'm trusting them with you. Tell me what my part is and I'll do it. Often your part is to hang back and sing worship music and let God do the dirty work. I know that you know my wife better than I'll ever know her and that you love her more than I can ever love her. So can you just show me what my part is in loving her? Can you just help me with that? God, I know that my career, for whatever reason, is important to you. I don't know why it's important to you. I don't know what the end game of it is. I don't know what you would have me to learn or gain there, but I know that it matters to you where I work, who I work for, and how I carry myself in the workplace. I know that matters to you, God. So I'm going to trust you with it and walk in the steps that you would lay out for me. When we pray, it gives us the proper perspective and it puts everything in its proper place. And then, when everything's in its proper place, prayer gives us peace. It offers us peace. I love that in worship, sometimes the Holy Spirit does things like this. In worship, Aaron referenced Philippians 4, 8. Finally, brothers, whatsoever things are true, noble, of good report, honorable, godly, trustworthy, think upon these things. And he was right. That verse is preceded by two verses that tell us what we should do in times of worry. Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and supplication, 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 Christ Jesus. So Paul writes in Philippians, don't be anxious for anything, which for most dudes, it's like, okay. And for most women, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm anxious about you saying that. Be anxious for nothing. But in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And what will happen when in everything we present our request to God, when in everything we pray, when in every circumstance we reflectively fall on our feet and say, God, what would you have us do? What happens when for everything we present our petitions to God and we have the proper perspective with that thing and who God is and we put ourselves in our proper place and we put God in his proper place and we put the situation in its proper place, then what happens is we are given the peace of God that passes all understanding and he guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. Prayerful people are able to walk in a peace that no one else can understand. Why? Because that peace is guarded by God. Because they walk in an understanding that God's got this and I don't and it's okay. The people in your life who pray the most are probably the most peaceful. They have the hardest feathers to ruffle. Now some of my friends are the most anxious and the most prayerful. Those things go hand in hand for them. But at least they've learned to reflexively pray. But when we are people of prayer and we're assured of perspective and place, we can't help but feel peace that follows that. I remember very vividly coming to Grace in April of 2017. And when I got here, I made this point before, I will not belabor it. Things were comically bad. We were going to shut the, if they didn't hire a senior pastor in April, they weren't making it out of May, no doubt about it. And no one who was here at that time would argue that. And I remember getting here and finding out more about how dire it was and going, whoa, well, this is career suicide because no one is going to look at the resume of a guy who's been a senior pastor exactly one time and ran it into the ground in six weeks. That's lifelong small group pastor territory. And then when I get old, they make me care pastor. That's what that is. But in prayer, I honestly, like I wasn't nervous. I wasn't worried. I didn't even really care because it was out of my hands. I knew that God loved this place. I knew that God cares about me and he cares about the people who call this place home. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is where God wanted me to be. And so I literally thought back in April of 2017, well, God, you brought me here on purpose. I know you did. It was either to grow it or to kill it. Either way, it's what you want. Let's ride. Let's see what happens. Now, we still don't know that he didn't bring me here to kill it, but so far, it's been to grow. So far, he's walked alongside us, and he's shown up again and again. Whenever we sing that song, Evidence, those are the kinds of things I think about. When we put things in their proper perspective, and we put ourselves in our place through prayer, we can be given the peace of God through prayer. And once we are walking in the peace of God through prayer, when we reflexively go to pray, we can pray with the proper perspective. It gives us the right perspective from which to pray. Because if I want to kneel down and pray for my children, John and Lily, I need to first acknowledge, God, you know them better than I'll ever know them. You see their entire future laid out in front of them. I don't know what they're going to do today. Hopefully, shut up, because we have a seven-hour drive. But I don't know what they're going to do today. You know what they're going to do in 30 years. I don't know how to best love their little hearts and souls. You knit them together. You know them intimately. So it inclines me with that admission to say, God, how would you have me pray for my children? God, what should my heart for Lily be? God, how can I best pray for John? And so when we walk in prayer, it inclines us towards his wisdom and we begin to blanket our prayers with this question of what is wise to pray. Not reflexively, what do I want to pray? What do I feel like praying? What do I want most in the moment? But God, because I know that you know this situation, you know me, you know the other people, you know everything happening, you know them intimately, because I that you know way more than I do about all the things what God is wise to pray. And that question begins to mature our prayers. When I pray for Sunday mornings, I never ever pray that the sermon would be good. I've never once prayed that I would do well. I think that's the wrong perspective. I pray and I write it every week to the elders. Every week to the elders I send out, let's all on these days, let's pray for this thing together. And Sunday has never changed. The prayer for Sunday is always, would the service be exactly what God wants it to be? Good, bad, or ugly, would what happens in here be what God wants to happen in here? When I pray for the band, when we have our pre-service meeting at 915, and sometimes I'm asked to pray over that, I always pray, God, would you help us to care about the things that you care about and not care about the things that you don't care about? Which is code speak for, if the host messes up, but it doesn't detract from the spiritual point of the service, who cares? If the basis starts with the wrong note, don't get bent out of shape about it. God doesn't care about it. You shouldn't either. Let's pursue the throne and praise God together. God, help us to care about what you care about and not care about what you don't care about. The more we walk in prayer, the more we keep the perspective in place right, the more peace we experience. And in that peace, we begin to pray wise prayers. God, how can I pray in accordance with your will about this? So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to invite Aaron and the band, Greg, back up. Back up. And instead of me finishing my sermon on prayer in prayer, I'm going to invite you to a time of prayer. I'm pretty certain if you're a thinking person that at some point during this sermon as I've talked about, hey, in this situation do you respond in prayer? Have you offered that up to prayer? Have you been trying to do this prayerlessly or with your own plans? I would be willing to bet that God has brought something to mind for you. That there's something or someone or some things in your life that probably do need some prayer. And maybe you haven't given them the prayer that they need. Maybe there are things you've been praying for very regularly for a long time, but you just want to lift them up again. So I'm going to step off the stage, and I'm going to give us all some time to pray. Lift those things up to God. Your children, your spouse, your loved ones, the family you'll see this Thanksgiving, that career thing that's just been eating at you, the bills that you don't know how you're going to pay, the health issues of you and your loved one that are just driving you nuts. Whatever it might be that God's brought to mind, take a few minutes and pray for that. And as you pray, Aaron's going to sing over us a little bit, and then at some point he'll invite us to stand. And we'll close out singing The Battle Belongs. And we'll let that be our battle cry that reminds us that our very first reaction, our very first reflex, no matter what's happening in our life, should be to go to God in prayer. Let's pray together, silently.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this November. Whenever I'm supposed to come up without a bumper video, the video that we played between the last song and the sermon is called a bumper video. Whenever I'm supposed to come up during a prayer and there's not a bumper video, I'm always terrified that I'm standing on the stage at the wrong time. There was a time at my old church where I was the host. I had Haley's job. They paid me for it. She does it for free. And I was in the front row, and I thought that the guy gave me the nod. You know, just this is it after this. And I was like, okay. So I come up, and he's standing back looking at me, and he goes, and he just strums the next song and goes, and I literally just walked up and looked at him in horror and then walked off the other side of the stage and sat down over there. And that was a congregation of like 700 people and they were all laughing at me. And I deserved it. That's germane to nothing. I'm just inviting you into the fear that I still fear, feel when I'm standing right here as Aaron is praying. Thank you to Kyle, our student pastor, who stepped in for me last week and did a phenomenal job as he continued on with the series. I appreciate that, man. We are in a series called The Songs We Sing, looking at some of the songs that we sing as a congregation, finding them in Scripture, allowing Scripture to imbue them with a greater meaning for us. And it's been really, really fun to move through this series, hear you guys responding, hear you guys singing, know that these things are connecting and that these songs can have deeper meaning for us. I continue to believe and emphasize that getting together and singing together on a Sunday morning as a body of believers is the most important thing that we do on Sunday mornings together. So I'm glad that we're continuing to do that. This week, we're looking at a song called The Battle Belongs. Next week, I'm preaching on a Christmas song, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, kind of to transition us into the Christmas season. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you guys next week. But this week, as I said, we're focused on a song called The Battle Belongs. It's one that we've sung around here for a while. You probably know it, but in case you don't, I'm just going to read you the chorus. This will not be on the screen, so you'll just be forced to pay attention to me. But the chorus goes like this. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees with my hands lifted high. Did you guys think I was going to sing this to you? No way. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. In every fear I lay at your feet, I'll sing through the night. Oh, God, the battle belongs to you. This song comes directly out of, I think, two stories in the Old Testament. Now, as we sing this song, there's songs about you guiding me through the shadow and through the valley. That comes from Psalm 23. There's words about his ways being higher than our ways. That comes from Romans 11, that if God is for us, who can be against us? That comes from Romans 8. So there's different lyrics in the song that come from different places in scripture, but the heart of the song itself comes from two fantastic stories in the Old Testament. Now, if you spent any time at all at Grace, you know that I love my Old Testament. I love my Old Testament stories. It's a really, it tends to be a more entertaining read than the New Testament once you get past Acts, right? So I love the narrative stories of the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, the one I'm going to focus on primarily today is in 2 Chronicles chapter 20. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. 2 Chronicles can be hard for some of us to find because maybe we don't have a lot of experience there. It's in the first third of the Bible. There's a lot of pages in 1 and 2 Chronicles, so you're bound to find it if you thumb through a little bit. If you see kings, you're gaining on it. And if you see Ezra or Nehemiah, you've gone too far. All right. So Chronicles chapter 20. And in Chronicles chapter 20, there's a guy who's the king named Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat is the king of Judah. By this point in history, the kingdom has split. After David, we have Solomon. And after Solomon is the king, we have Rehoboam. Rehoboam was a cruddy king. He was a jerk. He was a dummy. And so Jeroboam took the northern kingdoms referred to for the rest of the Old Testament typically as Israel. And Rehoboam kept the southern kingdom typically referred to as Judah. For the rest of the lines of those kings and those stories are told in 1 and 2 Kings and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The northern tribes of Israel had no good kings. They all did what was right in their own eyes. They all betrayed God. Southern Israel, depending on who you talk to, Judah had between three and five good kings. As I kind of dug into the research, in my opinion, they had three good kings. We're going to talk about two of them this morning. One of them was Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat, 2 Chronicles chapter 20, receives word that the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Ammonites and the Meubites, I don't know how to say the last one, Meubites, were gathering together to attack him. Clearly, they felt like they had seen a weakness and they were ready to exploit it. Now, Judah is not a geopolitical player. They're just trying to carve out their place in the world. They're by no means a superpower. They're not scaring anyone. And so these three tribes assemble against him and decide now's the time we're going to strike. We're going to come in and we're going to conquer Judah. We're going to conquer Jerusalem and overthrow Jehoshaphat. And so word of this planned attack and the three tribes uniting against Jehoshaphat gets back to him., these three tribes have amassed against you. They're coming in to take over. They probably have the advantage. What do you want to do? His very first reaction is he was afraid. After he processes the fact that he's afraid, what should I do? He prays. He prays and he assembles all of Judah. Everyone from the different towns, the different tribes in Judah, come to Jerusalem, fast with me. Implicit in fasting is praying. Pray with me. Let's seek the face of the Lord and what we should do. So that's what they did. All the people of Judah gathered in Jerusalem. And they got on their hands and their knees and they cried out to God and they said, what do we do? God, what do we do here? We're going to be attacked. What should we do? And so they respond in prayer. And God answers them in this way on down the passage, verses 15 through 18. And he said, We say the battle belongs to the Lord. That's where it comes from. It's from the high priest reassuring Jehoshaphat, don't worry about it. Do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This battle's not yours anyways. This battle belongs to God. Verse 16. And here's the scene. Jehoshaphat gets word that the Moabites, Ammonites, and the Miites are coming to attack them and overthrow them. He's scared. He prays. He gathers the people of Judah to pray with him. Father, what would you have us do here? At the end of the prayer, the high priest says, the Lord has directed me. And you're supposed to do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed. This is not your battle. This is God's. Go out and align yourself for battle. And the instructions that follow are, lead with the Levites and let them sing worship. Lead with worship and lead with praise. And that's what they did. He fell on his face. He praised God with all the people. And it's important that we understand that worship isn't just singing. Worship can be praying. Worship can be a posture. Worship is living a life of sacrifice. Worship has a large definition. And so he falls on his face. If you're hearing these instructions, he falls on his face with the rest of Judah and they pray to God. And then the next morning they get up. They're not fearful. They go out to the battle lines. They put in front of them the worship pastors, which has to be the worst possible idea, right? Like if we needed to defend grace, would you want Aaron and Greg to do it? Or would you want people with like military experience? I'm just asking the question. I don't think you would want me to do it, but they're not the tops on the list is all I'm saying. But they put the skinny jeans and the beards out in front. This is who we're going to lead with. By the way, all these jokes, none of this is my insight. These are all Aaron's jokes. I'm stealing them. This is a sermon he's done before, this part of it. So I'm authorized to use these things. I mean, just so we're all clear about how tough I am, I raked for like 45 minutes last week. My arm was sore for a day, and I got a blister on one of my fingies, even though I was wearing gloves. All right, so that's what we're dealing with here. But they put the worship leaders out in front, and they praise God. And as they praise God, God incites a riot in the camp of the three different tribes. They conquer each other, and they walk away dismayed. God's army doesn't have to fire a single arrow or throw a single spear. The battle is won because it belongs to the Lord. There's another wonderful example of this, and I believe it's referenced in the chorus when it says, everything I lay at your feet. And I think the most descriptive example of this is in 2 Kings chapter 19. It's a story of Hezekiah. Hezekiah was another one of the good kings of Jerusalem, or yeah, of Jerusalem and of Judah. And what's going on here is that Hezekiah receives word that the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, is sweeping through the Middle East and is storming towards Jerusalem intent on conquering it. And this isn't three random roving tribes that happen to exist around you, Moab and Amman. It's not those places. This is Assyria, the precursor to the Persian empire. This is Sennacherib, a name that strikes fear in everyone that hears it. This is a big deal. And Sennacherib on his way deploys basically propaganda in Jerusalem. It's a letter that he sends that he writes to the people of Jerusalem that says, hey, you're going to want to get out of Dodge because I'm coming to wreck shop. And if you're still there when I get there, you and your family's going to die, just so you know. And someone takes that letter and they hand it to Hezekiah. And this is Hezekiah's response in verse 14. Verse 19. The propaganda letter is brought to King Hezekiah. Hezekiah knows. If Sennacherib wants Jerusalem, he's going to take it. They have as much chance of defending Jerusalem from Sennacherib as my daughter Lily has defending her Reese's peanut butter cups at Halloween from me. I'm going to win that fight. And so what does Hezekiah do? He doesn't do what you think he should do. What he should do is assemble the generals right away. Assemble the quartermaster right away. Assemble the treasurer right away. Whoever's in charge of agriculture, how we're going to feed the people, get them in the room. He needs to assemble the cabinet right away. How do we defend Jerusalem? Someone start boiling some oil. I saw that on Netflix one time. That seems to be a thing you should do when you're defending the city. Get everybody together and let's come up with a plan to repel the Assyrian army. That's what we need to do. That's not what he does. He takes the letter. He goes to the temple. He lays it down at the feet of the Lord, and he prays. And he says, God, this is an affront to you. What would you have us do? His first response is to pray. And similarly to Jehoshaphat, God directs Hezekiah, don't do anything. Don't fire an arrow. Just watch, and I'll win. And the next morning, he incites a riot in the camp of the Assyrians. They rout each other, and they walk back to Assyria licking their wounds. God's armies didn't have to fire an arrow. Because they're good kings, Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah responded in prayer to everything that came their way. And so, of course, when I read these stories and I reflect on them, and I think about these were put here over a thousand years ago for us today. What is it that I should take from them? I think there's myriad applications here. But the biggest one to me is to simply ask, is this what I do? Is this what we do? When I encounter a situation that gives me pause, is my reflexive response to pray? When I'm fearful, like Jehoshaphat was, is my first response to go and pray, or is my first response to go and plan? I don't know about you, but when I'm in a stressful situation, when I feel disappointed or when I feel overwhelmed or when I feel like there's a big task in front of me, the very first thing I do is come up with a plan that I believe in. As soon as I have a plan that I can work, I feel very comforted in life. So the first thing I do in stress is I sit down, I think it through, I make a plan, and then I begin to work the plan. The problem is, prayer didn't precede that plan. It didn't follow that plan. It's just my plan. And I'm not, certainly didn't bring anybody here to make you feel bad about your prayer life. So I'll let you join in judging me about mine. And if it applies to you, fine. But when I read these passages, I can't help but ask myself, how much of my parenthood is prayerless and just reflexive? How much of my marriage and my love for Jen is prayerless and just a representation of my effort? How much of my career? How much of my interactions with others? How many of my important, maybe even difficult conversations? How many small groups in Bible studies have I led prayerlessly just going into them on my own? Is it my reflex in times of stress, in times of trepidation, in times of challenge, in times of fear, in times of uncertainty? Is my reflex to pray or is it to plan? Is it to seek the face of the Lord? Or is it to call a friend? How much in your life, this is where I'll put it on you, how much in your life, in your coming and in your going, as you enter into situations, as you face new situations, when you get phone calls, as you respond, how much in your life do you stop and you pause and you lay down at the foot of God and you say, God, I need you here. I'm not big enough for this. How much of that do you do and how much of it do you just take on yourself and charge right ahead without ever once stopping to pause and pray? I've joked often, and I will do it one day, that one day I'm going to give a sermon on reading the Bible. And I'm going to come out. I'm going to say, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You should read your Bible more. Let's pray. I'm going to do that one day. Because I genuinely think that when I come out here and I tell a group full of Christians who in your heart love and seek out God's word, when I say, hey guys, we should read the Bible more often, that the Holy Spirit can take it from there. He doesn't need me to talk for 29 and a half more minutes to make that an effective message. I'm probably just going to mess it up. That's enough for the Holy Spirit to go and work. And similarly, this morning is simply that. Hey guys, pray more. Pray more reflexively. Pray more regularly. And grain it into yourselves. Let the Holy Spirit work it into your psyche. Pray more. Because here's what happens when we pray more. I was reflecting as I was preparing. If we can be more like Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah, if we can be people who respond in prayer and not panic or plans, what can happen for us? Because remember, everything that God tells us to do, he tells us to do because it's best for us. So why is it best for us to stop at every moment, every day, and pray multiple times a day? Why is it better for us to pray and consider more? Here's what I think. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Prayer provides perspective, place, peace, and priorities. Not for nothing. That's the greatest alliterative sentence I've ever written in my life. I'm going to graduate now as a pastor. I've reached the mountaintop, I think. Prayer provides us with perspective. It puts things in their proper focus. I have a son, John, he's two and a half, and he's in that season where every time we go up the stairs, it's an adventure, right? And you always ask him when you're about to go up the stairs, you don't want to upset his delicate sensibilities. Johnny, do you want to hold my hand? You want to do it yourself? And he usually says, I do it myself. Okay. And so he uses the wall and the railings and different things, and he takes the steps one at a time. And I'm right behind him. If he falls, I'm going to catch him. It's going to be okay. But he likes to say, I do it myself. And then I let him do it himself. Listen, every time we go into a situation or circumstance or a scenario, and we do it prayerlessly, what we've just done is we've looked at God and we've said, I do it myself. Do you need help with your career? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. Do you need help in your marriage? No, I got this. I'll do it myself. I can hold your hand. I can guide you through this. I can show you the way. No, it's good. I'll do it myself. This big goal in your life, I'll do it myself. Reconciling a relationship, I'll do it myself. Raising your children, I'll do it myself. Every time we enter into anything prayerlessly, we are saying to God, I'll do it myself. Thanks. When we don't pray, we make ourselves too big and God too small. When we don't pray, when we don't pray about whatever it is, about a health issue, about a relationship, about a career, about parenthood, about our marriage, about trying to transition into being adult parents of adult kids, and that relationship is different, and I don't really know what to do with my hands anymore. I just need to know I need to give them some space. When we approach that prayerlessly, we make God too big and ourselves too small. We forget who we are and who he is. But I want us to actually acknowledge and admit that that any time we approach anything, whether it's just a small sales meeting, a regular business meeting in our place of work, a board meeting or an elder meeting, when we approach a small group, when we approach a delicate conversation with our spouse or with our kids, when we sit at our desk or wherever it is we sit on Monday morning and think about the week ahead, when we do any of those things prayerlessly, we make ourselves far too big and God far too small. And we say to him, I've got this. I'll do it myself. God in his goodness climbs those stairs right behind us, but he's willing to hold our hand and walk us up there if we'll reach for him in prayer. So not only does prayer give us perspective, but prayer puts everything in its proper place, right? Because when we pray, here's what we admit, whether we consciously acknowledge this or not. God is in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. When we pray, that's what we acknowledge. God's in charge. I am not. This situation is in his hands. God's the creator of the universe. I'm not the creator of the universe. He's in charge. I am not. And this situation is in his hands and better off for it. When I think about this, that prayer puts us in our proper place, I'm reminded of Genesis 1. Genesis 1.1. God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I love to ask the question, why does the Bible begin that way? I don't think it just begins that way because that's where the story begins. I think it begins that way because it sets up the fundamental relationship throughout all of Bible and all of life. God is the creator. We are the creation. This is it. All sin in our life is getting confused about that relationship. That's all it is. God is the Lord. I am not. God is the creator. I am the created. All sin in our life is when we choose to ignore that and say, no, no, no, I'm more important than him. That's it. And so what prayer does is put us in our proper place. What prayer does for us in a humble, quiet way is what God had to do for Job in a bombastic way in Job chapter 38. When Job's tired of life, he's tired of suffering and goes to God and he's like, hey man, you owe me some answers. And so in Job 38 and on, God gives Job those answers, but they're not the ones he wants. He says, Job, you've forgotten your place, pal. You don't know who you are and who I am. You've forgotten. And then Paul reiterates this in Romans 11, when he says, who can understand the mind of God? His ways are higher than our ways. And so when we humble ourselves in prayer, particularly when we bow on our knees if we can, it puts everything in its proper place. You are God. I am not. You're in charge. I'm reliant on you. The situation is bigger than me. It is not bigger than you. I know that you know my kids better than I could ever know them. I know you love them more than I could ever love them. So I'm trusting them with you. Tell me what my part is and I'll do it. Often your part is to hang back and sing worship music and let God do the dirty work. I know that you know my wife better than I'll ever know her and that you love her more than I can ever love her. So can you just show me what my part is in loving her? Can you just help me with that? God, I know that my career, for whatever reason, is important to you. I don't know why it's important to you. I don't know what the end game of it is. I don't know what you would have me to learn or gain there, but I know that it matters to you where I work, who I work for, and how I carry myself in the workplace. I know that matters to you, God. So I'm going to trust you with it and walk in the steps that you would lay out for me. When we pray, it gives us the proper perspective and it puts everything in its proper place. And then, when everything's in its proper place, prayer gives us peace. It offers us peace. I love that in worship, sometimes the Holy Spirit does things like this. In worship, Aaron referenced Philippians 4, 8. Finally, brothers, whatsoever things are true, noble, of good report, honorable, godly, trustworthy, think upon these things. And he was right. That verse is preceded by two verses that tell us what we should do in times of worry. Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and supplication, 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 Christ Jesus. So Paul writes in Philippians, don't be anxious for anything, which for most dudes, it's like, okay. And for most women, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm anxious about you saying that. Be anxious for nothing. But in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And what will happen when in everything we present our request to God, when in everything we pray, when in every circumstance we reflectively fall on our feet and say, God, what would you have us do? What happens when for everything we present our petitions to God and we have the proper perspective with that thing and who God is and we put ourselves in our proper place and we put God in his proper place and we put the situation in its proper place, then what happens is we are given the peace of God that passes all understanding and he guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. Prayerful people are able to walk in a peace that no one else can understand. Why? Because that peace is guarded by God. Because they walk in an understanding that God's got this and I don't and it's okay. The people in your life who pray the most are probably the most peaceful. They have the hardest feathers to ruffle. Now some of my friends are the most anxious and the most prayerful. Those things go hand in hand for them. But at least they've learned to reflexively pray. But when we are people of prayer and we're assured of perspective and place, we can't help but feel peace that follows that. I remember very vividly coming to Grace in April of 2017. And when I got here, I made this point before, I will not belabor it. Things were comically bad. We were going to shut the, if they didn't hire a senior pastor in April, they weren't making it out of May, no doubt about it. And no one who was here at that time would argue that. And I remember getting here and finding out more about how dire it was and going, whoa, well, this is career suicide because no one is going to look at the resume of a guy who's been a senior pastor exactly one time and ran it into the ground in six weeks. That's lifelong small group pastor territory. And then when I get old, they make me care pastor. That's what that is. But in prayer, I honestly, like I wasn't nervous. I wasn't worried. I didn't even really care because it was out of my hands. I knew that God loved this place. I knew that God cares about me and he cares about the people who call this place home. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is where God wanted me to be. And so I literally thought back in April of 2017, well, God, you brought me here on purpose. I know you did. It was either to grow it or to kill it. Either way, it's what you want. Let's ride. Let's see what happens. Now, we still don't know that he didn't bring me here to kill it, but so far, it's been to grow. So far, he's walked alongside us, and he's shown up again and again. Whenever we sing that song, Evidence, those are the kinds of things I think about. When we put things in their proper perspective, and we put ourselves in our place through prayer, we can be given the peace of God through prayer. And once we are walking in the peace of God through prayer, when we reflexively go to pray, we can pray with the proper perspective. It gives us the right perspective from which to pray. Because if I want to kneel down and pray for my children, John and Lily, I need to first acknowledge, God, you know them better than I'll ever know them. You see their entire future laid out in front of them. I don't know what they're going to do today. Hopefully, shut up, because we have a seven-hour drive. But I don't know what they're going to do today. You know what they're going to do in 30 years. I don't know how to best love their little hearts and souls. You knit them together. You know them intimately. So it inclines me with that admission to say, God, how would you have me pray for my children? God, what should my heart for Lily be? God, how can I best pray for John? And so when we walk in prayer, it inclines us towards his wisdom and we begin to blanket our prayers with this question of what is wise to pray. Not reflexively, what do I want to pray? What do I feel like praying? What do I want most in the moment? But God, because I know that you know this situation, you know me, you know the other people, you know everything happening, you know them intimately, because I that you know way more than I do about all the things what God is wise to pray. And that question begins to mature our prayers. When I pray for Sunday mornings, I never ever pray that the sermon would be good. I've never once prayed that I would do well. I think that's the wrong perspective. I pray and I write it every week to the elders. Every week to the elders I send out, let's all on these days, let's pray for this thing together. And Sunday has never changed. The prayer for Sunday is always, would the service be exactly what God wants it to be? Good, bad, or ugly, would what happens in here be what God wants to happen in here? When I pray for the band, when we have our pre-service meeting at 915, and sometimes I'm asked to pray over that, I always pray, God, would you help us to care about the things that you care about and not care about the things that you don't care about? Which is code speak for, if the host messes up, but it doesn't detract from the spiritual point of the service, who cares? If the basis starts with the wrong note, don't get bent out of shape about it. God doesn't care about it. You shouldn't either. Let's pursue the throne and praise God together. God, help us to care about what you care about and not care about what you don't care about. The more we walk in prayer, the more we keep the perspective in place right, the more peace we experience. And in that peace, we begin to pray wise prayers. God, how can I pray in accordance with your will about this? So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to invite Aaron and the band, Greg, back up. Back up. And instead of me finishing my sermon on prayer in prayer, I'm going to invite you to a time of prayer. I'm pretty certain if you're a thinking person that at some point during this sermon as I've talked about, hey, in this situation do you respond in prayer? Have you offered that up to prayer? Have you been trying to do this prayerlessly or with your own plans? I would be willing to bet that God has brought something to mind for you. That there's something or someone or some things in your life that probably do need some prayer. And maybe you haven't given them the prayer that they need. Maybe there are things you've been praying for very regularly for a long time, but you just want to lift them up again. So I'm going to step off the stage, and I'm going to give us all some time to pray. Lift those things up to God. Your children, your spouse, your loved ones, the family you'll see this Thanksgiving, that career thing that's just been eating at you, the bills that you don't know how you're going to pay, the health issues of you and your loved one that are just driving you nuts. Whatever it might be that God's brought to mind, take a few minutes and pray for that. And as you pray, Aaron's going to sing over us a little bit, and then at some point he'll invite us to stand. And we'll close out singing The Battle Belongs. And we'll let that be our battle cry that reminds us that our very first reaction, our very first reflex, no matter what's happening in our life, should be to go to God in prayer. Let's pray together, silently.
