Genesis

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.

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Now Joseph remains in prison after being falsely accused by Potiphar's wife. We learned last week that God's favor rested on Joseph, which resulted in his being in charge of the other prisoners. Two of the prisoners under his care were Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. These two men had dreams that Joseph was able to successfully interpret. In exchange for the interpretations, Joseph asked that the cupbearer would remember him to Pharaoh so he could get out of prison. But the cupbearer forgot about Joseph, and so he remains a prisoner. Joseph must once again choose to trust God and cling to the hope that he has a plan. Morning. Thanks for being here and online. It's great to be with you all. My name's Doug Bergeson, and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's been one day shy of exactly a year since I last preached, so I hope I'm not too rusty. I was asked to speak this past April, but had to decline as I was having a full hip replacement. I only mention that because, and I didn't anticipate it was going to be dark, but if you had seen me spring up on stage, you would have reacted, wow, what quickness, what energy, what, for lack of a better word, cat-like agility. Though I looked like a janky, wrinkled, liver-spotted 64-year-old on the outside, on the inside, I'm now literally bionic, mostly titanium and advanced ceramics. So I just thought that was important for you to know. But getting back to not having preached for a year, I am clearly not the only one who was worried that I was going to be a little rusty. Now, I need to be careful here. I'm flattered and privileged to have been asked to speak. However, over a seven-week sermon series covering 26 chapters in the book of Genesis, Nate has asked me to speak on one verse, Genesis 41.1. Not one chapter, one verse. What's up with that? Now, not what I'd call a ringing endorsement or an unwavering vote of confidence, right? 26 chapters over seven weeks, and I get one verse. Not that anyone would be petty enough to count, but in a series in which Nate will preach on 872 verses, I've been asked to preach on one. And to be perfectly honest, that's not even that good a verse. This is what it says. When two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. You tell me, am I overacting? I don't think so. Thank goodness I have a phenomenally large ego, or else I might have been easily devastated by such an obvious slight. A lesser, weaker person, perhaps one humbler and more grounded, probably would have been. Frankly, I don't know what to say about this verse. I don't have much to add. So, and I know this is a little unusual, I'll read Genesis 41.1 one more time, and then I'm going to ask Steve and the band to come back up and lead us in worship for the remainder of the time. Now, for those of you who know me, when I said I had nothing to add, you immediately knew I was kidding. I always have something to add, even when I don't. However, this morning, I hope and pray I do have something to add and that it's helpful. In preparing for this morning and thinking about what I might have to add, I ran across a quote from Howard Hendricks who was a former pastor and professor of theology who passed away several years ago. Hendricks said, it is not too difficult to be biblical if you don't care about being relevant. It's not difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being biblical. But if you want to be both biblical and relevant in your teaching, it's a very difficult task indeed. So as we continue this week to move through one of the greatest stories in the Bible, Joseph from the book of Genesis, That is my goal, to be both biblical and relevant. And to begin, I'd like to open us in prayer using the Apostle Paul's words from his letter to the churches in and around Ephesus, written while he was in prison. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may know him better. Amen. Those two words, wisdom and revelation, are going to be key for us this morning. Wisdom, according to the Bible, is acknowledging and submitting to the fact that God is God and that we are not. And revelation is the process by which God makes something known that was previously secret or unknown. Although God can reveal things to us in other ways, such as through nature, the primary way he chose to reveal things to us is through his written word, the Bible. Now, for most of us who call ourselves Christians, that's not a very controversial statement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. The Bible is God's revelation to us. In fact, most Christians I've met or read or listened to hold the Bible in high regard and would make that claim without question. Yet it is also my experience that many of us, including me, who make that claim, take our eye off the ball a little bit and lose sight of just what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation to us. How do we take our eye off the ball? How do we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's primary way of communicating and revealing himself to humankind? Well, we do it in a variety of ways. One popular method is by making Scripture primarily about us. How do I lead a good life? How do I raise my kids? How do I handle this or that problem? How do I have a God-centered marriage? Et cetera, et cetera. Now, don't get me wrong. Those aren't bad things to seek and to want to know. They just aren't the primary things, the first things we need to know. Another way we lose sight of what it means for the Bible to be God's revelation is when we make it say what we think it should say or what we want it to say. It's an easy and not uncommon thing to do. Happens all the time in churches. We interpret things a certain way, emphasize some things at the expense of others, ignore or downplay the historical, cultural, literary, and or biblical context of a passage to shape its meaning. When we do that, we read Scripture through our lens rather than God's. And that's not okay. Not if we profess the Bible to be God's revelation, God's word to us. This is no small point. What makes scripture the most valuable thing we will ever read is that it is God telling us about himself. This is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is what's important to me. This is how I operate. This is what I intend to do, and this is how I'm going to do it. It is God's take on things, his revelation, his perspective, his lens. The Bible is also history, but not any old history, not history for history's sake, but a very special history for, again, it's God's take on history, what he deems important, what he thinks we should know. And that is what gives Scripture authority over our lives. It is God's revelation of himself, his purposes, and his plans. Given that, the first question we should always ask ourselves when we read the Bible, the very first question is, what is this passage revealing to me about God? I'll say that again. When we read the Bible, the first question we should be asking ourselves is, what is this telling me about God? My favorite commentary series is the NIV application commentary. As I can't say it any better, I quote, there is nothing more fundamental to biblical revelation than the picture of God that it offers. If we set aside the picture of God affirmed in the text, we have lost our last foothold of authority, unquote. So, despite having been given only one verse, the reason I was still so excited to preach and so looking forward to this morning is that the story of Joseph has few, if any, equals in so clearly and powerfully revealing two giant things we need to know about our God. The first is that he's going to do what he intends to do, what he says he's going to do. And the second is that he's going to do it his way, not our way. Now let's turn back to our story and see the picture of God that it reveals and what it might mean for us today. As a quick recap, way back in time, long before Joseph, humankind had fallen into sin and self-destruction by choosing to reject their creator, the one and only true God, and the world was a complete mess. God began his magnificent plan to forgive, redeem, and restore fallen humanity by choosing one guy to whom God made a most lavish and unconditional promise. To this one guy, a man named Abraham, God promised land, a multitude of descendants who would become a great nation, and that through Abraham's offspring, all peoples in the world would be blessed. The remarkable promise was affirmed to Abraham's son Isaac, and again to his son Jacob. And this is where we are introduced to Joseph, the 11th of 12 sons born to Jacob and Jacob's absolute favorite. We meet Joseph when he is 17 and quickly learn that Jacob's unconcealed love and favor for Joseph, evidenced in part by a fancy robe, have poisoned the waters between Joseph and his older brothers. It probably didn't help that Joseph had given an unflattering report to his father about his brothers and the crummy job they were doing tending the flocks. And if that wasn't enough dysfunction for one family, and apparently it wasn't, Joseph thought it might be a good idea to share with everyone two separate dreams he had which both foretold of a time when the entire family would bow down to him. Scripture matter-of-factly states that his brothers hated him all the more. Imagine that. So the next time Joseph visited his brothers in the countryside, they conspired to kill him. At the very moment they were deciding Joseph's fate, a caravan of merchants heading to Egypt approached their camp. And the brothers had a brainstorm, kind of like a V8 moment. Rather than kill Joseph and deal with all that guilt, why not just sell him to these merchants and make a little cash to boot on the side? As an aside, the text seems to imply that you feel better about yourself and a lot less guilty if you simply sell a sibling into slavery rather than actually killing him. Just something to think about for those of you not getting along with all your brothers and sisters. Anyways, that's what they did. They sold Joseph, and they took his fancy robe, dipped it in goat's blood, and convinced their father that Joseph had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. The story continues with remarkable twists and turns, wild ups and downs for Joseph. He's first sold into Egypt to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. And when his new master sees that the Lord is with him and gives him success in everything he does, Joseph is put in complete charge and entrusted with all that Potiphar owned. But when, out of loyalty to Potiphar and fidelity to God, Joseph refuses the repeated advances of Potiphar's wife, she falsely accuses him of assault and he is thrown into prison. But once again, the Lord is with Joseph, this time prompting the prison's warden to eventually place Joseph in charge of the entire prison and all of its prisoners. Later, when the chief cupbearer and the chief baker both offend Pharaoh and are tossed in jail, they are attended by none other than Joseph. While in custody, both officials have disturbing dreams the very same night. When he heard the cupbearer's dream, Joseph explained that in three days, the cupbearer would be restored to his former position. And Joseph asked that when that happened, for the cupbearer to please remember him and plead his innocence before Pharaoh. Upon hearing such an upbeat interpretation for the cupbearer, the chief baker asked Joseph about his dream and was told that in three days Pharaoh would cut off his head and impale his body on a tree. Not as upbeat. Three days later, everything happened just as Joseph had said, and now, starting with the last verse of Genesis 40, we come to today's scripture. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph. He forgot him. When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream. So just halfway through our story, it's becoming increasingly clear that what God is revealing to us about himself, what he deems of tip-top importance for us to know, is that he's going to do what he says he's going to do no matter what. And he's going to do it his way, not our way. So that begs the question, the big question for us this morning, what is God's way of doing things? What does His way look like in practice? For starters, not like anything you or I would dream up. Steeped in mystery and far beyond our full comprehension, God's way uses people and circumstances which make little sense to us and which we would never choose. Operating according to his own timetable, God could pretty much care less about ours. Actively at work in all human decision and action, both good and evil, God's way by its very design frustrates and confounds human wisdom, intuition, and preference. And as an added kicker, not only won't we necessarily understand how God is at work in any given situation, oftentimes it won't even be obvious that he's working at all. Today's scripture may be short, but it is packed with significance as it illustrates God's way in action, focusing on the following three short snippets of text. The cupbearer forgot, two full years passed, Pharaoh had a dream. We see three defining features of God's way of doing things. All three are inextricably linked, all are shrouded in mystery, all are beyond our full understanding. And all are woven together in a way that ultimately and inevitably accomplish what God wants done. The first snippet of text, The Cupbearer Forgot, highlights the upside-down, counterintuitive nature of how God works. My first reaction is, what? The cupbearer forgot about Joseph? Are you kidding me? How is that helpful? Joseph did everything right. How is that fair? Yet almost without exception, we see in the story of Joseph and throughout all of Scripture, God's overwhelming preference to use people and circumstances that defy the odds and confound human wisdom and logic, devastating and demoralizing turns of events, great sorrows, constant obstacles and roadblocks, deeply flawed characters, good punished while evil seems to thrive, conflict, jealousy, forgotten obligations, in parentheses, see cupbearer. The list goes on. of the crummy circumstances that God seems to relish. Although we don't know all the reasons, Scripture does explain that God operates this way to humble us and to disabuse us of any notion that we deserve the credit, to make it perfectly clear that it is He who is responsible. He is the one in charge, and it is He who is at work. In 1 Corinthians 1, two full years past, illustrates what might be the most vexing and frustrating feature of God's way of doing things, his timing. It's now been 13 years since Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. By all accounts, Joseph has done the right thing at every turn. It's even been obvious to those closest to him and in the best position to know yet here joseph still sits in prison and now when the tides of fortune finally appear to be moving in joseph's favor and he at last has an important advocate to plead his innocence before pharaoh the cupbearer completely forgets about Joseph, who then remains in prison for two more years. It's enough to want to pull your hair out, particularly if you're Joseph. But again, rather than being the exception, Joseph's experience with God's timing is more the rule in Scripture. Over and over again, we see periods of waiting, periods of silence, periods of struggle and sorrow, periods of absence and denial, periods of the wilderness, periods in exile. These occur on a grand global scale, as well as in the smallness and intimacy of individual lives and families. In the Bible, God reveals himself to be both a promise maker and a promise keeper. But just as we see with his magnificent promise to Abraham, which won't reach its complete fulfillment for another 2,000 years in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Bible is really a story of the land in between. That time between promise and fulfillment, often very long. This is where the story of Joseph takes place. This is where God operates. And to further compound the mystery and complexity of God's timing, just as with his promise to Abraham, many of God's promises unfold over time, with some elements fulfilled sooner, while other elements of the very same promise must wait. We tend to focus on the ending and are anxious for its resolution. God, on the other hand, is all about playing the long game and is infinitely more patient, knowing that to achieve what he has ordained and promised, there is simply no substitute for the land in between. If given the chance, we would skip right past this land, avoiding its mystery, its uncertainty, its challenges, its obstacles, its disciplines, its heartbreak, disappointments. It's waiting. We hate wandering in the wilderness. I'm sure Joseph did too. Yet God's redemptive purposes don't happen without it. It's in the land in between that God shapes and changes us, redeems and refines us, preparing us for and moving us towards the ultimate promise fulfillment that will be eternity within. The third and final snippet of text is Pharaoh had a dream. And as we'll see next week, the dream prompts the cupbearer to finally remember Joseph. Was that just lucky that the Pharaoh had this dream? A coincidence? A bit of good fortune finally for Joseph? Not according to the Bible. This might be the most mysterious feature of how God operates. The scripture reveals that God sustains his creation and is involved and exerts his sovereign influence and control over all things. In so doing, God moves all of history steadily, inexorably, towards his appointed end. To be completely candid, even as I speak about it this morning, I struggle with this notion that God is involved in exerting his influence and control in and over all things. On the lighter side, I've been around church long enough to have heard the story of the person who, when going to Bible study on a rainy Wednesday morning, was late and praised God that a parking spot opened up right near the front door just as they pulled up. Isn't God great? Oh, all I can do is roll my eyes. Really? I don't want to be overly cynical, but come on. What about poor Sally who got there early and had to park all the way around the block and is now stopping wet? Was God judging her? Does he not favor and love her too? Is God really involved to that level of detail? But on a more serious note, what about all the terrible and tragic, unfair and absolutely evil things that happen in the world and sometimes in our lives? How can a just and loving God be involved in those things too? Now my go-to default answer has always been to ascribe all the bad things to the fact that we live in a fallen world, a world in which, for the time being, God accommodates the presence of evil and everything doesn't happen according to his will. But when I read the story of Joseph and reflect on the full testimony of scripture, I know my default answer is too simple, a bit too cut and dried. Our tendency is to want to attribute to God only the good things that happen and give him a pass on the bad things, explaining them away by saying it's a fallen world. However, God doesn't ever ask us for a pass. He doesn't need or want a pass from us. We might not intend to, but when we think he needs a pass, we shortchange and underestimate his mystery and his sovereignty. Rather than needing a pass, the story of Joseph affirms the picture of a God who is in control of all things and uses his influence in all things, even very bad and sinful things, to advance his redemptive plan. Very early on in the Bible, God is revealing that there is no human choice or decision that can derail what he intends on doing. In fact, we see God using those sinful choices to further rather than frustrate his plans. Scripture leaves the clear impression that more than simply allowing bad things to happen to Joseph, God is actively orchestrating, arranging, and in a sense, cooperating with those things. Joseph is only 17 when he is sold by his brothers, and he is 30 before things start turning around for him. Yet all those intervening events, conspiracy to murder, sold into slavery, framed and falsely accused, wrongly convicted, imprisoned, forgotten, all are woven together to bring us to this point in our story. The Bible teaches both God's sovereignty as well as human responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Now, if you find that difficult to reconcile, how can God be involved and in control and yet hold us accountable? If you can't tell where God's influence ends and human responsibility begins, if you find it even a bit frustrating that you can't fully understand or that it seems unfair, Scripture has a clear and consistent answer for you. Tough. Tough. I am God and you are not. It's of ironic, as we like to think we live in the age of science and enlightenment, but how enlightened are we really? As difficult as this idea might be for us to wrap our minds around, our modern minds around, it wasn't for Genesis' original audience, the Israelites. They didn't struggle with trying to figure out when, where, how, and if God intervened in human affairs. They did not think things unfolded naturally and that only on occasion, if at all, God might supernaturally intervene. Rather, they understood that things only happen naturally, like rain in its season, because God ordained it. In their worldview, nothing happened independently from God's cause and effect. Events and decisions were never either natural or supernatural, but always both and. Our way of looking at the world would seem odd and naive and perhaps even heretical to the Israelites, as if there was some dividing line between the natural and divine. They wouldn't spend much time trying to figure out if God was involved in a particular situation or not because they knew he was always involved somehow, some way. That doesn't mean that God and nature are one. They're not. But only that God is involved all the time. So we see in these three short snippets of text, the cupbearer forgot. Two full years passed. Pharaoh had a dream. God is revealing the mysterious and confounding methods, means, and timing of how he goes about accomplishing his purposes and plans. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Hertz car rental commercial from the 1990s. It opens with two businessmen, one an executive and his junior assistant, hustling out of a crowded airport. The boss says to his assistant, we've got to move fast, Kirby. I hope you've booked Hertz. Kirby replies, not exactly, but this company is fast. The boss asks, as fast as Hertz? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick up the car. Like Hertz? Not exactly, but it'll be waiting. Under a canopy with the keys in it? Not exactly, but they do have a special place to pick it up. Protected from the weather? Not exactly. The final scene is of the two men in their suits running to their car in the pouring rain. And the boss asks, counting on that promotion, Kirby? No, not exactly. I still love that commercial, even though I messed it up there, and have adapted it to the story of Joseph and what it means about God's way of working. Are we always going to understand what God is doing in our lives and how he's doing it? Not exactly. Is God concerned that everything makes sense to us? Not exactly. Does God care if everything seems fair? Not exactly. Does God want everything to go smoothly for us, avoiding obstacles and challenges that might confuse and discourage us? Not exactly. Doesn't God prefer to use mostly A-teamers, people who seem to have their acts together, rather than the weak, the flawed, and the foolish? Not exactly. Does God care if we're super busy or in a big hurry and have important things to do? Not exactly. Is God involved in control of only the good things in our lives? Not exactly. There is a sweeping passage from the book of Isaiah which captures in poetic language what the story of Joseph reveals and affirms so powerfully through story. Reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. He says, So God's thoughts are not our thoughts. His ways are not our ways. They are higher, better, eternal. And God's word that goes out from his mouth will not return to him empty, but will accomplish all that he intended and achieve the purpose for which he sent it. So when God says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. So why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because God still works this way. Seeing the mysterious and perplexing way he operated in the life of Joseph, we should not be surprised when God operates that way in our lives. Why is this important? Why should this matter to us today? Because we live in the land in between. God's redemptive plan is ongoing, still somewhere between promise and fulfillment. I was raised in a church which taught that once you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that you were saved, sort of past tense, and you were pretty much good to go. I've since come to believe, based on a fuller reading of scripture, that's not really true. More accurately, I'm in the process of being saved. While now free from the penalty of sin, which Jesus bore on the cross on my behalf, the fullness of God's promise still lies in the future. When not only will the penalty of sin have been paid, but the very power and presence of sin and death will be vanquished, and we will be resurrected to new life. But for the time being, we are in the land in between, and God is still working in all things for good as he moves all of history towards his appointed end. Why is this so important? Why should this matter to us today? Because it frees us to trust in him. When we finally stop trying to fit God in a box that we can understand, when we stop foisting our expectations and preferences on him, when we finally accept the fact that we won't understand what he's doing most of the time, why he's doing it, or how it might possibly be good or redemptive, it's actually easier to let go, easier to trust, easier to rest in the knowledge that God's got this. In closing, we will never understand God's ways, how he operates to accomplish his purposes, but we don't need to, as he is always faithful and always true to his word. And like so many people of faith down through the ages, we can find great comfort and confidence knowing and trusting in that. Even Jesus' disciples had no clue what was happening or why at the end of Jesus' ministry and were completely overwhelmed and distraught at his death. Only later were they able to look back and understand that God was in control all along. The disciples explicitly acknowledged this when they prayed the following words. Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. God, they only did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. In just a minute, the band is going to come back up here to perform a song, Promise Keeper. It's an absolutely gorgeous song, and as our closing prayer, and I'd like to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes, I'm going to read a few stanzas of unfolding, with everything I've seen, how could I not believe? You are a promise keeper. Your word will never fail. My heart can trust you, Jesus. I won't be overwhelmed. I'll see your goodness in the land of the living. I'll see your goodness right here, right now. You know the ending before the beginning, and I know that you have worked all things out. Amen. Thank you.

The Good morning, Grace Raleigh. How are you doing? It's good to see you today. I'm Dale Rector, Nathan's dad, and I am glad to be with you today. Hang in there for a minute. It's going to be a journey. I've got two Bibles. It's a long sermon. So just bear with me. Maybe it'll go quickly if we try. But I want to say something to the Grace Raleigh family first, and that is thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Not just for moving my son out of my basement four and a half years ago, but for loving him, loving his beautiful wife, Jen, our precious, precious grandchildren, Lily, and now John. And we are so grateful for you. Within the sound of my voice are those of you who will volunteer and step up and will do something to minister to my family and to my kids. And I can't thank you enough. You will do life together. You will laugh together. You'll cry together. You'll tell them the word of God together. You'll grow together. And I couldn't think of a better place for my family than here. So thank you very much, Grace Raleigh. When I was a child, I was given this Bible to me by my grandparents. 1969. I was 11 years old, and they gave me this Bible, and of course, this King James Bible. But Matthew chapter 24 is perhaps the most read portion of this Bible during my young adult life. In Matthew chapter 24, if any of you don't remember or recall, it is the place in which the disciples asked Jesus, what are the signs of the end times? What are those signs? And when is your return? If you pay attention and read Matthew chapter 24 this week, you will see it mirrored and imaged in Revelation chapter 6 next week with Nathan. So pay attention to that. We were crazy about eschatology. What's that? That's the study of the end times. And we dove in and we heard sermon after sermon. In fact, we predicted that Jesus would come back in 1988. There was a book that was written that said 88 reasons why Jesus would come back in 1988. And I'm like, wow, really? It didn't happen. It didn't occur. He still hasn't returned. And it seemed like over the years, the eschatology speeches and the study of Revelation got to be a little quiet and a little silent because most people were wrong. Most people, when they tried to predict something or say what this means, they were wrong. I have another Bible in front of me. This Bible was stolen by, it's not a Gideon Bible. It was stolen by my son four and a half years ago when he came up to here at Grace Raleigh. And four and a half years ago, he took this Bible that I had as a high school student, and I never had a chance to write in it and to say something in it, you know, sappy and meaningful like, you know, the greatest ever, the great Nate, you know. I love you dearly, the best dad you've ever had. Nothing like that at all. I don't have the words. Until I was preparing for this sermon, I thought, I have the perfect words. And to my son Nathan, this is true. That's it. This is the word of God. In Genesis, we see the tree of life. In Revelation, we see the tree of life. In Exodus, we see the ark of the covenant. In Revelation, we see the ark of the covenant. In Joel, we see the Ark of the Covenant. In Revelation, we see the Ark of the Covenant. In Joel, we see the trumpet sounds, and the day of the wrath of the Lamb has come. In Joel chapter 2 and chapter 3. In Revelation chapter 7, we see the trumpet sound, and the day of the wrath of the Lord and the Lamb comes. In Daniel, we see the exact specific days of the tribulation period. In Revelation, we see the exact same specific days in that book as well. Over and over and over again, if you fall in love with the Old Testament, you'll fall in love with Revelation because it all ties together. It all links together. It's true. It's right. It's God's word. It's what he wants us to have. So I'm grateful for you guys and your study of the word. And I'll be going into Revelation chapter four. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. But basically, you know, when Doug got up a couple weeks ago and he spoke, I thought to myself, Doug, it's really kind of funny and hilarious that you were given one verse. I was given the two easiest chapters in the entire book of Revelation, and you'll see how easy it is in a minute. But chapter 4 is a mirror image of Ezekiel chapter 1. And if you have Ezekiel 1 and you study it later, you'll see this same throne room of God. But John, 90-year-old John, is caught up into heaven. And he's caught up into heaven. And on the Lord's day, he's in the spirit. And whose voice does he hear? Jesus. He says, John, come up here. I have some things I want to show you. I have some things I want you to see. And he shows him where dad sits, where God the Father has a throne. And there's this throne. It's a majestic throne. And on the throne is a brownish image. It's an image of God. It is God. And it looks brown. And it's got an emerald rainbow around its head. Ezekiel says there are fire and metal around his waist. And there's lightnings and thunders that come from the throne of God and go out, and there's a brightness and a brilliance and a wonderment. The throne is set on a firmament of solid water and glass, and it looks still, Still to indicate the comfort and the sovereignty of God. And that's the picture we see of the throne room of God. And around the throne is 24 elders and four cherubims. And we get all enthralled with the brilliance, with the majesty, with the wonder, with the glorious look of the throne of God. And we forget what the point is. What is the point of Revelation chapter 4? It's so simple. It's so easy. Theologians miss it. They like to describe everything that's in here. And I'm going to tell you this, and you're going to go, well, that's not that bright. What's the point of the throne of God? God is on the throne. That's it. God is on the throne. He is on the throne. When Joseph was in prison, captive, God was on the throne. When the children of Israel spent 400 years in captivity, God was on the throne. When the first Passover came and the blood was put on the doorpost of every Jewish family and the death angel passed through and spared those children, God was on the throne. When Moses led the children of Israel out of captivity and 40 days became 40 years, God was on the throne. When Moses was put to the side and went up to the mountain and wasn't allowed to go to the promised land, Joshua went into the promised land with the children of Israel, and God was on the throne. City by city, they took over. Promised to them, to the father Abraham. And the Jews possessed the promised land, they possessed the Canaan land, and God was still on the throne. The period of judges came. We had a few good kings with a bunch of bad kings. We had a dispersion of the nation of Israel. The temple was destroyed. Again, the nation of Israel was taken back to captivity to Babylon this time, and God was still on the throne. They came back to Israel. 400 years of silence. Jesus was born. And Jesus was born of a virgin, came to this planet, and lived in the filth that Satan and we created. And God was still on the throne. The thorns were placed upon his brow. The blood came down. His hands were pierced with the nails. He was hung on the cross, and he cried out, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, which means, my God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? God was still on the throne. He couldn't look on his son because of our sin, but he was on the throne. Remember that. At that Passover, he was on the throne. Jesus was put into the grave. Three days later, God said, come forth. He came forth. God was still on the throne. 47 days, he appeared to 500 people at one time and then ascended into heaven. And guess what? God was still on the throne. He was still there. Still in control. Still in charge. Now what happens from here? What happens from here? Well, we have 11 of the 12 apostles martyred. John sees 60 years go by. And 60 years go by and he's caught up into heaven on the Lord's day. He thought he died and went to heaven, but he didn't. He was in the spirit. And guess what he saw? Revelation chapter four, God on the throne. Now what's going to happen in Revelation chapter 6 and following is nothing more than a full court press, nothing more than a reclamation process in which God reclaims stolen property. And he comes back and he takes what's rightfully his to redeem the last person who will say yes to Jesus and to say no to Satan and to crush Satan underneath our feet is what Romans says. And guess what? During everything you encounter in the next few weeks with Revelation, as good and as bad as it may seem, God's still on the throne. He is there. He hasn't left. He hasn't abrogated his position. He hasn't vacated it. He's still there. Through your cancer, through your COVID, through your disappointment, through abandonment, through your addictions, through your loss of family, loss of loved ones, to the loss of a young child. Everything that this world can throw at us and this world system can throw at us, God is still on the throne. That's chapter four. Now you say, well, what are the four cherubims? Everyone wants to know about the four cherubims and who are they and where'd they come from? And at this point in the sermon, I would say, who cares, right? Because God's on the throne no matter what. But we've got this curiosity about us. Have we seen the four cherubims before? Yes, we have, Ezekiel 1. The question is not what are the four cherubims, but where is God? You see, when the four cherubims show up, you would expect to see God, because God made these cherubims, angelic beings, if you will, looked like a human, had four sides to their head, the one of a man, the one of an ox, the one of an eagle, the one of a lion, and they looked weird to us, but we've never seen them. And John saw them and described them is exactly how Ezekiel described them in Ezekiel chapter 1. And these are around the throne of God. They move in unison around the throne of God. They're all together, the four cherubims, angelic beings. And I've got this to say about what the faces represent. And most people are guessing. And I'm guessing as well. But the faces represent the very essence of God. You see, we are made in the image of God. When I picture God, I think of a man. The descriptions of God, he has a head and face and hands and so forth. So I think these angelic beings meant to reflect the very essence of God, which is man, which is one of the faces you see. The other faces you see is the very essence of God as creation. And I think he made what he likes. You become that which you worship. And these four creatures, these four cherubims, wherever they go, they're around the throne of God. Can you imagine someone watching you 24-7, 365? I challenge you. Follow Nathan around 24-7. You may all leave the church. I hope you don't. I hope you stay with it. Jen's got a lot of love. We were so grateful for her. But for 24-7, 365, these angelic beings are around the throne of God. And you know what they say? It's recorded in Revelation chapter 4 and verse 8. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come. What is holiness? What does that mean? Holiness is the intersection of love and justice. It is the attribute of attributes. It's the attribute that contains all the other attributes. It's where love and justice collide. Everything, God's mercy, God's long-suffering, God's love, God's justice, is all wrapped up in this perfect word called holiness. It means different, different, different. Unique, unique, unique. There's never been anything like God. There'll never be anything like God ever again. He is holy. He is different all unto himself. The perfect amount of love is sprinkled with the perfect amount of justice at the right time, in the proportion in the right way. It is God's way and he is holy. So who am I? Who am I to question the character of God? I think it's funny. Each of us periodically do this little thing, which is wrong, but we do it anyways because we're human. Well, if I were God, I would zap them. Right? I mean, just think of it. When I'm driving down the road in traffic, you know, it's like, okay, here it comes. I believe half the people on the planet would be gone if I was God. Really. My wife knows that's true. You can't, you did what? Come on, man. But we sit there and we judge God through our lenses and through our eyes and from our limited perspective and we say, God, why didn't you exercise justice quicker? Hitler. Six million Jews died. We sit in amazement and say, well, God, if you'd just zapped them a little earlier, we wouldn't have had six million Jews die. And we question God's patience and long-suffering. And then when he does zap somebody, we go, man, that was mean. I can't believe God did that. What's going on here? So, you see, we can't do that. Whenever God acts, God acts in perfectness of love and justice all the time. There's a second group of people around the throne. It was the 24 elders. People have said it represents 12 apostles and 12 representatives from the tribe of Israel. They're wrong. I'm amazed at how wrong theologians can be. And when you study commentaries, be careful. Be careful. The way I study Revelation is in light of what it says in other parts of the Bible. Because some people have a bent on how it should play out. Well, I believe in this, and I believe in that. Well, I believe in the Word of God, and I'm going to let the Word of God just speak to me and say, what does it say to you? It's not Mother Teresa, it's not Billy Graham, it's not the Stanley brothers, you know, it's not Charles Stanley, it's not Andy Stanley, it's not any leaders, it's not any brilliant, it's definitely not me, definitely not my son. We're not one of the 24. What are they? Angelic beings. Well, how do you know that? Job 38, 7, where God is basically, if you will, talking to Job and saying, where were you when I created? You remember that? And Job 38.7 says, when the morning stars were put into place, when the planets were made and the solar systems were made, The sons of God rejoiced. Yes. The angels were there during creation to prove what the Savior did in creation. And these are nothing more than angelic beings that have some authority and some leadership. Why do you say that? Well, I say it because of what is in Revelation chapter 4 and verse 11. You created all things, and by your will they exist and were created. That's what they said. They're not puppets. They saw it. They were there. Hebrews 11.3 says, You mean the law of thermodynamics is wrong? In this case, it is. God created something out of nothing. He created that which is seen out of nothing. Well, that just doesn't compute with science. I love the faith of a child. Don't you? I love my grandkids. I mean, you can tell them almost anything and they believe it, right? And some of you think they have been duped in believing that Jesus is real and the Bible is real and they just haven't learned enough yet. When you walk a child through salvation and through that experience in following God, they look at you and they believe it. They trust you and trust you what you're going to say. Then they start trusting the word of God. Then they start trusting the teacher. Then they start trusting the preacher. And it says right in here the word of God that God created. Well, you know what? That's good enough for me. I don't care if it takes you 4.5 billion years to get there. I don't care. God could speak and it could happen. Well, science says this. Who cares? I believe what it says. He made us. He created us. And the reason we don't like to believe in a creation is because we don't want to be subject to God. But the whole thing hinges on his creating us. Because he made us and therefore he owns us and we're subject to him. Now, as an older adult, and this church has a lot my age and older, we kind of return back to that simple faith. That simple time that we had as children. And we sit there and we go, yeah, okay, I get it. Scientists have changed the age of the earth 18 times since I was born. Maybe they just don't know. Maybe they weren't there. And I'm telling you, the reason I believe it is because if I believe God existed in the four walls of my brain and that was it, I'm in big trouble, buddy. I really am. I mean, really, seriously. I get up from my easy chair, I go to the other room, and I wonder why I was there. Right? Hey, honey, would you bring the crackers back? You forgot the crackers again. What about the pudding? Well, I ate the pudding in the kitchen. Did you leave the light on? I don't know. Where's your phone? I don't know. Is it on silent? I don't know. And right now, all of you are thinking, I need to check my phone. You leave the house and you say, did I close the garage? Did I close the garage? You drive back, it's closed. You didn't believe yourself. I mean, this is fun. I mean, this is a blast getting old. And the older I get, the bigger God gets. Nathan, when he was of age to go to college, and we were grateful, my wife and I were both crying. We were crying for different reasons. When he went off to college, he went to Auburn. Not my pick. I picked a Bible college. I said, you should go to Bible college for one year. He didn't necessarily want to be a preacher. And he said, no, I'm going to Auburn. Why? Why do kids do that? Because they know more than you, right? They're smarter than you. They've got this thing figured out. So he went off to Auburn and I said to him, son, I've got one requirement for you and one only. And he says, what's that, dad? This is going to be pretty easy. I said, yeah, it's really easy. When you return from college, I want you to be dumber. And he looks at me, dumber? You want me to be dumber? Yes. He says, why dad? I said, well, right now, you know everything in the world. When you finish your first year, I want you to know a little less and I want you to be dumb again. I checked with him a few weeks ago and I said to him these words, son, the older I get, the bigger God gets. The more miraculous he gets, the more wondrous he gets. And he said, dad, I think the exact same thing. And I'm like, yes, he's dumb again. I like it. John 1 says, That's John 1. The triune God created mankind. We were created in the image of God. And in chapter 5, we see a segue to the right hand of the throne of God, and it is on the right hand of the throne of God you see a scroll. It looked nothing like this. This is the best we could do. And the scroll represented the title deed to planet Earth. And the title deed would be opened one seal at a time. And you had a seal, you opened it, you read it. You had another seal, you opened it, you unscrolled what was written. Had writing on the outside and writing on the inside. The writing on the outside was a person authorized to take the scroll from God the Father, from his right hand. And on the inside was the playbook to the end of the earth, to the reclamation of this planet and us back to our rightful position where he makes all the wrong things right. It's the playbook. It's the rest of the book of Revelation, what was in the Father's right hand. And there was a search in heaven as to the person who was worthy to take the scroll out of the Father's right hand and then loose the seals that were there. And John, 90-year-old John, weeped bitterly. He wept bitterly. Why? It's conjecture on my part, but can you imagine for a 60-year period of time between when Jesus ascended into heaven and when John was called back up into heaven, 60 years had passed. When you became a believer in the New Testament church era, first and second century, it was a death sentence. It was a sentence by which you would die. So John had led and given the gospel out to the ends of the earth and basically had seen his friends die. 11 out of the 12 apostles died and John and John alone only remained. And I can imagine, because I have doubts as an old person, always I have doubts, and I sit there and I go, is this really true? Is this word of God really true? Is this right? And John, I felt like, he thought for a moment, what if Jesus is not coming back to reclaim stolen property? What if this is all in vain? What if those people died in vain? And what I've been saying for 60 years is wrong. What then? What are we going to do? The angel of the Lord said to John, John, there's no crying in heaven. We don't cry up here. Dry it up, buddy. Something like that. And the angel said, behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, of the root of David. Whoa. Wait a minute. To a Jewish boy. That meant something. That meant something. The lion of the tribe of Judah. The root of David. That was the Messiah. That was the Messiah they expected to come the first time. And rescue him for all the pain. And set up his kingdom. This is the Messiah they expected to come the first time and rescue him for all the pain and set up his kingdom. This is the Messiah. This is the one I've been waiting for. This is the guy, the lion of the tribe of Judah. And when John saw between the throne of God and the cherubims that were around the throne, he saw this figure. And it was a figure as a lamb that was slain. Wow. The lamb that was slain. Now wait a minute. Let that sink in a little bit. You mean it's not pretty picture book Jesus with the nice flowing hair, all his hair, with a nice face, a nice body, fit body? You mean it wasn't that Jesus? No. It was a Jesus from 60 years ago he recognized on the cross with the crown of thorns, the nails in his hand. It was a lamb as if it was slain. He had the scars that he got from the crucifixion. And John, I believe his countenance probably changed from tears to gladness, recognizing that the Savior he had followed for 60 years was really true. It was really right. It was the right thing. This was the lamb that was slain because he saw the marks. You see, you can debate the resurrection all you want, but it happened. You can debate creation, but it happened. You can debate how God is going to come back. It's going to happen. Jesus was around with 500 people at one time. There's no scientist on this planet that has the key for that. Nobody has the key for that except God. Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ, there is no hope. Let's go watch football. Let's go play. Let's go eat. But we exist because of the resurrection. We are the Easter people. We do celebrate. Every week, the new church celebrated the resurrection of Christ because it was such a miracle. And John, 60 years later, saw that same Jesus in front of him and was just overwhelmed with joy and gladness. That is the resurrected Christ. Now, the disciples, I believe, had their marching order in a couple places in the New Testament. One is found in Matthew chapter 16. There's a location that's in northern Israel called Caesarea Philippi. And at Caesarea Philippi, there was this, what is called the gates of hell. I'm allowed to say that in church because it says it in the Bible, the gates of hell. And what was that place? It was a cave, and me and Nathan were there in 2014. It was a place where people came to worship false, dead gods. It was a place where they came to do unspeakable atrocities, things that were wrong, to try to please these false gods, dead gods. And Jesus had the boys there in such a wicked, vile place with all these gods and the pan-god, and he says to them this something very simple, who do these people say that I am? Who do they say that I am? Well, you're Elijah. You're John the Baptist. You're a righteous dude, right? You're a good person. And then Jesus stopped them and said, no, no, no, no, no. And this is the question of questions that everyone must answer. But whom do you say that I am? Whom do you say that I am? Whom do you say that I am? And I love Peter. Peter finally got it right with all boldness, with all everything in his gut. And I believe the decibel level got really high. And he said, thou art the Christ, the son of the living God. And what did Jesus say? Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed it to you, but my Father which is in heaven. And upon this rock moment came back in every one of the apostles' mind as the ascension of Christ occurred, as they gathered together, as Jesus conquered death, as we see him overcoming death and overcoming all obstacles. They were worried that they would die too, but now they weren't worried. Why? Because Jesus came to life. And when Jesus came to life, they approached Pentecost with a fervor and an intensity that they never had before. And that intensity, I think, they kind of looked like, after the ascension, I think they kind of looked a little like William Wallace. Braveheart. You know the story. Every time I see this, I think of Peter. That's William Wallace. What happened to William Wallace? He died. Hey, you guys don't know what I'm referring to. Google it. In Google, we trust. So just Google it. You'll find out what Braveheart is. He lost his life for the cause. And Peter died, crucified, upside down, dying for the cause. 11 out of the 12 died and were martyred because of what happened. You know what we need today in the church? We need more William Wallaces. We need people that are willing to die for the cause. You know, we just kind of want them to show up to live for the cause, let alone die for it. And why has it become so hard and so different? 2,000 years later, what happened to our intensity? What happened to our focus? I've got a hero of mine. His name is Randy Rye. Randy was a preacher. He left his church because of illness. He was supposed to have died eight times. He's got cancer. He's got organs that shut down. A couple weeks ago, he texted me and said, pray for me. I've got pneumonia. I'm hoping it's not COVID. If he gets COVID, he may die. It may be a death sentence for him. Randy, everywhere, he has no money. He has two nickels to rub together. But he loves the Lord with all intensity. And you know what he does? Everywhere he goes, he says to the doctors, to the nurses, to the patients without hope, he says, I want to tell you about Jesus. And I don't know a better place than in a hospital to tell somebody and get them prepared for eternity. But that guy, he approaches the gates of hell and he says, I'm going to tell this last person about Jesus. In our offices, God is there. Tell people about Jesus. Now, how can we do that today? How can we be the person with intensity today that lives out its Christianity with all fervor? I don't know about you. I haven't checked with this church yet. You're probably not typical of every North American church because Nathan's here. You're probably a little different. But every church I know of has a need for children's ministries. Always. Always a need. Hey man, it's the next generation in there. It's an opportunity to teach and train the next generation. Aaron should have a waiting list of names for people to do childcare. Look, you can hear Nathan on video. We know that. So go sit with the kids. Tell them about Jesus. Well, I don't know what to do. Well, Moses didn't either, but he did it. We need people to step up. What if we had twice as many people step up for children's ministries? What if we had a need come about and twice as much money came in? What about if we had a missions trip and twice as many people signed up for it as could go. What about if we asked for volunteers to serve to love our neighbors and twice as many people showed up? We've lost our intensity. John was the bishop of the church of Ephesus. And at that church, if you read the first two and three chapters of Revelation, you'll find out that the church of Ephesus lost its first love. And John was the bishop there, and he held some responsibility for losing that first love. And they were admonished by God that, hey, you need to get that first love back. Maybe that's what we need to do. I believe when John went back, he was different. And things were different from that point on. Now, if you all would do me a favor and go ahead and stand up, we're going to have the reading of the word of God, and then we're going to transition right into worship at the same time. But John went from Patmos to paradise, from paradise back to Patmos. In one year, he left Patmos and went back to Ephesus. And for five years, he lived. And then five years later, he died. In that five-year period of time, he discipled many young person. Hey, who would like to learn at the feet of John, one of the apostles, particularly after he'd been up to heaven? Well, I would. That would be neat. And so John went back to Ephesus and he discipled a young man, 25 years old, by the name of Polycarp. Polycarp became the bishop at the church of Smyrna. He died a martyr's death in 155 A.D. He had somebody else he trained, Irenaeus, which gave us all the doctrines that we preserve today. The grandchild, if you will, the spiritual grandchild of the apostle Paul. Or, I'm sorry, John. And you see, it pays to disciple one another, to disciple our kids. And I believe John's life ended well with discipling one another. He also had a song. He had a song he learned when he's revelation experience and it's found in verses nine through 13. And it went something like this. And I heard a voice of many angels around the throne, the living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was 10,000, and thousands and thousands saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. And every creature, every creature, which is in heaven and on earth and under the earth and such as are in the sea and that are in them, I heard saying, blessing and honor and glory and power be to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb forever and ever.