Genesis

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If you're here this morning and I haven't yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. So please say hello in the lobby after the service. If you're watching online, thanks for doing that. Particularly if you're on vacation, thanks for making us a part of your Sunday, even while you're away. This is the last sermon in our series, One Hit Wonders, where we have been pausing and looking at some verses and passages that we don't often get to stop at in a normal series or in our normal Bible study. Some of the lesser known verses and passages that we find in Scripture, a lot of them have been in the Minor Prophets, which is a whole section of the Old Testament that we don't often explore. But this morning is admittedly more of a greatest hit than a one-hit wonder. It's actually apropos with the last question of our little game, trivia game that we were playing there in the bumper video. Steve, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but I'm actually going to pull this one out of Psalms, which is that's the Beatles of the Bible. All the greatest hits there are in Psalms. And so the one that I'm pulling out this morning is one that we have framed and in our house. It's a very frameable verse. I would encourage you to do that. If you've never heard Psalm 1611 before, I think it's going to be one that you'll identify with and appreciate, and hopefully we can leave today thinking about in a different way, especially if you are aware of this verse. But Psalm 1611 simply says this. This is where we're going to focus this morning. David writes, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's a heck of a verse, isn't it? I mean, that's a really encouraging, life-giving verse. That's a great promise that David makes to us through the voice of God in Psalms. And as we walk through it, that first sentence, you make known to me the paths of life. Often in Psalms, David adopts kind of the motif of a shepherd, us as the sheep and God as our good shepherd. Psalm 23 is a very familiar Psalm where it says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So maintaining that illustration, you make known to me the paths of life is this picture of a shepherd leading his sheep to the good places, leading his sheep to where they can eat, to where they can drink, to where they can rest, to where they'll be protected. And so he's saying, and in the onset, you lead me to the life-giving paths, to fullness of life. You lead me, God, to the best possible places. And then he says, in your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Not everyone here is a scientist. You may not be aware of this fact, but you can't get fuller than full, man. When you're full, that's it. This idea in sports that we give 110%, that's bupkis. You can't do it. It's 100%. That's it. When you're full, you're full. So what he's saying is in God's presence, you will experience maximum joy. It is impossible to find any other place in the known universe, any other scenario, any other situation. It is impossible to pursue any other relationship in which you will find more joy than in your relationship with God, than in the presence of the Father, there is fullness of joy. And then he says, and at the right hand of the Father are pleasures forevermore. And we learn in Romans and Hebrews that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us as our high priest. So what that is saying is, in Christ, if we obey John 15, when Jesus says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit, if we abide in Christ, if we pursue him, if we love him, if we chase him, if we know him, if we are intimate with him, then we will experience pleasures forevermore. That's some astounding promises, right? He's going to lead us to the best places possible in God's presence as we pursue him, as Steve and Lisa invited us into worship, as we go into worship, as we take ourselves like in Isaiah 6 into the throne room of God in prayer, in his presence, we will experience the fullness of joy. And then as we pursue Jesus and we go to his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? Isn't that what we're all chasing anyways? Just better days and a happier existence? If we were to say for ourselves, what do you want in 20, 30 years? We'd say, I just want to be happy. If you have kids and you say, what do you want for your kids? One of the things I promise would be in your top five answers is, top three answers is, I just want them to be happy. This verse promises that. So I actually think that if we really believe that, if we really believe Psalm 1611, that our own selfishness would drive us to God. If we really believe this verse, that he's going to lead us to try to be generous or unselfish. We can do the most selfish thing possible, and that selfishness should, in theory, based on these promises, drive us straight to the throne of God. We should respond to this verse. Like I responded to the news in my mid-twenties that places like Fogo de Chão existed. Now, I don't know if you know what Fogo de Chão is, because we had one in Atlanta. That's where I'm from. We don't have one in Raleigh. It's a Churras, Korea. It's a Brazilian steakhouse. There's one over in Briar Creek, I think. I still need to get over there. But in a Brazilian steakhouse, let me just, let me just tell you what they do there. Okay. This is unbelievable. Some of y'all know. If you know me, you know, I love steak. I really do. I had steak the other night for the first time since John was born because I like to make it myself and it's a whole process and I was in heaven watching the recorded Open Championship. Anyways, I love steak. And they told me, and I was like 25, 26, you know there's this place called Fogo de Chão. And when you go there, there's a card next to your plate. And one side is red and one side is green. And when you put it on the green side, they just bring you steak until you flip it back to red. And I'm like, what now? And so I go to this place, right? And there's these men and they walk around with these skewers of perfectly cooked steak. And they bring it up to you. Your card is green. They go, would you like some, sir? Yes, I would. I'm glad that you came. And they start to slice the filet or the top sirloin or the skirt steak or the bottom sirloin or the lamb or whatever it is. Jen, we need to go to this place for lunch today. They just start shaving it until you tell them to stop. If you want a steak mountain on your plate, you can have a steak mountain. It's amazing. And I'm just telling you, if you leave there without the meat sweats, you're not a good American. It's a remarkable place. And so when they told me that this place existed, with all of my heart, all I thought is, I want to go to there. I want to go. I'll save my money. I will lie to people. I will disappear for three days so I can go to this place and experience phogo to chow. That's where I want to go. That's how we should respond to this verse. What? There's a place I can go and there is fullness of joy. There are pleasures forevermore. There's someone I can follow who will lead me to only the best places. That's a thing? I want to go to there. I'll disappear for three days. I'll sever relationships. I'll give up whatever I do. I'll save up whatever I gotta do. I want to go to there. That's how we should respond to this verse. If we believe that the Bible is the word of God and that what's in here is eternally true and good and right and worth staking our life on, if we really believe that this is God's word and that what he's telling us, what David is saying is true, then why don't we treat the kingdom of God like Jesus tells us to when he said the kingdom of God is like someone who finds a pearl in a field and they sell everything they have so they can buy that field and have that pearl. We would forsake everything for the kingdom of God and for the presence of God and to walk and abide with Jesus if we really believe this. But see, for me, I'm just talking about me. I'm not talking about you guys. For me, my actions don't bear out that I really believe this. If I really, truly believe that in the presence of God, I would find the fullness of joy, then I would betray everything that's not associated with that presence and chase after it as hard as I could. But I don't. And see, I'm preaching this because I've been a Christian about as far back as my memory goes. I've been around Christians for 40 years. I've talked to a lot of them. I have yet to meet a single Christian that when I ask them, how's your relationship with God going? How you doing? How's your spiritual health? I've never heard a single one of them say, I'm nailing it. I mean, I'm really good at this. I mean, about five, 10 years ago, I got to this place where I was just really walking with the Lord and now I'm just waiting on him to come down here and carry me up to heaven in a chariot without having to experience death. How can I help you? I've never met that person. Everyone I talk to has this profound sense of, I ought to be doing better by now. I know better than to do the things that I do. I thought I'd be closer with Jesus by now. I thought I'd be further along. I thought I'd be more spiritually mature and spiritually healthy. That's my experience of faith. There's this constant voice going, why aren't you better at this? And I think it's because we don't really believe that verse. We say we do. Do you believe the Bible? Yes. Every word? Yes. All of them. Okay, well, we don't seem to believe this one. So the interesting question becomes, why is that? Why do we have such a hard time trusting this verse in Psalms that says that in the presence of God, in the presence of Jesus, there are pleasures forevermore, which we all would agree we want. Then why doesn't our life look like we believe it? I think one of the big reasons is that we have an impoverished view of Jesus. We just have this impoverished view of who Jesus is. I've told you guys this before. I do premarital counseling with couples that are getting married. And one of the things I always ask them, so I won't belabor this because I really have told you guys this before, but the point that I'm making is important. I'll ask them on a scale of one to 10, place yourself on that scale of spiritual health. 10 is just zealot on fire for God, Elijah in the Old Testament, John the Baptist, just going and doing everything for Jesus, just totally on fire zealot. And then one is just very, very far from God. And I'll ask them, where are you in your spiritual health? And without fail, people will answer four to six, okay? Because no one wants to say, well, I'm currently doing great. And no one's going to admit to being a two. So everybody says four to six, okay? And then I'll say, and this is the important part, all right, that's great. In five years, where would you like to be? And it's really a vehicle, the numbers don't matter, it's a vehicle to talk about what steps can we take to grow in our spiritual health. That's what it's there for, to help us get into that discussion. But what's interesting to me is when I ask people, and where do you want to be in five years without fail? Eight. I've had one person in 11 years of premarital counseling say 10. One person. Everybody else, eight. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be crazy zealot. I don't want to be that person. Just make me an eight. That'd be great. And what they probably really mean is seven, but they're telling the pastor, so let's bump it up. And I can't help but think that that's probably due at least in part to the fact that they probably don't think that walking with Jesus is that big of a deal. They probably aren't that enraptured with Jesus. I probably just don't think he's as big of a deal as he is. Whatever picture we have in our head of what it would be like to be a 10 isn't that attractive. It's just not that great. We're not that compelled by it, so we don't pursue it. Why don't we say 10? Because we don't want to be. Because whatever's at 10 is not really something that we would enjoy. Because I think we have this small view of who Jesus is. Because for some reason or another, we've never just fallen in love with scriptures and made it a habit to get up and read it every day and see Jesus on these pages and read the gospels and walk through his life and see how he forgave and see how he was generous and see how he loved and see how he sacrificed and fallen in love with him. We haven't allowed the sin and the weight that so easily entangles in Hebrews. We haven't allowed that to fall to the wayside to a degree that we can begin to experience our savior. We haven't engaged in worship in such a way that we turn our heart to God and let him fill it up with his joy. We haven't stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus, God, condescended, came down from heaven, became one of us, walked with us in our filth, was patient and gracious with us, marched to the cross, died there on the cross for us, even though he knew that we would crud on it with our own life and with our own actions and with our own hypocrisy and sits at the right hand of the Father despite all of that and intercedes for us. We don't sit in the weight of that reality and allow the gratitude and the grandeur of his forgiveness and grace to wash over us. And it allows us to create this impoverished view of Jesus that isn't really all that compelling. And I think one of the reasons we keep our view of Jesus small is the second reason why we struggle sometimes, I think, to believe Psalm 1611, which is that we like making mud pies. We like making mud pies. C.S. Lewis was an author in England prior to and through World War II, and one of the greatest authors of all time. And he described sin in this way. This is a very gross, loose paraphrase. But he described sin like this. He said, it's as if we are children and our parents want to take us on the most amazing holiday. For us in America, it'd be a vacation. Our parents want to take us on the most amazing vacation, but we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies. We'll sit in the backyard playing with mud because we don't believe that anything could possibly be better than this, and our parents have the most amazing vacation on the planet planned for us, and we're totally disinterested in it. That's how he describes sin. That God has the fullness of joy. He has pleasures forevermore. He leads us to the paths of life. He has something better for us that he's trying to draw us to and we content ourselves with making mud pies in our backyard because we just don't believe there could be anything better. This is actually a trick of the enemy. This is a lie of Satan. You understand that, right? Think of it this way. One of Satan's best lies is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure. One of the enemy's greatest tactics is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure, on what we can have right now. Isn't this why most of us fail at diets? Not me, but you fail at diets. Because I want to be in good shape. I want to exercise and have the sweat show up here before it shows up here. I want that very much. But I also want a steak right now. I also want Cinnabon. I also want a Chick-fil-A, number one. And I want the sweet tea and I want it to be large. We also want those things. And so we sacrifice long-term things on the altar of the immediate. And this is a trick that Satan plays on us, where God offers us the fullness of joy in this process. God is thinking long-term. He's promising us things years down the road, and we sacrifice those things on what we want right now. Marriage is probably the easiest example of this, where God makes it very clear in Scripture, in Genesis, and then repeated again in Mark, that for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And what God has put together, let no man separate. It is God's will for your life. When you are born, it is his will and hope that you would meet one person, that you would marry them, that you would become one flesh, and that you would experience the fullness of joy that comes from being in this lifelong giving relationship. Now, I'm not trying to diminish people who have walked through divorce or are currently divorced or whatever and diminish you as being outside of God's will. I believe that divorce happens because we're broken people and that there is redemption after that. But if we want to talk about what God wants for us, he wants a husband and wife to be united in one flesh and he wants them to walk down the years and the decades following him and knowing him and raising children together and walking through things together and experiencing the depth of love that can only come through that level of commitment sustained through the decades. That's what he wants for us. There's joy and happiness there. Just last night, I'm going to embarrass Jen here, I'm sorry, but just last night, Jen and I, we've got an 11-week-old and we've got a five-and-a-half-year-old, and sometimes, just sometimes, only me, this is not true of Jen, but sometimes I don't like either of them. I just want to sit. Yesterday may or may not have been one of those times. But we had a plan. That last night, we had a plan. We're going to get the kids to bed, and we're going to go get Chinese, and we're going to bring it back. There's this knee Asian kitchen that's really, really good. And we went, and we got the stuff. And I bring it back, and we set it out on the console table and we sit down on the floor and we eat Chinese and we watch Hometown with Ben and Aaron who are charming. If you're not watching Hometown, I mean, you're missing out. They're great folks. And we watched that and we laughed together and we ate together and we talked about how good the food was and then afterwards we laughed at Instagram videos and then both of us couldn't stop commenting on how great it was to have that night and how much we loved each other. Give me that. Give me that love after 15 years, all day long over our honeymoon in St. Lucia. When we were 25 years old, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon and we thought it was great and it was the best and we're so in love and it was wonderful. Man, that's nothing compared to what we experienced last night. Give me Chinese on the floor hiding from our children and our dog over a week in St. Lucia because the love 15 years in and what we've walked through and what we experienced and what we know about each other and the ways that our love has changed over the years is so much richer than it was 15 years ago. Now, I can't wait to experience what some of you guys have experienced being 10 and 20 years beyond where we are and the fullness of love that comes there. That's what God wants for us. He wants us to experience that fullness, but there's a process and it takes time. And Satan, Satan would will to steal that joy from us by tempting us to just fade in our marriage and not put in the work that we need by tempting us to just be selfish. And today I know I should help with the kids. I know I should do these things. I know I should love. I know we should go to counseling. I know that we need to work on this marriage, but today it's hard and I don't want to. So we sacrifice future joy on the altar of the immediate. Or even worse, he begins to tempt us to look outside our marriage and that would be fun and that would be entertaining for a season and that would be a type of joy and pleasure that we don't get to experience. And so we do and we sacrifice what could be long-term joy on the altar of immediate pleasure. It's true in our quiet times. I've said dozens of times from this stage, there's no more important habit in our life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And we know this. And we know that through doing that, we will find Jesus, we will be drawn to him, we will be caught up in him, that life will be better, that our attitude will be better, that our spiritual health will be better. We know it's good for us. Most of the whole room would agree with me that that would be an excellent practice in our lives, and yet for many of us, we don't have it. Why? Because it's easier to hit the snooze button. It's easier to flick through Twitter. It's easier to turn on SportsCenter or to get to work early or to just sit in the quiet or to read a book. There's so many different things that we could do besides dive into God's Word. And so once again, we sacrifice the joy that waits for us in the presence of God on the altar of the immediate, doing what we want. This is one of the greatest tricks of Satan, just to trick Christians into wasting their days and pursuing temporary pleasures instead of long-term joy. I came across a quote this week, and I that it was timely from some pastor that I didn't recognize and he just simply said, all of Satan's promises are for the right now. Promises without process are lies. God promises us the future. Satan promises us today. And we so very easily choose today. But really, I think in a room full, for the most part, of believers, the reason, probably the predominant reason, we struggle to believe Psalm 1611, is if we're being honest, I think we're afraid to be on fire. I think we're afraid to be a 10. I think we're afraid to be zealots. We're afraid to be on fire for Jesus. We don't want to be that person. We don't want to have to give up everything and move to Malawi and teach and write the Bible in another language. We don't want to have to do that. We don't want to have to sell all the things that we've acquired. We don't want to have to give up the pleasures that we enjoy. I know for me, the thing that makes me scared to be a zealot, and listen, I'm speaking to me more than you right now. The thing that makes me scared is I just don't want to be weird. I want people to like me. I like having friends. So I think we're scared to be on fire. And after being around church people my whole life, I'm convinced that this is true. And when I say this, just know I'm saying this to me, okay? I'm saying this to me. I am convicted by this. I am stepping on my own toes. If this doesn't apply to you, great. If it does, welcome into my conviction. But I'm saying it to me. I'm convinced that we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground that appears spiritually healthy while still leaving us the Lord of our own lives. I'm convinced that a vast majority of Christians are afraid to be on fire, and so what we do is we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground of spirituality that makes us appear spiritually healthy while still giving us space to hang on to some of the things that bring us joy and pleasure and therefore still being the lords of our own lives. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to Bible study. I'm going to say the things. I'm going to have the right friends. I'm going to reorient my life. I'm going to look different now than I did years ago. And now I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing okay. I'm not a 10, but I'm like a seven. And this is a pretty comfortable place for me. Maybe I'm the only one that does that. But we carve out this moderate middle ground. I'm not John the Baptist. Okay. I'm not one of the disciples, but I'm not one of the bad ones either. I'm good. Could I be doing better? Sure. Everybody could be doing better. Could I be doing worse? A lot worse. You should have known me five years ago. And so we carve out this middle ground. Well, we're not on fire. We're not totally cold and turned off to the Lord. We're just like a seven. And we're good with it. When we do that, the Bible has something to say about it. About specifically that. In Revelation chapter three, Jesus has written letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three. And in chapter three, he says, you're pretty good. You do a lot of good things to this particular church. But then in 3.16, he says this, but you are lukewarm. And because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. That word spit there is better translated as vomit or spew. That's what Jesus thinks of the middle ground that we carve out for ourselves. Well, we're comfortable and happy and sure, I could give more, I could do more, I could grow more, I could sacrifice more, but that's scary, I don't want to do it. I'm doing pretty good here as a seven. God, if you'll just kind of leave me alone and worry about some of those threes, I'll be happy to invite them to my house. I'll be good. And Jesus says, couldn't be less interested in that. To me, Nate, I couldn't be less interested in your moderate middle ground of spirituality here. He calls us to be on fire. He calls us to be zealots. And if you're in this conviction with me, of this middle ground that we carve out for ourselves, I would invite you into this question. What is it that you're afraid of? If you light your hair on fire for Jesus and go burn the world down, what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that worries you about getting up every day and reading God's word? What is it that worries you about inviting Jesus into every moment of your life? What is it that worries you about being a zealot? Is it that you'll have to give up something that brings you pleasure? God has more pleasure waiting for you if you'll just trust him, if you'll just drop your mud pies and go with him on vacation, what are we scared of? Is there some pleasure or friend group or thing that you like to do that you're worried, well, if I really sell out, then I can't engage in that anymore. So what? God's got something better. Well, I'm worried that, this is me, I'm worried that I'm going to be weird. People won't like me, that I won't be relatable. Who cares? Jesus didn't call me to be relatable. He called me to be passionate about him. And I bet the joy that I'll find there and the relationships that are there and the magnanimity of the love that's found there will do just fine with the weirdness. What are we afraid of that God's not going to give us back? What kind of pleasures are we embracing in our middle ground that we don't want to let go because I don't want to go too far? Why? Are you afraid he's going to ask you to sell everything and move to Ghana? He's probably not. If all American Christians moved to Ghana at once, that would be inconvenient. He's probably not going to do that. But even if he did, you'll find pleasures forevermore and fullness of joy in Ghana, so go to Ghana, man. What are we scared of? I think we're scared of being zealots. And so maybe what we need to do is understand what that means. I don't think that being a zealot is selling everything and becoming a weirdo and moving out into the wilderness like John the Baptist and wearing camel skins and eating locusts. I think that being a zealot means inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. Into every conversation. Inviting him in. How would you have me handle this? How can I reflect you here? Into every quiet, peaceful moment. Into every still morning. Into every late night. Into every dinner conversation. Into every relationship, into every work interaction, inviting him into every email, into every prayer. I think being a zealot looks like simply inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. What harm can come if we do that? What possible thing could we give up that's worth anything at all if we simply start by inviting Jesus into every moment of our life? If we do that, you know what we'll find? That our view of him begins to enlargen. That the lies of Satan become less convincing. That the fear of being on fire becomes a lot less fearful. So let's do that, Grace. Let's collectively light our hair on fire and light the world on fire for Jesus. Let's collectively be zealots. Let's collectively trust that this verse is true. And let's collectively ask ourselves the tough question, what am I hanging on to that's preventing me from pursuing God? That's preventing me from pursuing Jesus, from abiding in his presence and creating a larger view of him in my life. And then let's ask ourselves if it's worth it. I know that for me this week, as I've sat in this verse, I've developed a more deep conviction than ever that I want to trust this verse. I want to believe it. I want to live it out. I want to go be a zealot. And I want the church to come with me. Let's pray. Father, we love you. I'll be the first to admit, God, sometimes I just, all the time, I love you the best way I know how. It's an imperfect, insufficient, hypocritical, broken love. But God, we love you. We're grateful for Jesus. We really are. We know that sometimes it doesn't seem like that. We know that we demand a lot of your forgiveness. God, we are grateful for it. Lord, I know that I have been afraid to give up some of the things that I think are actually bringing me joy when all they're doing is keeping me from you. So I pray that you would give me the strength to walk away from those things and the strength of faith and hope to trust that you're going to bring me to these paths of life, to the best places possible. God, would you give us the strength this morning to put down our mud pies and trust that where you're taking us is exponentially better than anything we could ever cook up for ourselves. I pray that we would grow in our view of Jesus and be so enamored with him that we would just sprint towards him with all of our might. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If you're here this morning and I haven't yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. So please say hello in the lobby after the service. If you're watching online, thanks for doing that. Particularly if you're on vacation, thanks for making us a part of your Sunday, even while you're away. This is the last sermon in our series, One Hit Wonders, where we have been pausing and looking at some verses and passages that we don't often get to stop at in a normal series or in our normal Bible study. Some of the lesser known verses and passages that we find in Scripture, a lot of them have been in the Minor Prophets, which is a whole section of the Old Testament that we don't often explore. But this morning is admittedly more of a greatest hit than a one-hit wonder. It's actually apropos with the last question of our little game, trivia game that we were playing there in the bumper video. Steve, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but I'm actually going to pull this one out of Psalms, which is that's the Beatles of the Bible. All the greatest hits there are in Psalms. And so the one that I'm pulling out this morning is one that we have framed and in our house. It's a very frameable verse. I would encourage you to do that. If you've never heard Psalm 1611 before, I think it's going to be one that you'll identify with and appreciate, and hopefully we can leave today thinking about in a different way, especially if you are aware of this verse. But Psalm 1611 simply says this. This is where we're going to focus this morning. David writes, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's a heck of a verse, isn't it? I mean, that's a really encouraging, life-giving verse. That's a great promise that David makes to us through the voice of God in Psalms. And as we walk through it, that first sentence, you make known to me the paths of life. Often in Psalms, David adopts kind of the motif of a shepherd, us as the sheep and God as our good shepherd. Psalm 23 is a very familiar Psalm where it says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So maintaining that illustration, you make known to me the paths of life is this picture of a shepherd leading his sheep to the good places, leading his sheep to where they can eat, to where they can drink, to where they can rest, to where they'll be protected. And so he's saying, and in the onset, you lead me to the life-giving paths, to fullness of life. You lead me, God, to the best possible places. And then he says, in your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Not everyone here is a scientist. You may not be aware of this fact, but you can't get fuller than full, man. When you're full, that's it. This idea in sports that we give 110%, that's bupkis. You can't do it. It's 100%. That's it. When you're full, you're full. So what he's saying is in God's presence, you will experience maximum joy. It is impossible to find any other place in the known universe, any other scenario, any other situation. It is impossible to pursue any other relationship in which you will find more joy than in your relationship with God, than in the presence of the Father, there is fullness of joy. And then he says, and at the right hand of the Father are pleasures forevermore. And we learn in Romans and Hebrews that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us as our high priest. So what that is saying is, in Christ, if we obey John 15, when Jesus says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit, if we abide in Christ, if we pursue him, if we love him, if we chase him, if we know him, if we are intimate with him, then we will experience pleasures forevermore. That's some astounding promises, right? He's going to lead us to the best places possible in God's presence as we pursue him, as Steve and Lisa invited us into worship, as we go into worship, as we take ourselves like in Isaiah 6 into the throne room of God in prayer, in his presence, we will experience the fullness of joy. And then as we pursue Jesus and we go to his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? Isn't that what we're all chasing anyways? Just better days and a happier existence? If we were to say for ourselves, what do you want in 20, 30 years? We'd say, I just want to be happy. If you have kids and you say, what do you want for your kids? One of the things I promise would be in your top five answers is, top three answers is, I just want them to be happy. This verse promises that. So I actually think that if we really believe that, if we really believe Psalm 1611, that our own selfishness would drive us to God. If we really believe this verse, that he's going to lead us to try to be generous or unselfish. We can do the most selfish thing possible, and that selfishness should, in theory, based on these promises, drive us straight to the throne of God. We should respond to this verse. Like I responded to the news in my mid-twenties that places like Fogo de Chão existed. Now, I don't know if you know what Fogo de Chão is, because we had one in Atlanta. That's where I'm from. We don't have one in Raleigh. It's a Churras, Korea. It's a Brazilian steakhouse. There's one over in Briar Creek, I think. I still need to get over there. But in a Brazilian steakhouse, let me just, let me just tell you what they do there. Okay. This is unbelievable. Some of y'all know. If you know me, you know, I love steak. I really do. I had steak the other night for the first time since John was born because I like to make it myself and it's a whole process and I was in heaven watching the recorded Open Championship. Anyways, I love steak. And they told me, and I was like 25, 26, you know there's this place called Fogo de Chão. And when you go there, there's a card next to your plate. And one side is red and one side is green. And when you put it on the green side, they just bring you steak until you flip it back to red. And I'm like, what now? And so I go to this place, right? And there's these men and they walk around with these skewers of perfectly cooked steak. And they bring it up to you. Your card is green. They go, would you like some, sir? Yes, I would. I'm glad that you came. And they start to slice the filet or the top sirloin or the skirt steak or the bottom sirloin or the lamb or whatever it is. Jen, we need to go to this place for lunch today. They just start shaving it until you tell them to stop. If you want a steak mountain on your plate, you can have a steak mountain. It's amazing. And I'm just telling you, if you leave there without the meat sweats, you're not a good American. It's a remarkable place. And so when they told me that this place existed, with all of my heart, all I thought is, I want to go to there. I want to go. I'll save my money. I will lie to people. I will disappear for three days so I can go to this place and experience phogo to chow. That's where I want to go. That's how we should respond to this verse. What? There's a place I can go and there is fullness of joy. There are pleasures forevermore. There's someone I can follow who will lead me to only the best places. That's a thing? I want to go to there. I'll disappear for three days. I'll sever relationships. I'll give up whatever I do. I'll save up whatever I gotta do. I want to go to there. That's how we should respond to this verse. If we believe that the Bible is the word of God and that what's in here is eternally true and good and right and worth staking our life on, if we really believe that this is God's word and that what he's telling us, what David is saying is true, then why don't we treat the kingdom of God like Jesus tells us to when he said the kingdom of God is like someone who finds a pearl in a field and they sell everything they have so they can buy that field and have that pearl. We would forsake everything for the kingdom of God and for the presence of God and to walk and abide with Jesus if we really believe this. But see, for me, I'm just talking about me. I'm not talking about you guys. For me, my actions don't bear out that I really believe this. If I really, truly believe that in the presence of God, I would find the fullness of joy, then I would betray everything that's not associated with that presence and chase after it as hard as I could. But I don't. And see, I'm preaching this because I've been a Christian about as far back as my memory goes. I've been around Christians for 40 years. I've talked to a lot of them. I have yet to meet a single Christian that when I ask them, how's your relationship with God going? How you doing? How's your spiritual health? I've never heard a single one of them say, I'm nailing it. I mean, I'm really good at this. I mean, about five, 10 years ago, I got to this place where I was just really walking with the Lord and now I'm just waiting on him to come down here and carry me up to heaven in a chariot without having to experience death. How can I help you? I've never met that person. Everyone I talk to has this profound sense of, I ought to be doing better by now. I know better than to do the things that I do. I thought I'd be closer with Jesus by now. I thought I'd be further along. I thought I'd be more spiritually mature and spiritually healthy. That's my experience of faith. There's this constant voice going, why aren't you better at this? And I think it's because we don't really believe that verse. We say we do. Do you believe the Bible? Yes. Every word? Yes. All of them. Okay, well, we don't seem to believe this one. So the interesting question becomes, why is that? Why do we have such a hard time trusting this verse in Psalms that says that in the presence of God, in the presence of Jesus, there are pleasures forevermore, which we all would agree we want. Then why doesn't our life look like we believe it? I think one of the big reasons is that we have an impoverished view of Jesus. We just have this impoverished view of who Jesus is. I've told you guys this before. I do premarital counseling with couples that are getting married. And one of the things I always ask them, so I won't belabor this because I really have told you guys this before, but the point that I'm making is important. I'll ask them on a scale of one to 10, place yourself on that scale of spiritual health. 10 is just zealot on fire for God, Elijah in the Old Testament, John the Baptist, just going and doing everything for Jesus, just totally on fire zealot. And then one is just very, very far from God. And I'll ask them, where are you in your spiritual health? And without fail, people will answer four to six, okay? Because no one wants to say, well, I'm currently doing great. And no one's going to admit to being a two. So everybody says four to six, okay? And then I'll say, and this is the important part, all right, that's great. In five years, where would you like to be? And it's really a vehicle, the numbers don't matter, it's a vehicle to talk about what steps can we take to grow in our spiritual health. That's what it's there for, to help us get into that discussion. But what's interesting to me is when I ask people, and where do you want to be in five years without fail? Eight. I've had one person in 11 years of premarital counseling say 10. One person. Everybody else, eight. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be crazy zealot. I don't want to be that person. Just make me an eight. That'd be great. And what they probably really mean is seven, but they're telling the pastor, so let's bump it up. And I can't help but think that that's probably due at least in part to the fact that they probably don't think that walking with Jesus is that big of a deal. They probably aren't that enraptured with Jesus. I probably just don't think he's as big of a deal as he is. Whatever picture we have in our head of what it would be like to be a 10 isn't that attractive. It's just not that great. We're not that compelled by it, so we don't pursue it. Why don't we say 10? Because we don't want to be. Because whatever's at 10 is not really something that we would enjoy. Because I think we have this small view of who Jesus is. Because for some reason or another, we've never just fallen in love with scriptures and made it a habit to get up and read it every day and see Jesus on these pages and read the gospels and walk through his life and see how he forgave and see how he was generous and see how he loved and see how he sacrificed and fallen in love with him. We haven't allowed the sin and the weight that so easily entangles in Hebrews. We haven't allowed that to fall to the wayside to a degree that we can begin to experience our savior. We haven't engaged in worship in such a way that we turn our heart to God and let him fill it up with his joy. We haven't stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus, God, condescended, came down from heaven, became one of us, walked with us in our filth, was patient and gracious with us, marched to the cross, died there on the cross for us, even though he knew that we would crud on it with our own life and with our own actions and with our own hypocrisy and sits at the right hand of the Father despite all of that and intercedes for us. We don't sit in the weight of that reality and allow the gratitude and the grandeur of his forgiveness and grace to wash over us. And it allows us to create this impoverished view of Jesus that isn't really all that compelling. And I think one of the reasons we keep our view of Jesus small is the second reason why we struggle sometimes, I think, to believe Psalm 1611, which is that we like making mud pies. We like making mud pies. C.S. Lewis was an author in England prior to and through World War II, and one of the greatest authors of all time. And he described sin in this way. This is a very gross, loose paraphrase. But he described sin like this. He said, it's as if we are children and our parents want to take us on the most amazing holiday. For us in America, it'd be a vacation. Our parents want to take us on the most amazing vacation, but we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies. We'll sit in the backyard playing with mud because we don't believe that anything could possibly be better than this, and our parents have the most amazing vacation on the planet planned for us, and we're totally disinterested in it. That's how he describes sin. That God has the fullness of joy. He has pleasures forevermore. He leads us to the paths of life. He has something better for us that he's trying to draw us to and we content ourselves with making mud pies in our backyard because we just don't believe there could be anything better. This is actually a trick of the enemy. This is a lie of Satan. You understand that, right? Think of it this way. One of Satan's best lies is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure. One of the enemy's greatest tactics is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure, on what we can have right now. Isn't this why most of us fail at diets? Not me, but you fail at diets. Because I want to be in good shape. I want to exercise and have the sweat show up here before it shows up here. I want that very much. But I also want a steak right now. I also want Cinnabon. I also want a Chick-fil-A, number one. And I want the sweet tea and I want it to be large. We also want those things. And so we sacrifice long-term things on the altar of the immediate. And this is a trick that Satan plays on us, where God offers us the fullness of joy in this process. God is thinking long-term. He's promising us things years down the road, and we sacrifice those things on what we want right now. Marriage is probably the easiest example of this, where God makes it very clear in Scripture, in Genesis, and then repeated again in Mark, that for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And what God has put together, let no man separate. It is God's will for your life. When you are born, it is his will and hope that you would meet one person, that you would marry them, that you would become one flesh, and that you would experience the fullness of joy that comes from being in this lifelong giving relationship. Now, I'm not trying to diminish people who have walked through divorce or are currently divorced or whatever and diminish you as being outside of God's will. I believe that divorce happens because we're broken people and that there is redemption after that. But if we want to talk about what God wants for us, he wants a husband and wife to be united in one flesh and he wants them to walk down the years and the decades following him and knowing him and raising children together and walking through things together and experiencing the depth of love that can only come through that level of commitment sustained through the decades. That's what he wants for us. There's joy and happiness there. Just last night, I'm going to embarrass Jen here, I'm sorry, but just last night, Jen and I, we've got an 11-week-old and we've got a five-and-a-half-year-old, and sometimes, just sometimes, only me, this is not true of Jen, but sometimes I don't like either of them. I just want to sit. Yesterday may or may not have been one of those times. But we had a plan. That last night, we had a plan. We're going to get the kids to bed, and we're going to go get Chinese, and we're going to bring it back. There's this knee Asian kitchen that's really, really good. And we went, and we got the stuff. And I bring it back, and we set it out on the console table and we sit down on the floor and we eat Chinese and we watch Hometown with Ben and Aaron who are charming. If you're not watching Hometown, I mean, you're missing out. They're great folks. And we watched that and we laughed together and we ate together and we talked about how good the food was and then afterwards we laughed at Instagram videos and then both of us couldn't stop commenting on how great it was to have that night and how much we loved each other. Give me that. Give me that love after 15 years, all day long over our honeymoon in St. Lucia. When we were 25 years old, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon and we thought it was great and it was the best and we're so in love and it was wonderful. Man, that's nothing compared to what we experienced last night. Give me Chinese on the floor hiding from our children and our dog over a week in St. Lucia because the love 15 years in and what we've walked through and what we experienced and what we know about each other and the ways that our love has changed over the years is so much richer than it was 15 years ago. Now, I can't wait to experience what some of you guys have experienced being 10 and 20 years beyond where we are and the fullness of love that comes there. That's what God wants for us. He wants us to experience that fullness, but there's a process and it takes time. And Satan, Satan would will to steal that joy from us by tempting us to just fade in our marriage and not put in the work that we need by tempting us to just be selfish. And today I know I should help with the kids. I know I should do these things. I know I should love. I know we should go to counseling. I know that we need to work on this marriage, but today it's hard and I don't want to. So we sacrifice future joy on the altar of the immediate. Or even worse, he begins to tempt us to look outside our marriage and that would be fun and that would be entertaining for a season and that would be a type of joy and pleasure that we don't get to experience. And so we do and we sacrifice what could be long-term joy on the altar of immediate pleasure. It's true in our quiet times. I've said dozens of times from this stage, there's no more important habit in our life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And we know this. And we know that through doing that, we will find Jesus, we will be drawn to him, we will be caught up in him, that life will be better, that our attitude will be better, that our spiritual health will be better. We know it's good for us. Most of the whole room would agree with me that that would be an excellent practice in our lives, and yet for many of us, we don't have it. Why? Because it's easier to hit the snooze button. It's easier to flick through Twitter. It's easier to turn on SportsCenter or to get to work early or to just sit in the quiet or to read a book. There's so many different things that we could do besides dive into God's Word. And so once again, we sacrifice the joy that waits for us in the presence of God on the altar of the immediate, doing what we want. This is one of the greatest tricks of Satan, just to trick Christians into wasting their days and pursuing temporary pleasures instead of long-term joy. I came across a quote this week, and I that it was timely from some pastor that I didn't recognize and he just simply said, all of Satan's promises are for the right now. Promises without process are lies. God promises us the future. Satan promises us today. And we so very easily choose today. But really, I think in a room full, for the most part, of believers, the reason, probably the predominant reason, we struggle to believe Psalm 1611, is if we're being honest, I think we're afraid to be on fire. I think we're afraid to be a 10. I think we're afraid to be zealots. We're afraid to be on fire for Jesus. We don't want to be that person. We don't want to have to give up everything and move to Malawi and teach and write the Bible in another language. We don't want to have to do that. We don't want to have to sell all the things that we've acquired. We don't want to have to give up the pleasures that we enjoy. I know for me, the thing that makes me scared to be a zealot, and listen, I'm speaking to me more than you right now. The thing that makes me scared is I just don't want to be weird. I want people to like me. I like having friends. So I think we're scared to be on fire. And after being around church people my whole life, I'm convinced that this is true. And when I say this, just know I'm saying this to me, okay? I'm saying this to me. I am convicted by this. I am stepping on my own toes. If this doesn't apply to you, great. If it does, welcome into my conviction. But I'm saying it to me. I'm convinced that we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground that appears spiritually healthy while still leaving us the Lord of our own lives. I'm convinced that a vast majority of Christians are afraid to be on fire, and so what we do is we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground of spirituality that makes us appear spiritually healthy while still giving us space to hang on to some of the things that bring us joy and pleasure and therefore still being the lords of our own lives. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to Bible study. I'm going to say the things. I'm going to have the right friends. I'm going to reorient my life. I'm going to look different now than I did years ago. And now I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing okay. I'm not a 10, but I'm like a seven. And this is a pretty comfortable place for me. Maybe I'm the only one that does that. But we carve out this moderate middle ground. I'm not John the Baptist. Okay. I'm not one of the disciples, but I'm not one of the bad ones either. I'm good. Could I be doing better? Sure. Everybody could be doing better. Could I be doing worse? A lot worse. You should have known me five years ago. And so we carve out this middle ground. Well, we're not on fire. We're not totally cold and turned off to the Lord. We're just like a seven. And we're good with it. When we do that, the Bible has something to say about it. About specifically that. In Revelation chapter three, Jesus has written letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three. And in chapter three, he says, you're pretty good. You do a lot of good things to this particular church. But then in 3.16, he says this, but you are lukewarm. And because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. That word spit there is better translated as vomit or spew. That's what Jesus thinks of the middle ground that we carve out for ourselves. Well, we're comfortable and happy and sure, I could give more, I could do more, I could grow more, I could sacrifice more, but that's scary, I don't want to do it. I'm doing pretty good here as a seven. God, if you'll just kind of leave me alone and worry about some of those threes, I'll be happy to invite them to my house. I'll be good. And Jesus says, couldn't be less interested in that. To me, Nate, I couldn't be less interested in your moderate middle ground of spirituality here. He calls us to be on fire. He calls us to be zealots. And if you're in this conviction with me, of this middle ground that we carve out for ourselves, I would invite you into this question. What is it that you're afraid of? If you light your hair on fire for Jesus and go burn the world down, what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that worries you about getting up every day and reading God's word? What is it that worries you about inviting Jesus into every moment of your life? What is it that worries you about being a zealot? Is it that you'll have to give up something that brings you pleasure? God has more pleasure waiting for you if you'll just trust him, if you'll just drop your mud pies and go with him on vacation, what are we scared of? Is there some pleasure or friend group or thing that you like to do that you're worried, well, if I really sell out, then I can't engage in that anymore. So what? God's got something better. Well, I'm worried that, this is me, I'm worried that I'm going to be weird. People won't like me, that I won't be relatable. Who cares? Jesus didn't call me to be relatable. He called me to be passionate about him. And I bet the joy that I'll find there and the relationships that are there and the magnanimity of the love that's found there will do just fine with the weirdness. What are we afraid of that God's not going to give us back? What kind of pleasures are we embracing in our middle ground that we don't want to let go because I don't want to go too far? Why? Are you afraid he's going to ask you to sell everything and move to Ghana? He's probably not. If all American Christians moved to Ghana at once, that would be inconvenient. He's probably not going to do that. But even if he did, you'll find pleasures forevermore and fullness of joy in Ghana, so go to Ghana, man. What are we scared of? I think we're scared of being zealots. And so maybe what we need to do is understand what that means. I don't think that being a zealot is selling everything and becoming a weirdo and moving out into the wilderness like John the Baptist and wearing camel skins and eating locusts. I think that being a zealot means inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. Into every conversation. Inviting him in. How would you have me handle this? How can I reflect you here? Into every quiet, peaceful moment. Into every still morning. Into every late night. Into every dinner conversation. Into every relationship, into every work interaction, inviting him into every email, into every prayer. I think being a zealot looks like simply inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. What harm can come if we do that? What possible thing could we give up that's worth anything at all if we simply start by inviting Jesus into every moment of our life? If we do that, you know what we'll find? That our view of him begins to enlargen. That the lies of Satan become less convincing. That the fear of being on fire becomes a lot less fearful. So let's do that, Grace. Let's collectively light our hair on fire and light the world on fire for Jesus. Let's collectively be zealots. Let's collectively trust that this verse is true. And let's collectively ask ourselves the tough question, what am I hanging on to that's preventing me from pursuing God? That's preventing me from pursuing Jesus, from abiding in his presence and creating a larger view of him in my life. And then let's ask ourselves if it's worth it. I know that for me this week, as I've sat in this verse, I've developed a more deep conviction than ever that I want to trust this verse. I want to believe it. I want to live it out. I want to go be a zealot. And I want the church to come with me. Let's pray. Father, we love you. I'll be the first to admit, God, sometimes I just, all the time, I love you the best way I know how. It's an imperfect, insufficient, hypocritical, broken love. But God, we love you. We're grateful for Jesus. We really are. We know that sometimes it doesn't seem like that. We know that we demand a lot of your forgiveness. God, we are grateful for it. Lord, I know that I have been afraid to give up some of the things that I think are actually bringing me joy when all they're doing is keeping me from you. So I pray that you would give me the strength to walk away from those things and the strength of faith and hope to trust that you're going to bring me to these paths of life, to the best places possible. God, would you give us the strength this morning to put down our mud pies and trust that where you're taking us is exponentially better than anything we could ever cook up for ourselves. I pray that we would grow in our view of Jesus and be so enamored with him that we would just sprint towards him with all of our might. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If you're here this morning and I haven't yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. So please say hello in the lobby after the service. If you're watching online, thanks for doing that. Particularly if you're on vacation, thanks for making us a part of your Sunday, even while you're away. This is the last sermon in our series, One Hit Wonders, where we have been pausing and looking at some verses and passages that we don't often get to stop at in a normal series or in our normal Bible study. Some of the lesser known verses and passages that we find in Scripture, a lot of them have been in the Minor Prophets, which is a whole section of the Old Testament that we don't often explore. But this morning is admittedly more of a greatest hit than a one-hit wonder. It's actually apropos with the last question of our little game, trivia game that we were playing there in the bumper video. Steve, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but I'm actually going to pull this one out of Psalms, which is that's the Beatles of the Bible. All the greatest hits there are in Psalms. And so the one that I'm pulling out this morning is one that we have framed and in our house. It's a very frameable verse. I would encourage you to do that. If you've never heard Psalm 1611 before, I think it's going to be one that you'll identify with and appreciate, and hopefully we can leave today thinking about in a different way, especially if you are aware of this verse. But Psalm 1611 simply says this. This is where we're going to focus this morning. David writes, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's a heck of a verse, isn't it? I mean, that's a really encouraging, life-giving verse. That's a great promise that David makes to us through the voice of God in Psalms. And as we walk through it, that first sentence, you make known to me the paths of life. Often in Psalms, David adopts kind of the motif of a shepherd, us as the sheep and God as our good shepherd. Psalm 23 is a very familiar Psalm where it says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So maintaining that illustration, you make known to me the paths of life is this picture of a shepherd leading his sheep to the good places, leading his sheep to where they can eat, to where they can drink, to where they can rest, to where they'll be protected. And so he's saying, and in the onset, you lead me to the life-giving paths, to fullness of life. You lead me, God, to the best possible places. And then he says, in your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Not everyone here is a scientist. You may not be aware of this fact, but you can't get fuller than full, man. When you're full, that's it. This idea in sports that we give 110%, that's bupkis. You can't do it. It's 100%. That's it. When you're full, you're full. So what he's saying is in God's presence, you will experience maximum joy. It is impossible to find any other place in the known universe, any other scenario, any other situation. It is impossible to pursue any other relationship in which you will find more joy than in your relationship with God, than in the presence of the Father, there is fullness of joy. And then he says, and at the right hand of the Father are pleasures forevermore. And we learn in Romans and Hebrews that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us as our high priest. So what that is saying is, in Christ, if we obey John 15, when Jesus says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit, if we abide in Christ, if we pursue him, if we love him, if we chase him, if we know him, if we are intimate with him, then we will experience pleasures forevermore. That's some astounding promises, right? He's going to lead us to the best places possible in God's presence as we pursue him, as Steve and Lisa invited us into worship, as we go into worship, as we take ourselves like in Isaiah 6 into the throne room of God in prayer, in his presence, we will experience the fullness of joy. And then as we pursue Jesus and we go to his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? Isn't that what we're all chasing anyways? Just better days and a happier existence? If we were to say for ourselves, what do you want in 20, 30 years? We'd say, I just want to be happy. If you have kids and you say, what do you want for your kids? One of the things I promise would be in your top five answers is, top three answers is, I just want them to be happy. This verse promises that. So I actually think that if we really believe that, if we really believe Psalm 1611, that our own selfishness would drive us to God. If we really believe this verse, that he's going to lead us to try to be generous or unselfish. We can do the most selfish thing possible, and that selfishness should, in theory, based on these promises, drive us straight to the throne of God. We should respond to this verse. Like I responded to the news in my mid-twenties that places like Fogo de Chão existed. Now, I don't know if you know what Fogo de Chão is, because we had one in Atlanta. That's where I'm from. We don't have one in Raleigh. It's a Churras, Korea. It's a Brazilian steakhouse. There's one over in Briar Creek, I think. I still need to get over there. But in a Brazilian steakhouse, let me just, let me just tell you what they do there. Okay. This is unbelievable. Some of y'all know. If you know me, you know, I love steak. I really do. I had steak the other night for the first time since John was born because I like to make it myself and it's a whole process and I was in heaven watching the recorded Open Championship. Anyways, I love steak. And they told me, and I was like 25, 26, you know there's this place called Fogo de Chão. And when you go there, there's a card next to your plate. And one side is red and one side is green. And when you put it on the green side, they just bring you steak until you flip it back to red. And I'm like, what now? And so I go to this place, right? And there's these men and they walk around with these skewers of perfectly cooked steak. And they bring it up to you. Your card is green. They go, would you like some, sir? Yes, I would. I'm glad that you came. And they start to slice the filet or the top sirloin or the skirt steak or the bottom sirloin or the lamb or whatever it is. Jen, we need to go to this place for lunch today. They just start shaving it until you tell them to stop. If you want a steak mountain on your plate, you can have a steak mountain. It's amazing. And I'm just telling you, if you leave there without the meat sweats, you're not a good American. It's a remarkable place. And so when they told me that this place existed, with all of my heart, all I thought is, I want to go to there. I want to go. I'll save my money. I will lie to people. I will disappear for three days so I can go to this place and experience phogo to chow. That's where I want to go. That's how we should respond to this verse. What? There's a place I can go and there is fullness of joy. There are pleasures forevermore. There's someone I can follow who will lead me to only the best places. That's a thing? I want to go to there. I'll disappear for three days. I'll sever relationships. I'll give up whatever I do. I'll save up whatever I gotta do. I want to go to there. That's how we should respond to this verse. If we believe that the Bible is the word of God and that what's in here is eternally true and good and right and worth staking our life on, if we really believe that this is God's word and that what he's telling us, what David is saying is true, then why don't we treat the kingdom of God like Jesus tells us to when he said the kingdom of God is like someone who finds a pearl in a field and they sell everything they have so they can buy that field and have that pearl. We would forsake everything for the kingdom of God and for the presence of God and to walk and abide with Jesus if we really believe this. But see, for me, I'm just talking about me. I'm not talking about you guys. For me, my actions don't bear out that I really believe this. If I really, truly believe that in the presence of God, I would find the fullness of joy, then I would betray everything that's not associated with that presence and chase after it as hard as I could. But I don't. And see, I'm preaching this because I've been a Christian about as far back as my memory goes. I've been around Christians for 40 years. I've talked to a lot of them. I have yet to meet a single Christian that when I ask them, how's your relationship with God going? How you doing? How's your spiritual health? I've never heard a single one of them say, I'm nailing it. I mean, I'm really good at this. I mean, about five, 10 years ago, I got to this place where I was just really walking with the Lord and now I'm just waiting on him to come down here and carry me up to heaven in a chariot without having to experience death. How can I help you? I've never met that person. Everyone I talk to has this profound sense of, I ought to be doing better by now. I know better than to do the things that I do. I thought I'd be closer with Jesus by now. I thought I'd be further along. I thought I'd be more spiritually mature and spiritually healthy. That's my experience of faith. There's this constant voice going, why aren't you better at this? And I think it's because we don't really believe that verse. We say we do. Do you believe the Bible? Yes. Every word? Yes. All of them. Okay, well, we don't seem to believe this one. So the interesting question becomes, why is that? Why do we have such a hard time trusting this verse in Psalms that says that in the presence of God, in the presence of Jesus, there are pleasures forevermore, which we all would agree we want. Then why doesn't our life look like we believe it? I think one of the big reasons is that we have an impoverished view of Jesus. We just have this impoverished view of who Jesus is. I've told you guys this before. I do premarital counseling with couples that are getting married. And one of the things I always ask them, so I won't belabor this because I really have told you guys this before, but the point that I'm making is important. I'll ask them on a scale of one to 10, place yourself on that scale of spiritual health. 10 is just zealot on fire for God, Elijah in the Old Testament, John the Baptist, just going and doing everything for Jesus, just totally on fire zealot. And then one is just very, very far from God. And I'll ask them, where are you in your spiritual health? And without fail, people will answer four to six, okay? Because no one wants to say, well, I'm currently doing great. And no one's going to admit to being a two. So everybody says four to six, okay? And then I'll say, and this is the important part, all right, that's great. In five years, where would you like to be? And it's really a vehicle, the numbers don't matter, it's a vehicle to talk about what steps can we take to grow in our spiritual health. That's what it's there for, to help us get into that discussion. But what's interesting to me is when I ask people, and where do you want to be in five years without fail? Eight. I've had one person in 11 years of premarital counseling say 10. One person. Everybody else, eight. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be crazy zealot. I don't want to be that person. Just make me an eight. That'd be great. And what they probably really mean is seven, but they're telling the pastor, so let's bump it up. And I can't help but think that that's probably due at least in part to the fact that they probably don't think that walking with Jesus is that big of a deal. They probably aren't that enraptured with Jesus. I probably just don't think he's as big of a deal as he is. Whatever picture we have in our head of what it would be like to be a 10 isn't that attractive. It's just not that great. We're not that compelled by it, so we don't pursue it. Why don't we say 10? Because we don't want to be. Because whatever's at 10 is not really something that we would enjoy. Because I think we have this small view of who Jesus is. Because for some reason or another, we've never just fallen in love with scriptures and made it a habit to get up and read it every day and see Jesus on these pages and read the gospels and walk through his life and see how he forgave and see how he was generous and see how he loved and see how he sacrificed and fallen in love with him. We haven't allowed the sin and the weight that so easily entangles in Hebrews. We haven't allowed that to fall to the wayside to a degree that we can begin to experience our savior. We haven't engaged in worship in such a way that we turn our heart to God and let him fill it up with his joy. We haven't stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus, God, condescended, came down from heaven, became one of us, walked with us in our filth, was patient and gracious with us, marched to the cross, died there on the cross for us, even though he knew that we would crud on it with our own life and with our own actions and with our own hypocrisy and sits at the right hand of the Father despite all of that and intercedes for us. We don't sit in the weight of that reality and allow the gratitude and the grandeur of his forgiveness and grace to wash over us. And it allows us to create this impoverished view of Jesus that isn't really all that compelling. And I think one of the reasons we keep our view of Jesus small is the second reason why we struggle sometimes, I think, to believe Psalm 1611, which is that we like making mud pies. We like making mud pies. C.S. Lewis was an author in England prior to and through World War II, and one of the greatest authors of all time. And he described sin in this way. This is a very gross, loose paraphrase. But he described sin like this. He said, it's as if we are children and our parents want to take us on the most amazing holiday. For us in America, it'd be a vacation. Our parents want to take us on the most amazing vacation, but we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies. We'll sit in the backyard playing with mud because we don't believe that anything could possibly be better than this, and our parents have the most amazing vacation on the planet planned for us, and we're totally disinterested in it. That's how he describes sin. That God has the fullness of joy. He has pleasures forevermore. He leads us to the paths of life. He has something better for us that he's trying to draw us to and we content ourselves with making mud pies in our backyard because we just don't believe there could be anything better. This is actually a trick of the enemy. This is a lie of Satan. You understand that, right? Think of it this way. One of Satan's best lies is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure. One of the enemy's greatest tactics is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure, on what we can have right now. Isn't this why most of us fail at diets? Not me, but you fail at diets. Because I want to be in good shape. I want to exercise and have the sweat show up here before it shows up here. I want that very much. But I also want a steak right now. I also want Cinnabon. I also want a Chick-fil-A, number one. And I want the sweet tea and I want it to be large. We also want those things. And so we sacrifice long-term things on the altar of the immediate. And this is a trick that Satan plays on us, where God offers us the fullness of joy in this process. God is thinking long-term. He's promising us things years down the road, and we sacrifice those things on what we want right now. Marriage is probably the easiest example of this, where God makes it very clear in Scripture, in Genesis, and then repeated again in Mark, that for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And what God has put together, let no man separate. It is God's will for your life. When you are born, it is his will and hope that you would meet one person, that you would marry them, that you would become one flesh, and that you would experience the fullness of joy that comes from being in this lifelong giving relationship. Now, I'm not trying to diminish people who have walked through divorce or are currently divorced or whatever and diminish you as being outside of God's will. I believe that divorce happens because we're broken people and that there is redemption after that. But if we want to talk about what God wants for us, he wants a husband and wife to be united in one flesh and he wants them to walk down the years and the decades following him and knowing him and raising children together and walking through things together and experiencing the depth of love that can only come through that level of commitment sustained through the decades. That's what he wants for us. There's joy and happiness there. Just last night, I'm going to embarrass Jen here, I'm sorry, but just last night, Jen and I, we've got an 11-week-old and we've got a five-and-a-half-year-old, and sometimes, just sometimes, only me, this is not true of Jen, but sometimes I don't like either of them. I just want to sit. Yesterday may or may not have been one of those times. But we had a plan. That last night, we had a plan. We're going to get the kids to bed, and we're going to go get Chinese, and we're going to bring it back. There's this knee Asian kitchen that's really, really good. And we went, and we got the stuff. And I bring it back, and we set it out on the console table and we sit down on the floor and we eat Chinese and we watch Hometown with Ben and Aaron who are charming. If you're not watching Hometown, I mean, you're missing out. They're great folks. And we watched that and we laughed together and we ate together and we talked about how good the food was and then afterwards we laughed at Instagram videos and then both of us couldn't stop commenting on how great it was to have that night and how much we loved each other. Give me that. Give me that love after 15 years, all day long over our honeymoon in St. Lucia. When we were 25 years old, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon and we thought it was great and it was the best and we're so in love and it was wonderful. Man, that's nothing compared to what we experienced last night. Give me Chinese on the floor hiding from our children and our dog over a week in St. Lucia because the love 15 years in and what we've walked through and what we experienced and what we know about each other and the ways that our love has changed over the years is so much richer than it was 15 years ago. Now, I can't wait to experience what some of you guys have experienced being 10 and 20 years beyond where we are and the fullness of love that comes there. That's what God wants for us. He wants us to experience that fullness, but there's a process and it takes time. And Satan, Satan would will to steal that joy from us by tempting us to just fade in our marriage and not put in the work that we need by tempting us to just be selfish. And today I know I should help with the kids. I know I should do these things. I know I should love. I know we should go to counseling. I know that we need to work on this marriage, but today it's hard and I don't want to. So we sacrifice future joy on the altar of the immediate. Or even worse, he begins to tempt us to look outside our marriage and that would be fun and that would be entertaining for a season and that would be a type of joy and pleasure that we don't get to experience. And so we do and we sacrifice what could be long-term joy on the altar of immediate pleasure. It's true in our quiet times. I've said dozens of times from this stage, there's no more important habit in our life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And we know this. And we know that through doing that, we will find Jesus, we will be drawn to him, we will be caught up in him, that life will be better, that our attitude will be better, that our spiritual health will be better. We know it's good for us. Most of the whole room would agree with me that that would be an excellent practice in our lives, and yet for many of us, we don't have it. Why? Because it's easier to hit the snooze button. It's easier to flick through Twitter. It's easier to turn on SportsCenter or to get to work early or to just sit in the quiet or to read a book. There's so many different things that we could do besides dive into God's Word. And so once again, we sacrifice the joy that waits for us in the presence of God on the altar of the immediate, doing what we want. This is one of the greatest tricks of Satan, just to trick Christians into wasting their days and pursuing temporary pleasures instead of long-term joy. I came across a quote this week, and I that it was timely from some pastor that I didn't recognize and he just simply said, all of Satan's promises are for the right now. Promises without process are lies. God promises us the future. Satan promises us today. And we so very easily choose today. But really, I think in a room full, for the most part, of believers, the reason, probably the predominant reason, we struggle to believe Psalm 1611, is if we're being honest, I think we're afraid to be on fire. I think we're afraid to be a 10. I think we're afraid to be zealots. We're afraid to be on fire for Jesus. We don't want to be that person. We don't want to have to give up everything and move to Malawi and teach and write the Bible in another language. We don't want to have to do that. We don't want to have to sell all the things that we've acquired. We don't want to have to give up the pleasures that we enjoy. I know for me, the thing that makes me scared to be a zealot, and listen, I'm speaking to me more than you right now. The thing that makes me scared is I just don't want to be weird. I want people to like me. I like having friends. So I think we're scared to be on fire. And after being around church people my whole life, I'm convinced that this is true. And when I say this, just know I'm saying this to me, okay? I'm saying this to me. I am convicted by this. I am stepping on my own toes. If this doesn't apply to you, great. If it does, welcome into my conviction. But I'm saying it to me. I'm convinced that we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground that appears spiritually healthy while still leaving us the Lord of our own lives. I'm convinced that a vast majority of Christians are afraid to be on fire, and so what we do is we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground of spirituality that makes us appear spiritually healthy while still giving us space to hang on to some of the things that bring us joy and pleasure and therefore still being the lords of our own lives. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to Bible study. I'm going to say the things. I'm going to have the right friends. I'm going to reorient my life. I'm going to look different now than I did years ago. And now I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing okay. I'm not a 10, but I'm like a seven. And this is a pretty comfortable place for me. Maybe I'm the only one that does that. But we carve out this moderate middle ground. I'm not John the Baptist. Okay. I'm not one of the disciples, but I'm not one of the bad ones either. I'm good. Could I be doing better? Sure. Everybody could be doing better. Could I be doing worse? A lot worse. You should have known me five years ago. And so we carve out this middle ground. Well, we're not on fire. We're not totally cold and turned off to the Lord. We're just like a seven. And we're good with it. When we do that, the Bible has something to say about it. About specifically that. In Revelation chapter three, Jesus has written letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three. And in chapter three, he says, you're pretty good. You do a lot of good things to this particular church. But then in 3.16, he says this, but you are lukewarm. And because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. That word spit there is better translated as vomit or spew. That's what Jesus thinks of the middle ground that we carve out for ourselves. Well, we're comfortable and happy and sure, I could give more, I could do more, I could grow more, I could sacrifice more, but that's scary, I don't want to do it. I'm doing pretty good here as a seven. God, if you'll just kind of leave me alone and worry about some of those threes, I'll be happy to invite them to my house. I'll be good. And Jesus says, couldn't be less interested in that. To me, Nate, I couldn't be less interested in your moderate middle ground of spirituality here. He calls us to be on fire. He calls us to be zealots. And if you're in this conviction with me, of this middle ground that we carve out for ourselves, I would invite you into this question. What is it that you're afraid of? If you light your hair on fire for Jesus and go burn the world down, what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that worries you about getting up every day and reading God's word? What is it that worries you about inviting Jesus into every moment of your life? What is it that worries you about being a zealot? Is it that you'll have to give up something that brings you pleasure? God has more pleasure waiting for you if you'll just trust him, if you'll just drop your mud pies and go with him on vacation, what are we scared of? Is there some pleasure or friend group or thing that you like to do that you're worried, well, if I really sell out, then I can't engage in that anymore. So what? God's got something better. Well, I'm worried that, this is me, I'm worried that I'm going to be weird. People won't like me, that I won't be relatable. Who cares? Jesus didn't call me to be relatable. He called me to be passionate about him. And I bet the joy that I'll find there and the relationships that are there and the magnanimity of the love that's found there will do just fine with the weirdness. What are we afraid of that God's not going to give us back? What kind of pleasures are we embracing in our middle ground that we don't want to let go because I don't want to go too far? Why? Are you afraid he's going to ask you to sell everything and move to Ghana? He's probably not. If all American Christians moved to Ghana at once, that would be inconvenient. He's probably not going to do that. But even if he did, you'll find pleasures forevermore and fullness of joy in Ghana, so go to Ghana, man. What are we scared of? I think we're scared of being zealots. And so maybe what we need to do is understand what that means. I don't think that being a zealot is selling everything and becoming a weirdo and moving out into the wilderness like John the Baptist and wearing camel skins and eating locusts. I think that being a zealot means inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. Into every conversation. Inviting him in. How would you have me handle this? How can I reflect you here? Into every quiet, peaceful moment. Into every still morning. Into every late night. Into every dinner conversation. Into every relationship, into every work interaction, inviting him into every email, into every prayer. I think being a zealot looks like simply inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. What harm can come if we do that? What possible thing could we give up that's worth anything at all if we simply start by inviting Jesus into every moment of our life? If we do that, you know what we'll find? That our view of him begins to enlargen. That the lies of Satan become less convincing. That the fear of being on fire becomes a lot less fearful. So let's do that, Grace. Let's collectively light our hair on fire and light the world on fire for Jesus. Let's collectively be zealots. Let's collectively trust that this verse is true. And let's collectively ask ourselves the tough question, what am I hanging on to that's preventing me from pursuing God? That's preventing me from pursuing Jesus, from abiding in his presence and creating a larger view of him in my life. And then let's ask ourselves if it's worth it. I know that for me this week, as I've sat in this verse, I've developed a more deep conviction than ever that I want to trust this verse. I want to believe it. I want to live it out. I want to go be a zealot. And I want the church to come with me. Let's pray. Father, we love you. I'll be the first to admit, God, sometimes I just, all the time, I love you the best way I know how. It's an imperfect, insufficient, hypocritical, broken love. But God, we love you. We're grateful for Jesus. We really are. We know that sometimes it doesn't seem like that. We know that we demand a lot of your forgiveness. God, we are grateful for it. Lord, I know that I have been afraid to give up some of the things that I think are actually bringing me joy when all they're doing is keeping me from you. So I pray that you would give me the strength to walk away from those things and the strength of faith and hope to trust that you're going to bring me to these paths of life, to the best places possible. God, would you give us the strength this morning to put down our mud pies and trust that where you're taking us is exponentially better than anything we could ever cook up for ourselves. I pray that we would grow in our view of Jesus and be so enamored with him that we would just sprint towards him with all of our might. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If you're here this morning and I haven't yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. So please say hello in the lobby after the service. If you're watching online, thanks for doing that. Particularly if you're on vacation, thanks for making us a part of your Sunday, even while you're away. This is the last sermon in our series, One Hit Wonders, where we have been pausing and looking at some verses and passages that we don't often get to stop at in a normal series or in our normal Bible study. Some of the lesser known verses and passages that we find in Scripture, a lot of them have been in the Minor Prophets, which is a whole section of the Old Testament that we don't often explore. But this morning is admittedly more of a greatest hit than a one-hit wonder. It's actually apropos with the last question of our little game, trivia game that we were playing there in the bumper video. Steve, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but I'm actually going to pull this one out of Psalms, which is that's the Beatles of the Bible. All the greatest hits there are in Psalms. And so the one that I'm pulling out this morning is one that we have framed and in our house. It's a very frameable verse. I would encourage you to do that. If you've never heard Psalm 1611 before, I think it's going to be one that you'll identify with and appreciate, and hopefully we can leave today thinking about in a different way, especially if you are aware of this verse. But Psalm 1611 simply says this. This is where we're going to focus this morning. David writes, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's a heck of a verse, isn't it? I mean, that's a really encouraging, life-giving verse. That's a great promise that David makes to us through the voice of God in Psalms. And as we walk through it, that first sentence, you make known to me the paths of life. Often in Psalms, David adopts kind of the motif of a shepherd, us as the sheep and God as our good shepherd. Psalm 23 is a very familiar Psalm where it says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So maintaining that illustration, you make known to me the paths of life is this picture of a shepherd leading his sheep to the good places, leading his sheep to where they can eat, to where they can drink, to where they can rest, to where they'll be protected. And so he's saying, and in the onset, you lead me to the life-giving paths, to fullness of life. You lead me, God, to the best possible places. And then he says, in your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Not everyone here is a scientist. You may not be aware of this fact, but you can't get fuller than full, man. When you're full, that's it. This idea in sports that we give 110%, that's bupkis. You can't do it. It's 100%. That's it. When you're full, you're full. So what he's saying is in God's presence, you will experience maximum joy. It is impossible to find any other place in the known universe, any other scenario, any other situation. It is impossible to pursue any other relationship in which you will find more joy than in your relationship with God, than in the presence of the Father, there is fullness of joy. And then he says, and at the right hand of the Father are pleasures forevermore. And we learn in Romans and Hebrews that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us as our high priest. So what that is saying is, in Christ, if we obey John 15, when Jesus says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit, if we abide in Christ, if we pursue him, if we love him, if we chase him, if we know him, if we are intimate with him, then we will experience pleasures forevermore. That's some astounding promises, right? He's going to lead us to the best places possible in God's presence as we pursue him, as Steve and Lisa invited us into worship, as we go into worship, as we take ourselves like in Isaiah 6 into the throne room of God in prayer, in his presence, we will experience the fullness of joy. And then as we pursue Jesus and we go to his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? Isn't that what we're all chasing anyways? Just better days and a happier existence? If we were to say for ourselves, what do you want in 20, 30 years? We'd say, I just want to be happy. If you have kids and you say, what do you want for your kids? One of the things I promise would be in your top five answers is, top three answers is, I just want them to be happy. This verse promises that. So I actually think that if we really believe that, if we really believe Psalm 1611, that our own selfishness would drive us to God. If we really believe this verse, that he's going to lead us to try to be generous or unselfish. We can do the most selfish thing possible, and that selfishness should, in theory, based on these promises, drive us straight to the throne of God. We should respond to this verse. Like I responded to the news in my mid-twenties that places like Fogo de Chão existed. Now, I don't know if you know what Fogo de Chão is, because we had one in Atlanta. That's where I'm from. We don't have one in Raleigh. It's a Churras, Korea. It's a Brazilian steakhouse. There's one over in Briar Creek, I think. I still need to get over there. But in a Brazilian steakhouse, let me just, let me just tell you what they do there. Okay. This is unbelievable. Some of y'all know. If you know me, you know, I love steak. I really do. I had steak the other night for the first time since John was born because I like to make it myself and it's a whole process and I was in heaven watching the recorded Open Championship. Anyways, I love steak. And they told me, and I was like 25, 26, you know there's this place called Fogo de Chão. And when you go there, there's a card next to your plate. And one side is red and one side is green. And when you put it on the green side, they just bring you steak until you flip it back to red. And I'm like, what now? And so I go to this place, right? And there's these men and they walk around with these skewers of perfectly cooked steak. And they bring it up to you. Your card is green. They go, would you like some, sir? Yes, I would. I'm glad that you came. And they start to slice the filet or the top sirloin or the skirt steak or the bottom sirloin or the lamb or whatever it is. Jen, we need to go to this place for lunch today. They just start shaving it until you tell them to stop. If you want a steak mountain on your plate, you can have a steak mountain. It's amazing. And I'm just telling you, if you leave there without the meat sweats, you're not a good American. It's a remarkable place. And so when they told me that this place existed, with all of my heart, all I thought is, I want to go to there. I want to go. I'll save my money. I will lie to people. I will disappear for three days so I can go to this place and experience phogo to chow. That's where I want to go. That's how we should respond to this verse. What? There's a place I can go and there is fullness of joy. There are pleasures forevermore. There's someone I can follow who will lead me to only the best places. That's a thing? I want to go to there. I'll disappear for three days. I'll sever relationships. I'll give up whatever I do. I'll save up whatever I gotta do. I want to go to there. That's how we should respond to this verse. If we believe that the Bible is the word of God and that what's in here is eternally true and good and right and worth staking our life on, if we really believe that this is God's word and that what he's telling us, what David is saying is true, then why don't we treat the kingdom of God like Jesus tells us to when he said the kingdom of God is like someone who finds a pearl in a field and they sell everything they have so they can buy that field and have that pearl. We would forsake everything for the kingdom of God and for the presence of God and to walk and abide with Jesus if we really believe this. But see, for me, I'm just talking about me. I'm not talking about you guys. For me, my actions don't bear out that I really believe this. If I really, truly believe that in the presence of God, I would find the fullness of joy, then I would betray everything that's not associated with that presence and chase after it as hard as I could. But I don't. And see, I'm preaching this because I've been a Christian about as far back as my memory goes. I've been around Christians for 40 years. I've talked to a lot of them. I have yet to meet a single Christian that when I ask them, how's your relationship with God going? How you doing? How's your spiritual health? I've never heard a single one of them say, I'm nailing it. I mean, I'm really good at this. I mean, about five, 10 years ago, I got to this place where I was just really walking with the Lord and now I'm just waiting on him to come down here and carry me up to heaven in a chariot without having to experience death. How can I help you? I've never met that person. Everyone I talk to has this profound sense of, I ought to be doing better by now. I know better than to do the things that I do. I thought I'd be closer with Jesus by now. I thought I'd be further along. I thought I'd be more spiritually mature and spiritually healthy. That's my experience of faith. There's this constant voice going, why aren't you better at this? And I think it's because we don't really believe that verse. We say we do. Do you believe the Bible? Yes. Every word? Yes. All of them. Okay, well, we don't seem to believe this one. So the interesting question becomes, why is that? Why do we have such a hard time trusting this verse in Psalms that says that in the presence of God, in the presence of Jesus, there are pleasures forevermore, which we all would agree we want. Then why doesn't our life look like we believe it? I think one of the big reasons is that we have an impoverished view of Jesus. We just have this impoverished view of who Jesus is. I've told you guys this before. I do premarital counseling with couples that are getting married. And one of the things I always ask them, so I won't belabor this because I really have told you guys this before, but the point that I'm making is important. I'll ask them on a scale of one to 10, place yourself on that scale of spiritual health. 10 is just zealot on fire for God, Elijah in the Old Testament, John the Baptist, just going and doing everything for Jesus, just totally on fire zealot. And then one is just very, very far from God. And I'll ask them, where are you in your spiritual health? And without fail, people will answer four to six, okay? Because no one wants to say, well, I'm currently doing great. And no one's going to admit to being a two. So everybody says four to six, okay? And then I'll say, and this is the important part, all right, that's great. In five years, where would you like to be? And it's really a vehicle, the numbers don't matter, it's a vehicle to talk about what steps can we take to grow in our spiritual health. That's what it's there for, to help us get into that discussion. But what's interesting to me is when I ask people, and where do you want to be in five years without fail? Eight. I've had one person in 11 years of premarital counseling say 10. One person. Everybody else, eight. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be crazy zealot. I don't want to be that person. Just make me an eight. That'd be great. And what they probably really mean is seven, but they're telling the pastor, so let's bump it up. And I can't help but think that that's probably due at least in part to the fact that they probably don't think that walking with Jesus is that big of a deal. They probably aren't that enraptured with Jesus. I probably just don't think he's as big of a deal as he is. Whatever picture we have in our head of what it would be like to be a 10 isn't that attractive. It's just not that great. We're not that compelled by it, so we don't pursue it. Why don't we say 10? Because we don't want to be. Because whatever's at 10 is not really something that we would enjoy. Because I think we have this small view of who Jesus is. Because for some reason or another, we've never just fallen in love with scriptures and made it a habit to get up and read it every day and see Jesus on these pages and read the gospels and walk through his life and see how he forgave and see how he was generous and see how he loved and see how he sacrificed and fallen in love with him. We haven't allowed the sin and the weight that so easily entangles in Hebrews. We haven't allowed that to fall to the wayside to a degree that we can begin to experience our savior. We haven't engaged in worship in such a way that we turn our heart to God and let him fill it up with his joy. We haven't stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus, God, condescended, came down from heaven, became one of us, walked with us in our filth, was patient and gracious with us, marched to the cross, died there on the cross for us, even though he knew that we would crud on it with our own life and with our own actions and with our own hypocrisy and sits at the right hand of the Father despite all of that and intercedes for us. We don't sit in the weight of that reality and allow the gratitude and the grandeur of his forgiveness and grace to wash over us. And it allows us to create this impoverished view of Jesus that isn't really all that compelling. And I think one of the reasons we keep our view of Jesus small is the second reason why we struggle sometimes, I think, to believe Psalm 1611, which is that we like making mud pies. We like making mud pies. C.S. Lewis was an author in England prior to and through World War II, and one of the greatest authors of all time. And he described sin in this way. This is a very gross, loose paraphrase. But he described sin like this. He said, it's as if we are children and our parents want to take us on the most amazing holiday. For us in America, it'd be a vacation. Our parents want to take us on the most amazing vacation, but we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies. We'll sit in the backyard playing with mud because we don't believe that anything could possibly be better than this, and our parents have the most amazing vacation on the planet planned for us, and we're totally disinterested in it. That's how he describes sin. That God has the fullness of joy. He has pleasures forevermore. He leads us to the paths of life. He has something better for us that he's trying to draw us to and we content ourselves with making mud pies in our backyard because we just don't believe there could be anything better. This is actually a trick of the enemy. This is a lie of Satan. You understand that, right? Think of it this way. One of Satan's best lies is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure. One of the enemy's greatest tactics is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure, on what we can have right now. Isn't this why most of us fail at diets? Not me, but you fail at diets. Because I want to be in good shape. I want to exercise and have the sweat show up here before it shows up here. I want that very much. But I also want a steak right now. I also want Cinnabon. I also want a Chick-fil-A, number one. And I want the sweet tea and I want it to be large. We also want those things. And so we sacrifice long-term things on the altar of the immediate. And this is a trick that Satan plays on us, where God offers us the fullness of joy in this process. God is thinking long-term. He's promising us things years down the road, and we sacrifice those things on what we want right now. Marriage is probably the easiest example of this, where God makes it very clear in Scripture, in Genesis, and then repeated again in Mark, that for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And what God has put together, let no man separate. It is God's will for your life. When you are born, it is his will and hope that you would meet one person, that you would marry them, that you would become one flesh, and that you would experience the fullness of joy that comes from being in this lifelong giving relationship. Now, I'm not trying to diminish people who have walked through divorce or are currently divorced or whatever and diminish you as being outside of God's will. I believe that divorce happens because we're broken people and that there is redemption after that. But if we want to talk about what God wants for us, he wants a husband and wife to be united in one flesh and he wants them to walk down the years and the decades following him and knowing him and raising children together and walking through things together and experiencing the depth of love that can only come through that level of commitment sustained through the decades. That's what he wants for us. There's joy and happiness there. Just last night, I'm going to embarrass Jen here, I'm sorry, but just last night, Jen and I, we've got an 11-week-old and we've got a five-and-a-half-year-old, and sometimes, just sometimes, only me, this is not true of Jen, but sometimes I don't like either of them. I just want to sit. Yesterday may or may not have been one of those times. But we had a plan. That last night, we had a plan. We're going to get the kids to bed, and we're going to go get Chinese, and we're going to bring it back. There's this knee Asian kitchen that's really, really good. And we went, and we got the stuff. And I bring it back, and we set it out on the console table and we sit down on the floor and we eat Chinese and we watch Hometown with Ben and Aaron who are charming. If you're not watching Hometown, I mean, you're missing out. They're great folks. And we watched that and we laughed together and we ate together and we talked about how good the food was and then afterwards we laughed at Instagram videos and then both of us couldn't stop commenting on how great it was to have that night and how much we loved each other. Give me that. Give me that love after 15 years, all day long over our honeymoon in St. Lucia. When we were 25 years old, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon and we thought it was great and it was the best and we're so in love and it was wonderful. Man, that's nothing compared to what we experienced last night. Give me Chinese on the floor hiding from our children and our dog over a week in St. Lucia because the love 15 years in and what we've walked through and what we experienced and what we know about each other and the ways that our love has changed over the years is so much richer than it was 15 years ago. Now, I can't wait to experience what some of you guys have experienced being 10 and 20 years beyond where we are and the fullness of love that comes there. That's what God wants for us. He wants us to experience that fullness, but there's a process and it takes time. And Satan, Satan would will to steal that joy from us by tempting us to just fade in our marriage and not put in the work that we need by tempting us to just be selfish. And today I know I should help with the kids. I know I should do these things. I know I should love. I know we should go to counseling. I know that we need to work on this marriage, but today it's hard and I don't want to. So we sacrifice future joy on the altar of the immediate. Or even worse, he begins to tempt us to look outside our marriage and that would be fun and that would be entertaining for a season and that would be a type of joy and pleasure that we don't get to experience. And so we do and we sacrifice what could be long-term joy on the altar of immediate pleasure. It's true in our quiet times. I've said dozens of times from this stage, there's no more important habit in our life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And we know this. And we know that through doing that, we will find Jesus, we will be drawn to him, we will be caught up in him, that life will be better, that our attitude will be better, that our spiritual health will be better. We know it's good for us. Most of the whole room would agree with me that that would be an excellent practice in our lives, and yet for many of us, we don't have it. Why? Because it's easier to hit the snooze button. It's easier to flick through Twitter. It's easier to turn on SportsCenter or to get to work early or to just sit in the quiet or to read a book. There's so many different things that we could do besides dive into God's Word. And so once again, we sacrifice the joy that waits for us in the presence of God on the altar of the immediate, doing what we want. This is one of the greatest tricks of Satan, just to trick Christians into wasting their days and pursuing temporary pleasures instead of long-term joy. I came across a quote this week, and I that it was timely from some pastor that I didn't recognize and he just simply said, all of Satan's promises are for the right now. Promises without process are lies. God promises us the future. Satan promises us today. And we so very easily choose today. But really, I think in a room full, for the most part, of believers, the reason, probably the predominant reason, we struggle to believe Psalm 1611, is if we're being honest, I think we're afraid to be on fire. I think we're afraid to be a 10. I think we're afraid to be zealots. We're afraid to be on fire for Jesus. We don't want to be that person. We don't want to have to give up everything and move to Malawi and teach and write the Bible in another language. We don't want to have to do that. We don't want to have to sell all the things that we've acquired. We don't want to have to give up the pleasures that we enjoy. I know for me, the thing that makes me scared to be a zealot, and listen, I'm speaking to me more than you right now. The thing that makes me scared is I just don't want to be weird. I want people to like me. I like having friends. So I think we're scared to be on fire. And after being around church people my whole life, I'm convinced that this is true. And when I say this, just know I'm saying this to me, okay? I'm saying this to me. I am convicted by this. I am stepping on my own toes. If this doesn't apply to you, great. If it does, welcome into my conviction. But I'm saying it to me. I'm convinced that we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground that appears spiritually healthy while still leaving us the Lord of our own lives. I'm convinced that a vast majority of Christians are afraid to be on fire, and so what we do is we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground of spirituality that makes us appear spiritually healthy while still giving us space to hang on to some of the things that bring us joy and pleasure and therefore still being the lords of our own lives. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to Bible study. I'm going to say the things. I'm going to have the right friends. I'm going to reorient my life. I'm going to look different now than I did years ago. And now I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing okay. I'm not a 10, but I'm like a seven. And this is a pretty comfortable place for me. Maybe I'm the only one that does that. But we carve out this moderate middle ground. I'm not John the Baptist. Okay. I'm not one of the disciples, but I'm not one of the bad ones either. I'm good. Could I be doing better? Sure. Everybody could be doing better. Could I be doing worse? A lot worse. You should have known me five years ago. And so we carve out this middle ground. Well, we're not on fire. We're not totally cold and turned off to the Lord. We're just like a seven. And we're good with it. When we do that, the Bible has something to say about it. About specifically that. In Revelation chapter three, Jesus has written letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three. And in chapter three, he says, you're pretty good. You do a lot of good things to this particular church. But then in 3.16, he says this, but you are lukewarm. And because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. That word spit there is better translated as vomit or spew. That's what Jesus thinks of the middle ground that we carve out for ourselves. Well, we're comfortable and happy and sure, I could give more, I could do more, I could grow more, I could sacrifice more, but that's scary, I don't want to do it. I'm doing pretty good here as a seven. God, if you'll just kind of leave me alone and worry about some of those threes, I'll be happy to invite them to my house. I'll be good. And Jesus says, couldn't be less interested in that. To me, Nate, I couldn't be less interested in your moderate middle ground of spirituality here. He calls us to be on fire. He calls us to be zealots. And if you're in this conviction with me, of this middle ground that we carve out for ourselves, I would invite you into this question. What is it that you're afraid of? If you light your hair on fire for Jesus and go burn the world down, what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that worries you about getting up every day and reading God's word? What is it that worries you about inviting Jesus into every moment of your life? What is it that worries you about being a zealot? Is it that you'll have to give up something that brings you pleasure? God has more pleasure waiting for you if you'll just trust him, if you'll just drop your mud pies and go with him on vacation, what are we scared of? Is there some pleasure or friend group or thing that you like to do that you're worried, well, if I really sell out, then I can't engage in that anymore. So what? God's got something better. Well, I'm worried that, this is me, I'm worried that I'm going to be weird. People won't like me, that I won't be relatable. Who cares? Jesus didn't call me to be relatable. He called me to be passionate about him. And I bet the joy that I'll find there and the relationships that are there and the magnanimity of the love that's found there will do just fine with the weirdness. What are we afraid of that God's not going to give us back? What kind of pleasures are we embracing in our middle ground that we don't want to let go because I don't want to go too far? Why? Are you afraid he's going to ask you to sell everything and move to Ghana? He's probably not. If all American Christians moved to Ghana at once, that would be inconvenient. He's probably not going to do that. But even if he did, you'll find pleasures forevermore and fullness of joy in Ghana, so go to Ghana, man. What are we scared of? I think we're scared of being zealots. And so maybe what we need to do is understand what that means. I don't think that being a zealot is selling everything and becoming a weirdo and moving out into the wilderness like John the Baptist and wearing camel skins and eating locusts. I think that being a zealot means inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. Into every conversation. Inviting him in. How would you have me handle this? How can I reflect you here? Into every quiet, peaceful moment. Into every still morning. Into every late night. Into every dinner conversation. Into every relationship, into every work interaction, inviting him into every email, into every prayer. I think being a zealot looks like simply inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. What harm can come if we do that? What possible thing could we give up that's worth anything at all if we simply start by inviting Jesus into every moment of our life? If we do that, you know what we'll find? That our view of him begins to enlargen. That the lies of Satan become less convincing. That the fear of being on fire becomes a lot less fearful. So let's do that, Grace. Let's collectively light our hair on fire and light the world on fire for Jesus. Let's collectively be zealots. Let's collectively trust that this verse is true. And let's collectively ask ourselves the tough question, what am I hanging on to that's preventing me from pursuing God? That's preventing me from pursuing Jesus, from abiding in his presence and creating a larger view of him in my life. And then let's ask ourselves if it's worth it. I know that for me this week, as I've sat in this verse, I've developed a more deep conviction than ever that I want to trust this verse. I want to believe it. I want to live it out. I want to go be a zealot. And I want the church to come with me. Let's pray. Father, we love you. I'll be the first to admit, God, sometimes I just, all the time, I love you the best way I know how. It's an imperfect, insufficient, hypocritical, broken love. But God, we love you. We're grateful for Jesus. We really are. We know that sometimes it doesn't seem like that. We know that we demand a lot of your forgiveness. God, we are grateful for it. Lord, I know that I have been afraid to give up some of the things that I think are actually bringing me joy when all they're doing is keeping me from you. So I pray that you would give me the strength to walk away from those things and the strength of faith and hope to trust that you're going to bring me to these paths of life, to the best places possible. God, would you give us the strength this morning to put down our mud pies and trust that where you're taking us is exponentially better than anything we could ever cook up for ourselves. I pray that we would grow in our view of Jesus and be so enamored with him that we would just sprint towards him with all of our might. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If you're here this morning and I haven't yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. So please say hello in the lobby after the service. If you're watching online, thanks for doing that. Particularly if you're on vacation, thanks for making us a part of your Sunday, even while you're away. This is the last sermon in our series, One Hit Wonders, where we have been pausing and looking at some verses and passages that we don't often get to stop at in a normal series or in our normal Bible study. Some of the lesser known verses and passages that we find in Scripture, a lot of them have been in the Minor Prophets, which is a whole section of the Old Testament that we don't often explore. But this morning is admittedly more of a greatest hit than a one-hit wonder. It's actually apropos with the last question of our little game, trivia game that we were playing there in the bumper video. Steve, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but I'm actually going to pull this one out of Psalms, which is that's the Beatles of the Bible. All the greatest hits there are in Psalms. And so the one that I'm pulling out this morning is one that we have framed and in our house. It's a very frameable verse. I would encourage you to do that. If you've never heard Psalm 1611 before, I think it's going to be one that you'll identify with and appreciate, and hopefully we can leave today thinking about in a different way, especially if you are aware of this verse. But Psalm 1611 simply says this. This is where we're going to focus this morning. David writes, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's a heck of a verse, isn't it? I mean, that's a really encouraging, life-giving verse. That's a great promise that David makes to us through the voice of God in Psalms. And as we walk through it, that first sentence, you make known to me the paths of life. Often in Psalms, David adopts kind of the motif of a shepherd, us as the sheep and God as our good shepherd. Psalm 23 is a very familiar Psalm where it says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So maintaining that illustration, you make known to me the paths of life is this picture of a shepherd leading his sheep to the good places, leading his sheep to where they can eat, to where they can drink, to where they can rest, to where they'll be protected. And so he's saying, and in the onset, you lead me to the life-giving paths, to fullness of life. You lead me, God, to the best possible places. And then he says, in your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Not everyone here is a scientist. You may not be aware of this fact, but you can't get fuller than full, man. When you're full, that's it. This idea in sports that we give 110%, that's bupkis. You can't do it. It's 100%. That's it. When you're full, you're full. So what he's saying is in God's presence, you will experience maximum joy. It is impossible to find any other place in the known universe, any other scenario, any other situation. It is impossible to pursue any other relationship in which you will find more joy than in your relationship with God, than in the presence of the Father, there is fullness of joy. And then he says, and at the right hand of the Father are pleasures forevermore. And we learn in Romans and Hebrews that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us as our high priest. So what that is saying is, in Christ, if we obey John 15, when Jesus says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit, if we abide in Christ, if we pursue him, if we love him, if we chase him, if we know him, if we are intimate with him, then we will experience pleasures forevermore. That's some astounding promises, right? He's going to lead us to the best places possible in God's presence as we pursue him, as Steve and Lisa invited us into worship, as we go into worship, as we take ourselves like in Isaiah 6 into the throne room of God in prayer, in his presence, we will experience the fullness of joy. And then as we pursue Jesus and we go to his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? Isn't that what we're all chasing anyways? Just better days and a happier existence? If we were to say for ourselves, what do you want in 20, 30 years? We'd say, I just want to be happy. If you have kids and you say, what do you want for your kids? One of the things I promise would be in your top five answers is, top three answers is, I just want them to be happy. This verse promises that. So I actually think that if we really believe that, if we really believe Psalm 1611, that our own selfishness would drive us to God. If we really believe this verse, that he's going to lead us to try to be generous or unselfish. We can do the most selfish thing possible, and that selfishness should, in theory, based on these promises, drive us straight to the throne of God. We should respond to this verse. Like I responded to the news in my mid-twenties that places like Fogo de Chão existed. Now, I don't know if you know what Fogo de Chão is, because we had one in Atlanta. That's where I'm from. We don't have one in Raleigh. It's a Churras, Korea. It's a Brazilian steakhouse. There's one over in Briar Creek, I think. I still need to get over there. But in a Brazilian steakhouse, let me just, let me just tell you what they do there. Okay. This is unbelievable. Some of y'all know. If you know me, you know, I love steak. I really do. I had steak the other night for the first time since John was born because I like to make it myself and it's a whole process and I was in heaven watching the recorded Open Championship. Anyways, I love steak. And they told me, and I was like 25, 26, you know there's this place called Fogo de Chão. And when you go there, there's a card next to your plate. And one side is red and one side is green. And when you put it on the green side, they just bring you steak until you flip it back to red. And I'm like, what now? And so I go to this place, right? And there's these men and they walk around with these skewers of perfectly cooked steak. And they bring it up to you. Your card is green. They go, would you like some, sir? Yes, I would. I'm glad that you came. And they start to slice the filet or the top sirloin or the skirt steak or the bottom sirloin or the lamb or whatever it is. Jen, we need to go to this place for lunch today. They just start shaving it until you tell them to stop. If you want a steak mountain on your plate, you can have a steak mountain. It's amazing. And I'm just telling you, if you leave there without the meat sweats, you're not a good American. It's a remarkable place. And so when they told me that this place existed, with all of my heart, all I thought is, I want to go to there. I want to go. I'll save my money. I will lie to people. I will disappear for three days so I can go to this place and experience phogo to chow. That's where I want to go. That's how we should respond to this verse. What? There's a place I can go and there is fullness of joy. There are pleasures forevermore. There's someone I can follow who will lead me to only the best places. That's a thing? I want to go to there. I'll disappear for three days. I'll sever relationships. I'll give up whatever I do. I'll save up whatever I gotta do. I want to go to there. That's how we should respond to this verse. If we believe that the Bible is the word of God and that what's in here is eternally true and good and right and worth staking our life on, if we really believe that this is God's word and that what he's telling us, what David is saying is true, then why don't we treat the kingdom of God like Jesus tells us to when he said the kingdom of God is like someone who finds a pearl in a field and they sell everything they have so they can buy that field and have that pearl. We would forsake everything for the kingdom of God and for the presence of God and to walk and abide with Jesus if we really believe this. But see, for me, I'm just talking about me. I'm not talking about you guys. For me, my actions don't bear out that I really believe this. If I really, truly believe that in the presence of God, I would find the fullness of joy, then I would betray everything that's not associated with that presence and chase after it as hard as I could. But I don't. And see, I'm preaching this because I've been a Christian about as far back as my memory goes. I've been around Christians for 40 years. I've talked to a lot of them. I have yet to meet a single Christian that when I ask them, how's your relationship with God going? How you doing? How's your spiritual health? I've never heard a single one of them say, I'm nailing it. I mean, I'm really good at this. I mean, about five, 10 years ago, I got to this place where I was just really walking with the Lord and now I'm just waiting on him to come down here and carry me up to heaven in a chariot without having to experience death. How can I help you? I've never met that person. Everyone I talk to has this profound sense of, I ought to be doing better by now. I know better than to do the things that I do. I thought I'd be closer with Jesus by now. I thought I'd be further along. I thought I'd be more spiritually mature and spiritually healthy. That's my experience of faith. There's this constant voice going, why aren't you better at this? And I think it's because we don't really believe that verse. We say we do. Do you believe the Bible? Yes. Every word? Yes. All of them. Okay, well, we don't seem to believe this one. So the interesting question becomes, why is that? Why do we have such a hard time trusting this verse in Psalms that says that in the presence of God, in the presence of Jesus, there are pleasures forevermore, which we all would agree we want. Then why doesn't our life look like we believe it? I think one of the big reasons is that we have an impoverished view of Jesus. We just have this impoverished view of who Jesus is. I've told you guys this before. I do premarital counseling with couples that are getting married. And one of the things I always ask them, so I won't belabor this because I really have told you guys this before, but the point that I'm making is important. I'll ask them on a scale of one to 10, place yourself on that scale of spiritual health. 10 is just zealot on fire for God, Elijah in the Old Testament, John the Baptist, just going and doing everything for Jesus, just totally on fire zealot. And then one is just very, very far from God. And I'll ask them, where are you in your spiritual health? And without fail, people will answer four to six, okay? Because no one wants to say, well, I'm currently doing great. And no one's going to admit to being a two. So everybody says four to six, okay? And then I'll say, and this is the important part, all right, that's great. In five years, where would you like to be? And it's really a vehicle, the numbers don't matter, it's a vehicle to talk about what steps can we take to grow in our spiritual health. That's what it's there for, to help us get into that discussion. But what's interesting to me is when I ask people, and where do you want to be in five years without fail? Eight. I've had one person in 11 years of premarital counseling say 10. One person. Everybody else, eight. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be crazy zealot. I don't want to be that person. Just make me an eight. That'd be great. And what they probably really mean is seven, but they're telling the pastor, so let's bump it up. And I can't help but think that that's probably due at least in part to the fact that they probably don't think that walking with Jesus is that big of a deal. They probably aren't that enraptured with Jesus. I probably just don't think he's as big of a deal as he is. Whatever picture we have in our head of what it would be like to be a 10 isn't that attractive. It's just not that great. We're not that compelled by it, so we don't pursue it. Why don't we say 10? Because we don't want to be. Because whatever's at 10 is not really something that we would enjoy. Because I think we have this small view of who Jesus is. Because for some reason or another, we've never just fallen in love with scriptures and made it a habit to get up and read it every day and see Jesus on these pages and read the gospels and walk through his life and see how he forgave and see how he was generous and see how he loved and see how he sacrificed and fallen in love with him. We haven't allowed the sin and the weight that so easily entangles in Hebrews. We haven't allowed that to fall to the wayside to a degree that we can begin to experience our savior. We haven't engaged in worship in such a way that we turn our heart to God and let him fill it up with his joy. We haven't stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus, God, condescended, came down from heaven, became one of us, walked with us in our filth, was patient and gracious with us, marched to the cross, died there on the cross for us, even though he knew that we would crud on it with our own life and with our own actions and with our own hypocrisy and sits at the right hand of the Father despite all of that and intercedes for us. We don't sit in the weight of that reality and allow the gratitude and the grandeur of his forgiveness and grace to wash over us. And it allows us to create this impoverished view of Jesus that isn't really all that compelling. And I think one of the reasons we keep our view of Jesus small is the second reason why we struggle sometimes, I think, to believe Psalm 1611, which is that we like making mud pies. We like making mud pies. C.S. Lewis was an author in England prior to and through World War II, and one of the greatest authors of all time. And he described sin in this way. This is a very gross, loose paraphrase. But he described sin like this. He said, it's as if we are children and our parents want to take us on the most amazing holiday. For us in America, it'd be a vacation. Our parents want to take us on the most amazing vacation, but we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies. We'll sit in the backyard playing with mud because we don't believe that anything could possibly be better than this, and our parents have the most amazing vacation on the planet planned for us, and we're totally disinterested in it. That's how he describes sin. That God has the fullness of joy. He has pleasures forevermore. He leads us to the paths of life. He has something better for us that he's trying to draw us to and we content ourselves with making mud pies in our backyard because we just don't believe there could be anything better. This is actually a trick of the enemy. This is a lie of Satan. You understand that, right? Think of it this way. One of Satan's best lies is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure. One of the enemy's greatest tactics is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure, on what we can have right now. Isn't this why most of us fail at diets? Not me, but you fail at diets. Because I want to be in good shape. I want to exercise and have the sweat show up here before it shows up here. I want that very much. But I also want a steak right now. I also want Cinnabon. I also want a Chick-fil-A, number one. And I want the sweet tea and I want it to be large. We also want those things. And so we sacrifice long-term things on the altar of the immediate. And this is a trick that Satan plays on us, where God offers us the fullness of joy in this process. God is thinking long-term. He's promising us things years down the road, and we sacrifice those things on what we want right now. Marriage is probably the easiest example of this, where God makes it very clear in Scripture, in Genesis, and then repeated again in Mark, that for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And what God has put together, let no man separate. It is God's will for your life. When you are born, it is his will and hope that you would meet one person, that you would marry them, that you would become one flesh, and that you would experience the fullness of joy that comes from being in this lifelong giving relationship. Now, I'm not trying to diminish people who have walked through divorce or are currently divorced or whatever and diminish you as being outside of God's will. I believe that divorce happens because we're broken people and that there is redemption after that. But if we want to talk about what God wants for us, he wants a husband and wife to be united in one flesh and he wants them to walk down the years and the decades following him and knowing him and raising children together and walking through things together and experiencing the depth of love that can only come through that level of commitment sustained through the decades. That's what he wants for us. There's joy and happiness there. Just last night, I'm going to embarrass Jen here, I'm sorry, but just last night, Jen and I, we've got an 11-week-old and we've got a five-and-a-half-year-old, and sometimes, just sometimes, only me, this is not true of Jen, but sometimes I don't like either of them. I just want to sit. Yesterday may or may not have been one of those times. But we had a plan. That last night, we had a plan. We're going to get the kids to bed, and we're going to go get Chinese, and we're going to bring it back. There's this knee Asian kitchen that's really, really good. And we went, and we got the stuff. And I bring it back, and we set it out on the console table and we sit down on the floor and we eat Chinese and we watch Hometown with Ben and Aaron who are charming. If you're not watching Hometown, I mean, you're missing out. They're great folks. And we watched that and we laughed together and we ate together and we talked about how good the food was and then afterwards we laughed at Instagram videos and then both of us couldn't stop commenting on how great it was to have that night and how much we loved each other. Give me that. Give me that love after 15 years, all day long over our honeymoon in St. Lucia. When we were 25 years old, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon and we thought it was great and it was the best and we're so in love and it was wonderful. Man, that's nothing compared to what we experienced last night. Give me Chinese on the floor hiding from our children and our dog over a week in St. Lucia because the love 15 years in and what we've walked through and what we experienced and what we know about each other and the ways that our love has changed over the years is so much richer than it was 15 years ago. Now, I can't wait to experience what some of you guys have experienced being 10 and 20 years beyond where we are and the fullness of love that comes there. That's what God wants for us. He wants us to experience that fullness, but there's a process and it takes time. And Satan, Satan would will to steal that joy from us by tempting us to just fade in our marriage and not put in the work that we need by tempting us to just be selfish. And today I know I should help with the kids. I know I should do these things. I know I should love. I know we should go to counseling. I know that we need to work on this marriage, but today it's hard and I don't want to. So we sacrifice future joy on the altar of the immediate. Or even worse, he begins to tempt us to look outside our marriage and that would be fun and that would be entertaining for a season and that would be a type of joy and pleasure that we don't get to experience. And so we do and we sacrifice what could be long-term joy on the altar of immediate pleasure. It's true in our quiet times. I've said dozens of times from this stage, there's no more important habit in our life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And we know this. And we know that through doing that, we will find Jesus, we will be drawn to him, we will be caught up in him, that life will be better, that our attitude will be better, that our spiritual health will be better. We know it's good for us. Most of the whole room would agree with me that that would be an excellent practice in our lives, and yet for many of us, we don't have it. Why? Because it's easier to hit the snooze button. It's easier to flick through Twitter. It's easier to turn on SportsCenter or to get to work early or to just sit in the quiet or to read a book. There's so many different things that we could do besides dive into God's Word. And so once again, we sacrifice the joy that waits for us in the presence of God on the altar of the immediate, doing what we want. This is one of the greatest tricks of Satan, just to trick Christians into wasting their days and pursuing temporary pleasures instead of long-term joy. I came across a quote this week, and I that it was timely from some pastor that I didn't recognize and he just simply said, all of Satan's promises are for the right now. Promises without process are lies. God promises us the future. Satan promises us today. And we so very easily choose today. But really, I think in a room full, for the most part, of believers, the reason, probably the predominant reason, we struggle to believe Psalm 1611, is if we're being honest, I think we're afraid to be on fire. I think we're afraid to be a 10. I think we're afraid to be zealots. We're afraid to be on fire for Jesus. We don't want to be that person. We don't want to have to give up everything and move to Malawi and teach and write the Bible in another language. We don't want to have to do that. We don't want to have to sell all the things that we've acquired. We don't want to have to give up the pleasures that we enjoy. I know for me, the thing that makes me scared to be a zealot, and listen, I'm speaking to me more than you right now. The thing that makes me scared is I just don't want to be weird. I want people to like me. I like having friends. So I think we're scared to be on fire. And after being around church people my whole life, I'm convinced that this is true. And when I say this, just know I'm saying this to me, okay? I'm saying this to me. I am convicted by this. I am stepping on my own toes. If this doesn't apply to you, great. If it does, welcome into my conviction. But I'm saying it to me. I'm convinced that we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground that appears spiritually healthy while still leaving us the Lord of our own lives. I'm convinced that a vast majority of Christians are afraid to be on fire, and so what we do is we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground of spirituality that makes us appear spiritually healthy while still giving us space to hang on to some of the things that bring us joy and pleasure and therefore still being the lords of our own lives. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to Bible study. I'm going to say the things. I'm going to have the right friends. I'm going to reorient my life. I'm going to look different now than I did years ago. And now I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing okay. I'm not a 10, but I'm like a seven. And this is a pretty comfortable place for me. Maybe I'm the only one that does that. But we carve out this moderate middle ground. I'm not John the Baptist. Okay. I'm not one of the disciples, but I'm not one of the bad ones either. I'm good. Could I be doing better? Sure. Everybody could be doing better. Could I be doing worse? A lot worse. You should have known me five years ago. And so we carve out this middle ground. Well, we're not on fire. We're not totally cold and turned off to the Lord. We're just like a seven. And we're good with it. When we do that, the Bible has something to say about it. About specifically that. In Revelation chapter three, Jesus has written letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three. And in chapter three, he says, you're pretty good. You do a lot of good things to this particular church. But then in 3.16, he says this, but you are lukewarm. And because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. That word spit there is better translated as vomit or spew. That's what Jesus thinks of the middle ground that we carve out for ourselves. Well, we're comfortable and happy and sure, I could give more, I could do more, I could grow more, I could sacrifice more, but that's scary, I don't want to do it. I'm doing pretty good here as a seven. God, if you'll just kind of leave me alone and worry about some of those threes, I'll be happy to invite them to my house. I'll be good. And Jesus says, couldn't be less interested in that. To me, Nate, I couldn't be less interested in your moderate middle ground of spirituality here. He calls us to be on fire. He calls us to be zealots. And if you're in this conviction with me, of this middle ground that we carve out for ourselves, I would invite you into this question. What is it that you're afraid of? If you light your hair on fire for Jesus and go burn the world down, what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that worries you about getting up every day and reading God's word? What is it that worries you about inviting Jesus into every moment of your life? What is it that worries you about being a zealot? Is it that you'll have to give up something that brings you pleasure? God has more pleasure waiting for you if you'll just trust him, if you'll just drop your mud pies and go with him on vacation, what are we scared of? Is there some pleasure or friend group or thing that you like to do that you're worried, well, if I really sell out, then I can't engage in that anymore. So what? God's got something better. Well, I'm worried that, this is me, I'm worried that I'm going to be weird. People won't like me, that I won't be relatable. Who cares? Jesus didn't call me to be relatable. He called me to be passionate about him. And I bet the joy that I'll find there and the relationships that are there and the magnanimity of the love that's found there will do just fine with the weirdness. What are we afraid of that God's not going to give us back? What kind of pleasures are we embracing in our middle ground that we don't want to let go because I don't want to go too far? Why? Are you afraid he's going to ask you to sell everything and move to Ghana? He's probably not. If all American Christians moved to Ghana at once, that would be inconvenient. He's probably not going to do that. But even if he did, you'll find pleasures forevermore and fullness of joy in Ghana, so go to Ghana, man. What are we scared of? I think we're scared of being zealots. And so maybe what we need to do is understand what that means. I don't think that being a zealot is selling everything and becoming a weirdo and moving out into the wilderness like John the Baptist and wearing camel skins and eating locusts. I think that being a zealot means inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. Into every conversation. Inviting him in. How would you have me handle this? How can I reflect you here? Into every quiet, peaceful moment. Into every still morning. Into every late night. Into every dinner conversation. Into every relationship, into every work interaction, inviting him into every email, into every prayer. I think being a zealot looks like simply inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. What harm can come if we do that? What possible thing could we give up that's worth anything at all if we simply start by inviting Jesus into every moment of our life? If we do that, you know what we'll find? That our view of him begins to enlargen. That the lies of Satan become less convincing. That the fear of being on fire becomes a lot less fearful. So let's do that, Grace. Let's collectively light our hair on fire and light the world on fire for Jesus. Let's collectively be zealots. Let's collectively trust that this verse is true. And let's collectively ask ourselves the tough question, what am I hanging on to that's preventing me from pursuing God? That's preventing me from pursuing Jesus, from abiding in his presence and creating a larger view of him in my life. And then let's ask ourselves if it's worth it. I know that for me this week, as I've sat in this verse, I've developed a more deep conviction than ever that I want to trust this verse. I want to believe it. I want to live it out. I want to go be a zealot. And I want the church to come with me. Let's pray. Father, we love you. I'll be the first to admit, God, sometimes I just, all the time, I love you the best way I know how. It's an imperfect, insufficient, hypocritical, broken love. But God, we love you. We're grateful for Jesus. We really are. We know that sometimes it doesn't seem like that. We know that we demand a lot of your forgiveness. God, we are grateful for it. Lord, I know that I have been afraid to give up some of the things that I think are actually bringing me joy when all they're doing is keeping me from you. So I pray that you would give me the strength to walk away from those things and the strength of faith and hope to trust that you're going to bring me to these paths of life, to the best places possible. God, would you give us the strength this morning to put down our mud pies and trust that where you're taking us is exponentially better than anything we could ever cook up for ourselves. I pray that we would grow in our view of Jesus and be so enamored with him that we would just sprint towards him with all of our might. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If you're here this morning and I haven't yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. So please say hello in the lobby after the service. If you're watching online, thanks for doing that. Particularly if you're on vacation, thanks for making us a part of your Sunday, even while you're away. This is the last sermon in our series, One Hit Wonders, where we have been pausing and looking at some verses and passages that we don't often get to stop at in a normal series or in our normal Bible study. Some of the lesser known verses and passages that we find in Scripture, a lot of them have been in the Minor Prophets, which is a whole section of the Old Testament that we don't often explore. But this morning is admittedly more of a greatest hit than a one-hit wonder. It's actually apropos with the last question of our little game, trivia game that we were playing there in the bumper video. Steve, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but I'm actually going to pull this one out of Psalms, which is that's the Beatles of the Bible. All the greatest hits there are in Psalms. And so the one that I'm pulling out this morning is one that we have framed and in our house. It's a very frameable verse. I would encourage you to do that. If you've never heard Psalm 1611 before, I think it's going to be one that you'll identify with and appreciate, and hopefully we can leave today thinking about in a different way, especially if you are aware of this verse. But Psalm 1611 simply says this. This is where we're going to focus this morning. David writes, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's a heck of a verse, isn't it? I mean, that's a really encouraging, life-giving verse. That's a great promise that David makes to us through the voice of God in Psalms. And as we walk through it, that first sentence, you make known to me the paths of life. Often in Psalms, David adopts kind of the motif of a shepherd, us as the sheep and God as our good shepherd. Psalm 23 is a very familiar Psalm where it says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So maintaining that illustration, you make known to me the paths of life is this picture of a shepherd leading his sheep to the good places, leading his sheep to where they can eat, to where they can drink, to where they can rest, to where they'll be protected. And so he's saying, and in the onset, you lead me to the life-giving paths, to fullness of life. You lead me, God, to the best possible places. And then he says, in your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Not everyone here is a scientist. You may not be aware of this fact, but you can't get fuller than full, man. When you're full, that's it. This idea in sports that we give 110%, that's bupkis. You can't do it. It's 100%. That's it. When you're full, you're full. So what he's saying is in God's presence, you will experience maximum joy. It is impossible to find any other place in the known universe, any other scenario, any other situation. It is impossible to pursue any other relationship in which you will find more joy than in your relationship with God, than in the presence of the Father, there is fullness of joy. And then he says, and at the right hand of the Father are pleasures forevermore. And we learn in Romans and Hebrews that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us as our high priest. So what that is saying is, in Christ, if we obey John 15, when Jesus says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit, if we abide in Christ, if we pursue him, if we love him, if we chase him, if we know him, if we are intimate with him, then we will experience pleasures forevermore. That's some astounding promises, right? He's going to lead us to the best places possible in God's presence as we pursue him, as Steve and Lisa invited us into worship, as we go into worship, as we take ourselves like in Isaiah 6 into the throne room of God in prayer, in his presence, we will experience the fullness of joy. And then as we pursue Jesus and we go to his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? Isn't that what we're all chasing anyways? Just better days and a happier existence? If we were to say for ourselves, what do you want in 20, 30 years? We'd say, I just want to be happy. If you have kids and you say, what do you want for your kids? One of the things I promise would be in your top five answers is, top three answers is, I just want them to be happy. This verse promises that. So I actually think that if we really believe that, if we really believe Psalm 1611, that our own selfishness would drive us to God. If we really believe this verse, that he's going to lead us to try to be generous or unselfish. We can do the most selfish thing possible, and that selfishness should, in theory, based on these promises, drive us straight to the throne of God. We should respond to this verse. Like I responded to the news in my mid-twenties that places like Fogo de Chão existed. Now, I don't know if you know what Fogo de Chão is, because we had one in Atlanta. That's where I'm from. We don't have one in Raleigh. It's a Churras, Korea. It's a Brazilian steakhouse. There's one over in Briar Creek, I think. I still need to get over there. But in a Brazilian steakhouse, let me just, let me just tell you what they do there. Okay. This is unbelievable. Some of y'all know. If you know me, you know, I love steak. I really do. I had steak the other night for the first time since John was born because I like to make it myself and it's a whole process and I was in heaven watching the recorded Open Championship. Anyways, I love steak. And they told me, and I was like 25, 26, you know there's this place called Fogo de Chão. And when you go there, there's a card next to your plate. And one side is red and one side is green. And when you put it on the green side, they just bring you steak until you flip it back to red. And I'm like, what now? And so I go to this place, right? And there's these men and they walk around with these skewers of perfectly cooked steak. And they bring it up to you. Your card is green. They go, would you like some, sir? Yes, I would. I'm glad that you came. And they start to slice the filet or the top sirloin or the skirt steak or the bottom sirloin or the lamb or whatever it is. Jen, we need to go to this place for lunch today. They just start shaving it until you tell them to stop. If you want a steak mountain on your plate, you can have a steak mountain. It's amazing. And I'm just telling you, if you leave there without the meat sweats, you're not a good American. It's a remarkable place. And so when they told me that this place existed, with all of my heart, all I thought is, I want to go to there. I want to go. I'll save my money. I will lie to people. I will disappear for three days so I can go to this place and experience phogo to chow. That's where I want to go. That's how we should respond to this verse. What? There's a place I can go and there is fullness of joy. There are pleasures forevermore. There's someone I can follow who will lead me to only the best places. That's a thing? I want to go to there. I'll disappear for three days. I'll sever relationships. I'll give up whatever I do. I'll save up whatever I gotta do. I want to go to there. That's how we should respond to this verse. If we believe that the Bible is the word of God and that what's in here is eternally true and good and right and worth staking our life on, if we really believe that this is God's word and that what he's telling us, what David is saying is true, then why don't we treat the kingdom of God like Jesus tells us to when he said the kingdom of God is like someone who finds a pearl in a field and they sell everything they have so they can buy that field and have that pearl. We would forsake everything for the kingdom of God and for the presence of God and to walk and abide with Jesus if we really believe this. But see, for me, I'm just talking about me. I'm not talking about you guys. For me, my actions don't bear out that I really believe this. If I really, truly believe that in the presence of God, I would find the fullness of joy, then I would betray everything that's not associated with that presence and chase after it as hard as I could. But I don't. And see, I'm preaching this because I've been a Christian about as far back as my memory goes. I've been around Christians for 40 years. I've talked to a lot of them. I have yet to meet a single Christian that when I ask them, how's your relationship with God going? How you doing? How's your spiritual health? I've never heard a single one of them say, I'm nailing it. I mean, I'm really good at this. I mean, about five, 10 years ago, I got to this place where I was just really walking with the Lord and now I'm just waiting on him to come down here and carry me up to heaven in a chariot without having to experience death. How can I help you? I've never met that person. Everyone I talk to has this profound sense of, I ought to be doing better by now. I know better than to do the things that I do. I thought I'd be closer with Jesus by now. I thought I'd be further along. I thought I'd be more spiritually mature and spiritually healthy. That's my experience of faith. There's this constant voice going, why aren't you better at this? And I think it's because we don't really believe that verse. We say we do. Do you believe the Bible? Yes. Every word? Yes. All of them. Okay, well, we don't seem to believe this one. So the interesting question becomes, why is that? Why do we have such a hard time trusting this verse in Psalms that says that in the presence of God, in the presence of Jesus, there are pleasures forevermore, which we all would agree we want. Then why doesn't our life look like we believe it? I think one of the big reasons is that we have an impoverished view of Jesus. We just have this impoverished view of who Jesus is. I've told you guys this before. I do premarital counseling with couples that are getting married. And one of the things I always ask them, so I won't belabor this because I really have told you guys this before, but the point that I'm making is important. I'll ask them on a scale of one to 10, place yourself on that scale of spiritual health. 10 is just zealot on fire for God, Elijah in the Old Testament, John the Baptist, just going and doing everything for Jesus, just totally on fire zealot. And then one is just very, very far from God. And I'll ask them, where are you in your spiritual health? And without fail, people will answer four to six, okay? Because no one wants to say, well, I'm currently doing great. And no one's going to admit to being a two. So everybody says four to six, okay? And then I'll say, and this is the important part, all right, that's great. In five years, where would you like to be? And it's really a vehicle, the numbers don't matter, it's a vehicle to talk about what steps can we take to grow in our spiritual health. That's what it's there for, to help us get into that discussion. But what's interesting to me is when I ask people, and where do you want to be in five years without fail? Eight. I've had one person in 11 years of premarital counseling say 10. One person. Everybody else, eight. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be crazy zealot. I don't want to be that person. Just make me an eight. That'd be great. And what they probably really mean is seven, but they're telling the pastor, so let's bump it up. And I can't help but think that that's probably due at least in part to the fact that they probably don't think that walking with Jesus is that big of a deal. They probably aren't that enraptured with Jesus. I probably just don't think he's as big of a deal as he is. Whatever picture we have in our head of what it would be like to be a 10 isn't that attractive. It's just not that great. We're not that compelled by it, so we don't pursue it. Why don't we say 10? Because we don't want to be. Because whatever's at 10 is not really something that we would enjoy. Because I think we have this small view of who Jesus is. Because for some reason or another, we've never just fallen in love with scriptures and made it a habit to get up and read it every day and see Jesus on these pages and read the gospels and walk through his life and see how he forgave and see how he was generous and see how he loved and see how he sacrificed and fallen in love with him. We haven't allowed the sin and the weight that so easily entangles in Hebrews. We haven't allowed that to fall to the wayside to a degree that we can begin to experience our savior. We haven't engaged in worship in such a way that we turn our heart to God and let him fill it up with his joy. We haven't stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus, God, condescended, came down from heaven, became one of us, walked with us in our filth, was patient and gracious with us, marched to the cross, died there on the cross for us, even though he knew that we would crud on it with our own life and with our own actions and with our own hypocrisy and sits at the right hand of the Father despite all of that and intercedes for us. We don't sit in the weight of that reality and allow the gratitude and the grandeur of his forgiveness and grace to wash over us. And it allows us to create this impoverished view of Jesus that isn't really all that compelling. And I think one of the reasons we keep our view of Jesus small is the second reason why we struggle sometimes, I think, to believe Psalm 1611, which is that we like making mud pies. We like making mud pies. C.S. Lewis was an author in England prior to and through World War II, and one of the greatest authors of all time. And he described sin in this way. This is a very gross, loose paraphrase. But he described sin like this. He said, it's as if we are children and our parents want to take us on the most amazing holiday. For us in America, it'd be a vacation. Our parents want to take us on the most amazing vacation, but we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies. We'll sit in the backyard playing with mud because we don't believe that anything could possibly be better than this, and our parents have the most amazing vacation on the planet planned for us, and we're totally disinterested in it. That's how he describes sin. That God has the fullness of joy. He has pleasures forevermore. He leads us to the paths of life. He has something better for us that he's trying to draw us to and we content ourselves with making mud pies in our backyard because we just don't believe there could be anything better. This is actually a trick of the enemy. This is a lie of Satan. You understand that, right? Think of it this way. One of Satan's best lies is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure. One of the enemy's greatest tactics is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure, on what we can have right now. Isn't this why most of us fail at diets? Not me, but you fail at diets. Because I want to be in good shape. I want to exercise and have the sweat show up here before it shows up here. I want that very much. But I also want a steak right now. I also want Cinnabon. I also want a Chick-fil-A, number one. And I want the sweet tea and I want it to be large. We also want those things. And so we sacrifice long-term things on the altar of the immediate. And this is a trick that Satan plays on us, where God offers us the fullness of joy in this process. God is thinking long-term. He's promising us things years down the road, and we sacrifice those things on what we want right now. Marriage is probably the easiest example of this, where God makes it very clear in Scripture, in Genesis, and then repeated again in Mark, that for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And what God has put together, let no man separate. It is God's will for your life. When you are born, it is his will and hope that you would meet one person, that you would marry them, that you would become one flesh, and that you would experience the fullness of joy that comes from being in this lifelong giving relationship. Now, I'm not trying to diminish people who have walked through divorce or are currently divorced or whatever and diminish you as being outside of God's will. I believe that divorce happens because we're broken people and that there is redemption after that. But if we want to talk about what God wants for us, he wants a husband and wife to be united in one flesh and he wants them to walk down the years and the decades following him and knowing him and raising children together and walking through things together and experiencing the depth of love that can only come through that level of commitment sustained through the decades. That's what he wants for us. There's joy and happiness there. Just last night, I'm going to embarrass Jen here, I'm sorry, but just last night, Jen and I, we've got an 11-week-old and we've got a five-and-a-half-year-old, and sometimes, just sometimes, only me, this is not true of Jen, but sometimes I don't like either of them. I just want to sit. Yesterday may or may not have been one of those times. But we had a plan. That last night, we had a plan. We're going to get the kids to bed, and we're going to go get Chinese, and we're going to bring it back. There's this knee Asian kitchen that's really, really good. And we went, and we got the stuff. And I bring it back, and we set it out on the console table and we sit down on the floor and we eat Chinese and we watch Hometown with Ben and Aaron who are charming. If you're not watching Hometown, I mean, you're missing out. They're great folks. And we watched that and we laughed together and we ate together and we talked about how good the food was and then afterwards we laughed at Instagram videos and then both of us couldn't stop commenting on how great it was to have that night and how much we loved each other. Give me that. Give me that love after 15 years, all day long over our honeymoon in St. Lucia. When we were 25 years old, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon and we thought it was great and it was the best and we're so in love and it was wonderful. Man, that's nothing compared to what we experienced last night. Give me Chinese on the floor hiding from our children and our dog over a week in St. Lucia because the love 15 years in and what we've walked through and what we experienced and what we know about each other and the ways that our love has changed over the years is so much richer than it was 15 years ago. Now, I can't wait to experience what some of you guys have experienced being 10 and 20 years beyond where we are and the fullness of love that comes there. That's what God wants for us. He wants us to experience that fullness, but there's a process and it takes time. And Satan, Satan would will to steal that joy from us by tempting us to just fade in our marriage and not put in the work that we need by tempting us to just be selfish. And today I know I should help with the kids. I know I should do these things. I know I should love. I know we should go to counseling. I know that we need to work on this marriage, but today it's hard and I don't want to. So we sacrifice future joy on the altar of the immediate. Or even worse, he begins to tempt us to look outside our marriage and that would be fun and that would be entertaining for a season and that would be a type of joy and pleasure that we don't get to experience. And so we do and we sacrifice what could be long-term joy on the altar of immediate pleasure. It's true in our quiet times. I've said dozens of times from this stage, there's no more important habit in our life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And we know this. And we know that through doing that, we will find Jesus, we will be drawn to him, we will be caught up in him, that life will be better, that our attitude will be better, that our spiritual health will be better. We know it's good for us. Most of the whole room would agree with me that that would be an excellent practice in our lives, and yet for many of us, we don't have it. Why? Because it's easier to hit the snooze button. It's easier to flick through Twitter. It's easier to turn on SportsCenter or to get to work early or to just sit in the quiet or to read a book. There's so many different things that we could do besides dive into God's Word. And so once again, we sacrifice the joy that waits for us in the presence of God on the altar of the immediate, doing what we want. This is one of the greatest tricks of Satan, just to trick Christians into wasting their days and pursuing temporary pleasures instead of long-term joy. I came across a quote this week, and I that it was timely from some pastor that I didn't recognize and he just simply said, all of Satan's promises are for the right now. Promises without process are lies. God promises us the future. Satan promises us today. And we so very easily choose today. But really, I think in a room full, for the most part, of believers, the reason, probably the predominant reason, we struggle to believe Psalm 1611, is if we're being honest, I think we're afraid to be on fire. I think we're afraid to be a 10. I think we're afraid to be zealots. We're afraid to be on fire for Jesus. We don't want to be that person. We don't want to have to give up everything and move to Malawi and teach and write the Bible in another language. We don't want to have to do that. We don't want to have to sell all the things that we've acquired. We don't want to have to give up the pleasures that we enjoy. I know for me, the thing that makes me scared to be a zealot, and listen, I'm speaking to me more than you right now. The thing that makes me scared is I just don't want to be weird. I want people to like me. I like having friends. So I think we're scared to be on fire. And after being around church people my whole life, I'm convinced that this is true. And when I say this, just know I'm saying this to me, okay? I'm saying this to me. I am convicted by this. I am stepping on my own toes. If this doesn't apply to you, great. If it does, welcome into my conviction. But I'm saying it to me. I'm convinced that we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground that appears spiritually healthy while still leaving us the Lord of our own lives. I'm convinced that a vast majority of Christians are afraid to be on fire, and so what we do is we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground of spirituality that makes us appear spiritually healthy while still giving us space to hang on to some of the things that bring us joy and pleasure and therefore still being the lords of our own lives. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to Bible study. I'm going to say the things. I'm going to have the right friends. I'm going to reorient my life. I'm going to look different now than I did years ago. And now I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing okay. I'm not a 10, but I'm like a seven. And this is a pretty comfortable place for me. Maybe I'm the only one that does that. But we carve out this moderate middle ground. I'm not John the Baptist. Okay. I'm not one of the disciples, but I'm not one of the bad ones either. I'm good. Could I be doing better? Sure. Everybody could be doing better. Could I be doing worse? A lot worse. You should have known me five years ago. And so we carve out this middle ground. Well, we're not on fire. We're not totally cold and turned off to the Lord. We're just like a seven. And we're good with it. When we do that, the Bible has something to say about it. About specifically that. In Revelation chapter three, Jesus has written letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three. And in chapter three, he says, you're pretty good. You do a lot of good things to this particular church. But then in 3.16, he says this, but you are lukewarm. And because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. That word spit there is better translated as vomit or spew. That's what Jesus thinks of the middle ground that we carve out for ourselves. Well, we're comfortable and happy and sure, I could give more, I could do more, I could grow more, I could sacrifice more, but that's scary, I don't want to do it. I'm doing pretty good here as a seven. God, if you'll just kind of leave me alone and worry about some of those threes, I'll be happy to invite them to my house. I'll be good. And Jesus says, couldn't be less interested in that. To me, Nate, I couldn't be less interested in your moderate middle ground of spirituality here. He calls us to be on fire. He calls us to be zealots. And if you're in this conviction with me, of this middle ground that we carve out for ourselves, I would invite you into this question. What is it that you're afraid of? If you light your hair on fire for Jesus and go burn the world down, what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that worries you about getting up every day and reading God's word? What is it that worries you about inviting Jesus into every moment of your life? What is it that worries you about being a zealot? Is it that you'll have to give up something that brings you pleasure? God has more pleasure waiting for you if you'll just trust him, if you'll just drop your mud pies and go with him on vacation, what are we scared of? Is there some pleasure or friend group or thing that you like to do that you're worried, well, if I really sell out, then I can't engage in that anymore. So what? God's got something better. Well, I'm worried that, this is me, I'm worried that I'm going to be weird. People won't like me, that I won't be relatable. Who cares? Jesus didn't call me to be relatable. He called me to be passionate about him. And I bet the joy that I'll find there and the relationships that are there and the magnanimity of the love that's found there will do just fine with the weirdness. What are we afraid of that God's not going to give us back? What kind of pleasures are we embracing in our middle ground that we don't want to let go because I don't want to go too far? Why? Are you afraid he's going to ask you to sell everything and move to Ghana? He's probably not. If all American Christians moved to Ghana at once, that would be inconvenient. He's probably not going to do that. But even if he did, you'll find pleasures forevermore and fullness of joy in Ghana, so go to Ghana, man. What are we scared of? I think we're scared of being zealots. And so maybe what we need to do is understand what that means. I don't think that being a zealot is selling everything and becoming a weirdo and moving out into the wilderness like John the Baptist and wearing camel skins and eating locusts. I think that being a zealot means inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. Into every conversation. Inviting him in. How would you have me handle this? How can I reflect you here? Into every quiet, peaceful moment. Into every still morning. Into every late night. Into every dinner conversation. Into every relationship, into every work interaction, inviting him into every email, into every prayer. I think being a zealot looks like simply inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. What harm can come if we do that? What possible thing could we give up that's worth anything at all if we simply start by inviting Jesus into every moment of our life? If we do that, you know what we'll find? That our view of him begins to enlargen. That the lies of Satan become less convincing. That the fear of being on fire becomes a lot less fearful. So let's do that, Grace. Let's collectively light our hair on fire and light the world on fire for Jesus. Let's collectively be zealots. Let's collectively trust that this verse is true. And let's collectively ask ourselves the tough question, what am I hanging on to that's preventing me from pursuing God? That's preventing me from pursuing Jesus, from abiding in his presence and creating a larger view of him in my life. And then let's ask ourselves if it's worth it. I know that for me this week, as I've sat in this verse, I've developed a more deep conviction than ever that I want to trust this verse. I want to believe it. I want to live it out. I want to go be a zealot. And I want the church to come with me. Let's pray. Father, we love you. I'll be the first to admit, God, sometimes I just, all the time, I love you the best way I know how. It's an imperfect, insufficient, hypocritical, broken love. But God, we love you. We're grateful for Jesus. We really are. We know that sometimes it doesn't seem like that. We know that we demand a lot of your forgiveness. God, we are grateful for it. Lord, I know that I have been afraid to give up some of the things that I think are actually bringing me joy when all they're doing is keeping me from you. So I pray that you would give me the strength to walk away from those things and the strength of faith and hope to trust that you're going to bring me to these paths of life, to the best places possible. God, would you give us the strength this morning to put down our mud pies and trust that where you're taking us is exponentially better than anything we could ever cook up for ourselves. I pray that we would grow in our view of Jesus and be so enamored with him that we would just sprint towards him with all of our might. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If you're here this morning and I haven't yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. So please say hello in the lobby after the service. If you're watching online, thanks for doing that. Particularly if you're on vacation, thanks for making us a part of your Sunday, even while you're away. This is the last sermon in our series, One Hit Wonders, where we have been pausing and looking at some verses and passages that we don't often get to stop at in a normal series or in our normal Bible study. Some of the lesser known verses and passages that we find in Scripture, a lot of them have been in the Minor Prophets, which is a whole section of the Old Testament that we don't often explore. But this morning is admittedly more of a greatest hit than a one-hit wonder. It's actually apropos with the last question of our little game, trivia game that we were playing there in the bumper video. Steve, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but I'm actually going to pull this one out of Psalms, which is that's the Beatles of the Bible. All the greatest hits there are in Psalms. And so the one that I'm pulling out this morning is one that we have framed and in our house. It's a very frameable verse. I would encourage you to do that. If you've never heard Psalm 1611 before, I think it's going to be one that you'll identify with and appreciate, and hopefully we can leave today thinking about in a different way, especially if you are aware of this verse. But Psalm 1611 simply says this. This is where we're going to focus this morning. David writes, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's a heck of a verse, isn't it? I mean, that's a really encouraging, life-giving verse. That's a great promise that David makes to us through the voice of God in Psalms. And as we walk through it, that first sentence, you make known to me the paths of life. Often in Psalms, David adopts kind of the motif of a shepherd, us as the sheep and God as our good shepherd. Psalm 23 is a very familiar Psalm where it says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So maintaining that illustration, you make known to me the paths of life is this picture of a shepherd leading his sheep to the good places, leading his sheep to where they can eat, to where they can drink, to where they can rest, to where they'll be protected. And so he's saying, and in the onset, you lead me to the life-giving paths, to fullness of life. You lead me, God, to the best possible places. And then he says, in your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Not everyone here is a scientist. You may not be aware of this fact, but you can't get fuller than full, man. When you're full, that's it. This idea in sports that we give 110%, that's bupkis. You can't do it. It's 100%. That's it. When you're full, you're full. So what he's saying is in God's presence, you will experience maximum joy. It is impossible to find any other place in the known universe, any other scenario, any other situation. It is impossible to pursue any other relationship in which you will find more joy than in your relationship with God, than in the presence of the Father, there is fullness of joy. And then he says, and at the right hand of the Father are pleasures forevermore. And we learn in Romans and Hebrews that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us as our high priest. So what that is saying is, in Christ, if we obey John 15, when Jesus says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit, if we abide in Christ, if we pursue him, if we love him, if we chase him, if we know him, if we are intimate with him, then we will experience pleasures forevermore. That's some astounding promises, right? He's going to lead us to the best places possible in God's presence as we pursue him, as Steve and Lisa invited us into worship, as we go into worship, as we take ourselves like in Isaiah 6 into the throne room of God in prayer, in his presence, we will experience the fullness of joy. And then as we pursue Jesus and we go to his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? Isn't that what we're all chasing anyways? Just better days and a happier existence? If we were to say for ourselves, what do you want in 20, 30 years? We'd say, I just want to be happy. If you have kids and you say, what do you want for your kids? One of the things I promise would be in your top five answers is, top three answers is, I just want them to be happy. This verse promises that. So I actually think that if we really believe that, if we really believe Psalm 1611, that our own selfishness would drive us to God. If we really believe this verse, that he's going to lead us to try to be generous or unselfish. We can do the most selfish thing possible, and that selfishness should, in theory, based on these promises, drive us straight to the throne of God. We should respond to this verse. Like I responded to the news in my mid-twenties that places like Fogo de Chão existed. Now, I don't know if you know what Fogo de Chão is, because we had one in Atlanta. That's where I'm from. We don't have one in Raleigh. It's a Churras, Korea. It's a Brazilian steakhouse. There's one over in Briar Creek, I think. I still need to get over there. But in a Brazilian steakhouse, let me just, let me just tell you what they do there. Okay. This is unbelievable. Some of y'all know. If you know me, you know, I love steak. I really do. I had steak the other night for the first time since John was born because I like to make it myself and it's a whole process and I was in heaven watching the recorded Open Championship. Anyways, I love steak. And they told me, and I was like 25, 26, you know there's this place called Fogo de Chão. And when you go there, there's a card next to your plate. And one side is red and one side is green. And when you put it on the green side, they just bring you steak until you flip it back to red. And I'm like, what now? And so I go to this place, right? And there's these men and they walk around with these skewers of perfectly cooked steak. And they bring it up to you. Your card is green. They go, would you like some, sir? Yes, I would. I'm glad that you came. And they start to slice the filet or the top sirloin or the skirt steak or the bottom sirloin or the lamb or whatever it is. Jen, we need to go to this place for lunch today. They just start shaving it until you tell them to stop. If you want a steak mountain on your plate, you can have a steak mountain. It's amazing. And I'm just telling you, if you leave there without the meat sweats, you're not a good American. It's a remarkable place. And so when they told me that this place existed, with all of my heart, all I thought is, I want to go to there. I want to go. I'll save my money. I will lie to people. I will disappear for three days so I can go to this place and experience phogo to chow. That's where I want to go. That's how we should respond to this verse. What? There's a place I can go and there is fullness of joy. There are pleasures forevermore. There's someone I can follow who will lead me to only the best places. That's a thing? I want to go to there. I'll disappear for three days. I'll sever relationships. I'll give up whatever I do. I'll save up whatever I gotta do. I want to go to there. That's how we should respond to this verse. If we believe that the Bible is the word of God and that what's in here is eternally true and good and right and worth staking our life on, if we really believe that this is God's word and that what he's telling us, what David is saying is true, then why don't we treat the kingdom of God like Jesus tells us to when he said the kingdom of God is like someone who finds a pearl in a field and they sell everything they have so they can buy that field and have that pearl. We would forsake everything for the kingdom of God and for the presence of God and to walk and abide with Jesus if we really believe this. But see, for me, I'm just talking about me. I'm not talking about you guys. For me, my actions don't bear out that I really believe this. If I really, truly believe that in the presence of God, I would find the fullness of joy, then I would betray everything that's not associated with that presence and chase after it as hard as I could. But I don't. And see, I'm preaching this because I've been a Christian about as far back as my memory goes. I've been around Christians for 40 years. I've talked to a lot of them. I have yet to meet a single Christian that when I ask them, how's your relationship with God going? How you doing? How's your spiritual health? I've never heard a single one of them say, I'm nailing it. I mean, I'm really good at this. I mean, about five, 10 years ago, I got to this place where I was just really walking with the Lord and now I'm just waiting on him to come down here and carry me up to heaven in a chariot without having to experience death. How can I help you? I've never met that person. Everyone I talk to has this profound sense of, I ought to be doing better by now. I know better than to do the things that I do. I thought I'd be closer with Jesus by now. I thought I'd be further along. I thought I'd be more spiritually mature and spiritually healthy. That's my experience of faith. There's this constant voice going, why aren't you better at this? And I think it's because we don't really believe that verse. We say we do. Do you believe the Bible? Yes. Every word? Yes. All of them. Okay, well, we don't seem to believe this one. So the interesting question becomes, why is that? Why do we have such a hard time trusting this verse in Psalms that says that in the presence of God, in the presence of Jesus, there are pleasures forevermore, which we all would agree we want. Then why doesn't our life look like we believe it? I think one of the big reasons is that we have an impoverished view of Jesus. We just have this impoverished view of who Jesus is. I've told you guys this before. I do premarital counseling with couples that are getting married. And one of the things I always ask them, so I won't belabor this because I really have told you guys this before, but the point that I'm making is important. I'll ask them on a scale of one to 10, place yourself on that scale of spiritual health. 10 is just zealot on fire for God, Elijah in the Old Testament, John the Baptist, just going and doing everything for Jesus, just totally on fire zealot. And then one is just very, very far from God. And I'll ask them, where are you in your spiritual health? And without fail, people will answer four to six, okay? Because no one wants to say, well, I'm currently doing great. And no one's going to admit to being a two. So everybody says four to six, okay? And then I'll say, and this is the important part, all right, that's great. In five years, where would you like to be? And it's really a vehicle, the numbers don't matter, it's a vehicle to talk about what steps can we take to grow in our spiritual health. That's what it's there for, to help us get into that discussion. But what's interesting to me is when I ask people, and where do you want to be in five years without fail? Eight. I've had one person in 11 years of premarital counseling say 10. One person. Everybody else, eight. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be crazy zealot. I don't want to be that person. Just make me an eight. That'd be great. And what they probably really mean is seven, but they're telling the pastor, so let's bump it up. And I can't help but think that that's probably due at least in part to the fact that they probably don't think that walking with Jesus is that big of a deal. They probably aren't that enraptured with Jesus. I probably just don't think he's as big of a deal as he is. Whatever picture we have in our head of what it would be like to be a 10 isn't that attractive. It's just not that great. We're not that compelled by it, so we don't pursue it. Why don't we say 10? Because we don't want to be. Because whatever's at 10 is not really something that we would enjoy. Because I think we have this small view of who Jesus is. Because for some reason or another, we've never just fallen in love with scriptures and made it a habit to get up and read it every day and see Jesus on these pages and read the gospels and walk through his life and see how he forgave and see how he was generous and see how he loved and see how he sacrificed and fallen in love with him. We haven't allowed the sin and the weight that so easily entangles in Hebrews. We haven't allowed that to fall to the wayside to a degree that we can begin to experience our savior. We haven't engaged in worship in such a way that we turn our heart to God and let him fill it up with his joy. We haven't stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus, God, condescended, came down from heaven, became one of us, walked with us in our filth, was patient and gracious with us, marched to the cross, died there on the cross for us, even though he knew that we would crud on it with our own life and with our own actions and with our own hypocrisy and sits at the right hand of the Father despite all of that and intercedes for us. We don't sit in the weight of that reality and allow the gratitude and the grandeur of his forgiveness and grace to wash over us. And it allows us to create this impoverished view of Jesus that isn't really all that compelling. And I think one of the reasons we keep our view of Jesus small is the second reason why we struggle sometimes, I think, to believe Psalm 1611, which is that we like making mud pies. We like making mud pies. C.S. Lewis was an author in England prior to and through World War II, and one of the greatest authors of all time. And he described sin in this way. This is a very gross, loose paraphrase. But he described sin like this. He said, it's as if we are children and our parents want to take us on the most amazing holiday. For us in America, it'd be a vacation. Our parents want to take us on the most amazing vacation, but we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies. We'll sit in the backyard playing with mud because we don't believe that anything could possibly be better than this, and our parents have the most amazing vacation on the planet planned for us, and we're totally disinterested in it. That's how he describes sin. That God has the fullness of joy. He has pleasures forevermore. He leads us to the paths of life. He has something better for us that he's trying to draw us to and we content ourselves with making mud pies in our backyard because we just don't believe there could be anything better. This is actually a trick of the enemy. This is a lie of Satan. You understand that, right? Think of it this way. One of Satan's best lies is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure. One of the enemy's greatest tactics is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure, on what we can have right now. Isn't this why most of us fail at diets? Not me, but you fail at diets. Because I want to be in good shape. I want to exercise and have the sweat show up here before it shows up here. I want that very much. But I also want a steak right now. I also want Cinnabon. I also want a Chick-fil-A, number one. And I want the sweet tea and I want it to be large. We also want those things. And so we sacrifice long-term things on the altar of the immediate. And this is a trick that Satan plays on us, where God offers us the fullness of joy in this process. God is thinking long-term. He's promising us things years down the road, and we sacrifice those things on what we want right now. Marriage is probably the easiest example of this, where God makes it very clear in Scripture, in Genesis, and then repeated again in Mark, that for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And what God has put together, let no man separate. It is God's will for your life. When you are born, it is his will and hope that you would meet one person, that you would marry them, that you would become one flesh, and that you would experience the fullness of joy that comes from being in this lifelong giving relationship. Now, I'm not trying to diminish people who have walked through divorce or are currently divorced or whatever and diminish you as being outside of God's will. I believe that divorce happens because we're broken people and that there is redemption after that. But if we want to talk about what God wants for us, he wants a husband and wife to be united in one flesh and he wants them to walk down the years and the decades following him and knowing him and raising children together and walking through things together and experiencing the depth of love that can only come through that level of commitment sustained through the decades. That's what he wants for us. There's joy and happiness there. Just last night, I'm going to embarrass Jen here, I'm sorry, but just last night, Jen and I, we've got an 11-week-old and we've got a five-and-a-half-year-old, and sometimes, just sometimes, only me, this is not true of Jen, but sometimes I don't like either of them. I just want to sit. Yesterday may or may not have been one of those times. But we had a plan. That last night, we had a plan. We're going to get the kids to bed, and we're going to go get Chinese, and we're going to bring it back. There's this knee Asian kitchen that's really, really good. And we went, and we got the stuff. And I bring it back, and we set it out on the console table and we sit down on the floor and we eat Chinese and we watch Hometown with Ben and Aaron who are charming. If you're not watching Hometown, I mean, you're missing out. They're great folks. And we watched that and we laughed together and we ate together and we talked about how good the food was and then afterwards we laughed at Instagram videos and then both of us couldn't stop commenting on how great it was to have that night and how much we loved each other. Give me that. Give me that love after 15 years, all day long over our honeymoon in St. Lucia. When we were 25 years old, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon and we thought it was great and it was the best and we're so in love and it was wonderful. Man, that's nothing compared to what we experienced last night. Give me Chinese on the floor hiding from our children and our dog over a week in St. Lucia because the love 15 years in and what we've walked through and what we experienced and what we know about each other and the ways that our love has changed over the years is so much richer than it was 15 years ago. Now, I can't wait to experience what some of you guys have experienced being 10 and 20 years beyond where we are and the fullness of love that comes there. That's what God wants for us. He wants us to experience that fullness, but there's a process and it takes time. And Satan, Satan would will to steal that joy from us by tempting us to just fade in our marriage and not put in the work that we need by tempting us to just be selfish. And today I know I should help with the kids. I know I should do these things. I know I should love. I know we should go to counseling. I know that we need to work on this marriage, but today it's hard and I don't want to. So we sacrifice future joy on the altar of the immediate. Or even worse, he begins to tempt us to look outside our marriage and that would be fun and that would be entertaining for a season and that would be a type of joy and pleasure that we don't get to experience. And so we do and we sacrifice what could be long-term joy on the altar of immediate pleasure. It's true in our quiet times. I've said dozens of times from this stage, there's no more important habit in our life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And we know this. And we know that through doing that, we will find Jesus, we will be drawn to him, we will be caught up in him, that life will be better, that our attitude will be better, that our spiritual health will be better. We know it's good for us. Most of the whole room would agree with me that that would be an excellent practice in our lives, and yet for many of us, we don't have it. Why? Because it's easier to hit the snooze button. It's easier to flick through Twitter. It's easier to turn on SportsCenter or to get to work early or to just sit in the quiet or to read a book. There's so many different things that we could do besides dive into God's Word. And so once again, we sacrifice the joy that waits for us in the presence of God on the altar of the immediate, doing what we want. This is one of the greatest tricks of Satan, just to trick Christians into wasting their days and pursuing temporary pleasures instead of long-term joy. I came across a quote this week, and I that it was timely from some pastor that I didn't recognize and he just simply said, all of Satan's promises are for the right now. Promises without process are lies. God promises us the future. Satan promises us today. And we so very easily choose today. But really, I think in a room full, for the most part, of believers, the reason, probably the predominant reason, we struggle to believe Psalm 1611, is if we're being honest, I think we're afraid to be on fire. I think we're afraid to be a 10. I think we're afraid to be zealots. We're afraid to be on fire for Jesus. We don't want to be that person. We don't want to have to give up everything and move to Malawi and teach and write the Bible in another language. We don't want to have to do that. We don't want to have to sell all the things that we've acquired. We don't want to have to give up the pleasures that we enjoy. I know for me, the thing that makes me scared to be a zealot, and listen, I'm speaking to me more than you right now. The thing that makes me scared is I just don't want to be weird. I want people to like me. I like having friends. So I think we're scared to be on fire. And after being around church people my whole life, I'm convinced that this is true. And when I say this, just know I'm saying this to me, okay? I'm saying this to me. I am convicted by this. I am stepping on my own toes. If this doesn't apply to you, great. If it does, welcome into my conviction. But I'm saying it to me. I'm convinced that we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground that appears spiritually healthy while still leaving us the Lord of our own lives. I'm convinced that a vast majority of Christians are afraid to be on fire, and so what we do is we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground of spirituality that makes us appear spiritually healthy while still giving us space to hang on to some of the things that bring us joy and pleasure and therefore still being the lords of our own lives. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to Bible study. I'm going to say the things. I'm going to have the right friends. I'm going to reorient my life. I'm going to look different now than I did years ago. And now I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing okay. I'm not a 10, but I'm like a seven. And this is a pretty comfortable place for me. Maybe I'm the only one that does that. But we carve out this moderate middle ground. I'm not John the Baptist. Okay. I'm not one of the disciples, but I'm not one of the bad ones either. I'm good. Could I be doing better? Sure. Everybody could be doing better. Could I be doing worse? A lot worse. You should have known me five years ago. And so we carve out this middle ground. Well, we're not on fire. We're not totally cold and turned off to the Lord. We're just like a seven. And we're good with it. When we do that, the Bible has something to say about it. About specifically that. In Revelation chapter three, Jesus has written letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three. And in chapter three, he says, you're pretty good. You do a lot of good things to this particular church. But then in 3.16, he says this, but you are lukewarm. And because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. That word spit there is better translated as vomit or spew. That's what Jesus thinks of the middle ground that we carve out for ourselves. Well, we're comfortable and happy and sure, I could give more, I could do more, I could grow more, I could sacrifice more, but that's scary, I don't want to do it. I'm doing pretty good here as a seven. God, if you'll just kind of leave me alone and worry about some of those threes, I'll be happy to invite them to my house. I'll be good. And Jesus says, couldn't be less interested in that. To me, Nate, I couldn't be less interested in your moderate middle ground of spirituality here. He calls us to be on fire. He calls us to be zealots. And if you're in this conviction with me, of this middle ground that we carve out for ourselves, I would invite you into this question. What is it that you're afraid of? If you light your hair on fire for Jesus and go burn the world down, what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that worries you about getting up every day and reading God's word? What is it that worries you about inviting Jesus into every moment of your life? What is it that worries you about being a zealot? Is it that you'll have to give up something that brings you pleasure? God has more pleasure waiting for you if you'll just trust him, if you'll just drop your mud pies and go with him on vacation, what are we scared of? Is there some pleasure or friend group or thing that you like to do that you're worried, well, if I really sell out, then I can't engage in that anymore. So what? God's got something better. Well, I'm worried that, this is me, I'm worried that I'm going to be weird. People won't like me, that I won't be relatable. Who cares? Jesus didn't call me to be relatable. He called me to be passionate about him. And I bet the joy that I'll find there and the relationships that are there and the magnanimity of the love that's found there will do just fine with the weirdness. What are we afraid of that God's not going to give us back? What kind of pleasures are we embracing in our middle ground that we don't want to let go because I don't want to go too far? Why? Are you afraid he's going to ask you to sell everything and move to Ghana? He's probably not. If all American Christians moved to Ghana at once, that would be inconvenient. He's probably not going to do that. But even if he did, you'll find pleasures forevermore and fullness of joy in Ghana, so go to Ghana, man. What are we scared of? I think we're scared of being zealots. And so maybe what we need to do is understand what that means. I don't think that being a zealot is selling everything and becoming a weirdo and moving out into the wilderness like John the Baptist and wearing camel skins and eating locusts. I think that being a zealot means inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. Into every conversation. Inviting him in. How would you have me handle this? How can I reflect you here? Into every quiet, peaceful moment. Into every still morning. Into every late night. Into every dinner conversation. Into every relationship, into every work interaction, inviting him into every email, into every prayer. I think being a zealot looks like simply inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. What harm can come if we do that? What possible thing could we give up that's worth anything at all if we simply start by inviting Jesus into every moment of our life? If we do that, you know what we'll find? That our view of him begins to enlargen. That the lies of Satan become less convincing. That the fear of being on fire becomes a lot less fearful. So let's do that, Grace. Let's collectively light our hair on fire and light the world on fire for Jesus. Let's collectively be zealots. Let's collectively trust that this verse is true. And let's collectively ask ourselves the tough question, what am I hanging on to that's preventing me from pursuing God? That's preventing me from pursuing Jesus, from abiding in his presence and creating a larger view of him in my life. And then let's ask ourselves if it's worth it. I know that for me this week, as I've sat in this verse, I've developed a more deep conviction than ever that I want to trust this verse. I want to believe it. I want to live it out. I want to go be a zealot. And I want the church to come with me. Let's pray. Father, we love you. I'll be the first to admit, God, sometimes I just, all the time, I love you the best way I know how. It's an imperfect, insufficient, hypocritical, broken love. But God, we love you. We're grateful for Jesus. We really are. We know that sometimes it doesn't seem like that. We know that we demand a lot of your forgiveness. God, we are grateful for it. Lord, I know that I have been afraid to give up some of the things that I think are actually bringing me joy when all they're doing is keeping me from you. So I pray that you would give me the strength to walk away from those things and the strength of faith and hope to trust that you're going to bring me to these paths of life, to the best places possible. God, would you give us the strength this morning to put down our mud pies and trust that where you're taking us is exponentially better than anything we could ever cook up for ourselves. I pray that we would grow in our view of Jesus and be so enamored with him that we would just sprint towards him with all of our might. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this morning. Apparently, what it takes to get Grace excited about church in June is a pandemic that lasts 18 months. Look at this. This is fantastic. We are in the second part of our series called One Hit Wonders, where we're basically, I said last week, we're basically just using this as a vehicle to look at some of the verses in the Bible that are pretty famous, pretty significant verses, ones that we treasure, but maybe a typical series doesn't hit on them, or even a typical Bible study might not arrive at these verses. So it's a time to kind of grab some of the verses and some of the passages out of Scripture that we may not land on in sermons and in Bible studies, but focus on them here in the summer as we come together each week. And so this week, I actually want to talk to you, ironically, about the danger of doing that. I want to talk to you about the danger of One-Hit Wonders, of just seeing a verse that we like. I like the words in this verse. I like what it says. I like what God is telling me. So I'm just going to grab it out of the Bible and I'm going to use it to encourage myself. This is a thing that brings encouragement to me and we kind of cling on to it. If you grew up in church, okay, how many of you, I want to see a show of hands actually. I didn't plan to do this, but I'm just now empirically interested. How many of you have ever heard someone else claim to have or have ever had your own life verse? How many of you have ever heard someone claim to have a life verse? Yes, this is a big time, this is a church thing, okay? If you're like, what in the world is that? You're one of the fortunate ones. But if you know what that is, to have a life verse, this is the verse, this is me. When I see this verse, I feel seen and heard. This is my life verse, okay? This is kind of my theme for life. And so what we do is we'll pull out these individual verses and we'll allow them to mean something of great significance to us. But sometimes when we do that, it can be dangerous. As I talk about this this morning, we're going to look at probably the most famous one of these verses. It's probably the most famous verse in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 29, 11. We're going to look at that verse today, and we're going to talk about why is it dangerous to just pull a single verse out of context. But I would preface it this way. My wife, Jen, she told me that I needed to be kind and gentle as I did this, because she noted that oftentimes I take glee in bursting people's bubbles. She may have cited the fact that every Christmas, I'd like to point out to you that the wise men were nowhere near the manger on Christmas and therefore all your nativity scenes are wrong and dumb. But I'm not allowed to crush this verse with that sort of careless flair. And I actually learned the lesson about this the hard way. Several years ago at my previous church, I was asked to come and give the devotional for the Loganville High School Red Devils baseball team. And you have no reason to know this. If you do know this and you're from North Carolina, you're weird, okay? But the Loganville Red Devils were really, really good at baseball. They won several state tournaments. They had a really good program over there. And their head coach was a guy named Brian Mills. And he went to our church and he asked me to come and give the devotional to the boys as they, because in Loganville, things are different. You can go talk about Jesus in public schools and everyone's just like, cool. That's not how it goes in Wake County. But I went out there, I went out there and I gave them a devotion, right? And they had this kid on their team named Clint Frazier, who at the time was the number one baseball prospect in the country, right? A big old mop of red hair. I never had any interactions with Clint, and this was the only time I ever really did get to interact with him. And I'm going to give a devotional to the team. And at the time, you may remember this, those of you who have been involved in church culture, there was actually an athletic gear, like Under Armour or Nike, like athletic apparel company called Phil 413, Philippians 413. And they would put Philippians 413 on all their stuff. And that's the verse, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, right? And so they're giving it to athletes. You can run that mile through Christ who strengthens you. You're going to hit that jump shot. You're going to hit that home run. You're going to complete that pass, you know, or make that sweet set, volleyball players. You're going to do it through Christ who gives you strength, right? And so they're like claiming this. They're emblazing it on their chest and on their equipment and they're going and God is powering me and I'm going to do good here. But the verse really, it's written by Paul and it comes in this context where Paul has said, I have learned how to be joyful with plenty and I have learned how to be joyful with little in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying, no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in God. I've learned how to find that contentment in him. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And so really, if we wanted to apply it to a baseball team, I explained to them, it would be about being okay with winning or losing, being happy whether you win or whether you lose. And I said, it's not going to make you hit the ball harder. It's not going to make you throw it further. It's not the verse to claim for your playoff run. If you want a verse, and then I went to Proverbs, and it was a verse on hard work and how God honors hard work. So claim this verse and outwork the other teams. But don't claim that verse like it's going to make you a better athlete because it won't. The whole time I'm talking about this, the boys kind of just, they all just have this smirk on their face. They're all just kind of smiling at me, you know? And so when I'm done, I'm like, all right, look, what gives? What did I step in? What's going on? Clint Frazier walks up to me, and he pulls back his sleeve, and he freshly minted Philippians 4.13 tat on his forearm, just right there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I'm so sorry. Clint is now the starting right fielder for the New York Yankees. I'm not making it up. You can look it up. He's there. He's a great ball player and he's still got the tattoo. So apparently I was wrong. It did make him hit the ball further and throw better. I don't know. But that was where I learned to be gentle as you talk about verses that are near and dear to people. And Jeremiah 29 11 is one that is really special to folks and really does give us a sense of hope and a sense of peace. You may know it. If you don't, you can turn your Bible there. If you don't have a Bible with you, it's in the seat back in front of you. But Jeremiah 29, 11 says, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. It's a really great verse. I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. If you're in a place where you feel uncertain, I don't know what's coming next. I need this relationship to work out. I don't know how in the world, in this market, I'm ever going to be able to afford a house. I don't know where the next job is going to come from. I don't know if I can close this deal. I don't know if this thing is going to work out with my kid. I don't know if this relationship is going to pan out. I don't know, God. And then for someone to speak that peace into your life, that God has a plan for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. That's a real hopeful, life-giving verse. And a lot of people claim it for those reasons, and that's great. I actually get to go and do a wedding here in a few weeks for Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, by the way, not just a lady that I refer to in my sermons. I'm going to do a wedding for her cousin, and his bride is a girl named Haley. We were planning out the ceremony a couple of nights ago. And part of Haley's story is she had a brother named David growing up who struggled with addiction and depression. And David ended up taking his own life. And to honor him in the ceremony, she still has a voicemail from him where he reads her that verse. And they want it played in the ceremony. And that's a beautiful thing. Because God does have a plan for David. He does have a plan for Haley. He does have a plan for us. But I also think that it's important to understand what that plan is. And to understand what that verse really means. Because I think there's actually greater comfort waiting on us there than we've given that verse credit for. So I want to talk to you this morning about two dangers of one-hit wonders. Two dangers of grabbing a verse, plucking it out of the Bible, not reading anything around it and going, boom, this is what this means for me and my life. There's two big ways that we get in big trouble when we do that. So the first way and the first danger of just grabbing a verse out of context, when you hear someone grab a verse out of context, when you hear someone quote a verse, when you see something on a meme, when you see something on a t-shirt or whatever it is, we need to read it and look around it. And when we don't do that, we don't fully understand the verse, two really bad things can happen. The first one is we mislead ourselves and others. We just grab a verse out of the Bible and we apply it. It sounds nice. We mislead ourselves and others. And I say ourselves and others because each of us has a circle of influence. Sometimes we repeat what we hear to other people. I said something last week to a friend of mine and he goes, is that true? And I said, you know what? Honestly, I don't know. I heard it years ago and I've been parroting it ever since. I need to do some research on that. I have no idea. I think we do this sometimes. So when we just grab a verse out of context, we run the risk of misleading ourselves and others. I know of a church a few years ago that they were doing a building campaign. They were launching another campus. They were kind of relaunching their main campus. And they kind of grabbed a verse as the theme verse for the year. Look at what God is going to do at this place. And this is what's going to motivate us. And so the pastor was kind of casting vision for what's going to happen in the future. And then they found a nice verse to pair with it because when you're doing church right, that's what you do. You kind of decide what you think God wants you to do, and then you find a verse in the Bible that happens to coincide with the plans that you made. I'm kidding. That's not really a good way to go about applying Bible verses, but churches do this all the time, and so this church did it too, and they landed on this verse, Habakkuk 1.5. And Habakkuk 1.5, when you read it, it's like, oh, shoot. Look at what God's going to do here. There's going to be amazing things done in this place. Look at what Habakkuk 1 Ooh. Ooh, what if we did that at Grace? We're doing a building campaign. What if this home stretch? I said, guys, this is our verse that we are claiming. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. I'm going to do something so amazing you wouldn't even believe it. If I told you what I was going to do you wouldn't believe it. And so the church, they claimed it, they put it on their literature, they piped it out there and everyone's like God's going to do amazing things here. We're not going to believe it. Even if he tells us what he's going to do we wouldn't believe him. And then one day somebody picked up their Bible and they read the rest of the verses. This is Habakkuk 1, 6 and following. Look at what the Lord will do here. He will bring great punishment upon our negligence. It's genuinely funny how opposite that verse is of what they wanted it to be. But it's also really sad. And I don't think that the pastor did this in any way to manipulate. I don't think he did it intentionally in any way. I think it was just lazy. Just kind of ignorant. I think he saw that verse somewhere. It was like, ooh, that's a good campaign verse. And then everybody started claiming it. Thinking that's what Habakkuk 1.5 meant. And it didn't. It meant, God, bring your punishment on us. Bring the Chaldeans and their violent faces. When we just pluck a verse out of context, we run a real risk of misleading ourselves and others. And so we don't want to do that with Jeremiah 29 11. We want to understand this verse in its proper context. And in its proper context, the prophet Jeremiah was writing this letter, the book of Jeremiah, to God's children, to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, the Hebrews, however it is you most easily refer to him, that's who he is writing to. And these people are people who are in captivity in Babylon. Israel, Jerusalem has been laid waste to. It has been conquered. It is left in smoke and ashes. And then Babylon carried away the best and the brightest. So the only people who were left in Israel were the old and the feeble and the young and the useless. Everybody else got taken away, right? And these people have a promise from God. Back in Genesis chapter 12, that God made to their forefather Abraham, where God promised Abraham, I will provide you with land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That's Jesus. That came true. Your descendants will be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. There's a lot of Jewish people now. That came true. And I will give you the land of Canaan, the modern-day nation of Israel. So these people grew up being taught these promises of God that he made to their forefather Abraham, claiming those promises from the sovereign God, and now have watched that land be taken away from them. Now they have watched their best and their brightest be carried off as slaves into Babylon. Now they look at the smoldering ash heap of their once proud country and think, how could this be? How could this have ever happened? It's a discouraged people who think that their God has forgotten them or is somehow incapable of keeping his promises to them. They're spiritually and literally destitute. And to them, Jeremiah speaks these amazing words of comfort. Do you see how those hit a little different for the Hebrew people who have been carried away as slaves to Babylon? Jeremiah tells them, God sees you. He knows you. He has not forgotten about you. He intends to keep his promises to you. Hang in there. Have faith. And see, we take that verse and we apply it to the immediate situation. We take that verse and we say, God has a plan for me. I'm going to get the job. God has a plan for me. This relationship is going to work out. God has a plan for me. I know this thing is going to work. I just walked through this tremendous loss, but I'm comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me. So he's going to restore that. And we take this promise that was made to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament who were destitute and enslaved, and we make it mean that we're going to do better in the job interview or that the relationship's going to work out or that we're going to close that deal or that this stress is going to go away in my life. Which brings me to my next point. The next danger of one-hit wonders is that we cheapen the text. We cheapen the text. Now, I've got to be honest with you. This last week, a buddy of mine made fun of me for using ridiculous words in my sermons. So this So this week, when I wrote these notes, I said, we impoverish the text. But I had his voice in my head, and I changed it to cheapen. So if you just want the authentic experience, you need to change that word cheapen to impoverished in your own notes, okay? And giggle at me for doing that, but I can't. Impoverish is such a better word, but I just, I got insecure about it, so we went with cheapen the text. It cheapens the text. We take what it does mean, and we reduce it to what we need it to mean, and when we do that, we cheapen it, we impoverish it, we make it so much weaker than it should be. To show you this, look with me at what Jeremiah writes after the famous verse, Jeremiah 29 29 11. We pick it up in verse 12. Then you will call, I know the plans I have for you, he says, here are the plans. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Let me tell you what my plans are. My plans are that when you cry out to me, I'm going to hear you. My plans are that when you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. My plans are that, listen to this, my plans are that you would know me. My plans are that I would draw you into a relationship with myself. That's what God says his plans are. The very first thing I know, don't worry. I have a hope and a future. I have plans for you. You know what my plans for you are? He tells them in the following verses, my plans are that you would know me, which I love because this is a theme throughout the Bible. It's all that God has ever wanted, that we would know him. This is when Paul prays in the New Testament, when he writes out greetings to the churches, and he tells them that he prays for them. The most explicit of this is in Ephesians chapter 3, where he says, And then the conclusion of the prayer is that you would know the richness of the depth of the knowledge of Christ and be filled with all the knowledge of God, that you would know him. It's this prayer for us that's echoed throughout the centuries, not just in Jeremiah 29, but we see it before that. We see it in the high priestly prayer that Jesus prays in John chapter 17. We see it at the end of the Bible when he brings us all to him, to know him. The plan that he has for the Hebrew people is the same plan that he has for you, that you would know him. That the creator God would have an intimate relationship with you and that you would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cares about the smallest of details in your life. Scripture teaches us that not even a bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing, and that the very numbers of head, the very hair on your head is numbered. He knows you intimately, and He wants you to know Him that much. So does Jeremiah 29 11 apply to you? You're darn right it does. You're darn right it does, because his plan for them and for you is that you would know him. That's the plan. That the things in your life would be orchestrated to bring you down this path where you would know him and see him as the ultimate good. Are the things going to work out in the temporary? Maybe. I don't know. But if they don't, he's going to orchestrate and weave those things as one giant river that flows to him in eternity so that you might know him. That's what he's doing. I don't know what's going to happen in the temporary, but I do know that the result of them are going to be to funnel you towards God himself. And that's his plan for you, that he would know you. And listen to this cool thing. He says in verse 14, I will restore your fortunes and gather you from the nations and all the places where I've driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm going to bring you back to Israel. I'm going to restore your fortune. I'm going to restore your family. Everything's going to be okay. And that's a great thought, and it's a comforting one for them. But listen to this, and this is why prophecy in the Old Testament is so cool. You know what happens in the last two chapters of the Bible? If you flip to the very end, Revelation 21, 22, you know what happens there? You're gonna, because I'm doing a series in Revelation in the fall. It's gonna be like seven weeks, October, November. Get pumped up. I'm gonna answer every question you've ever had about Revelation with absolute certainty. The last two chapters of the Bible, God creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. And he gathers us to himself. And he restores our families. And he unites us. And he rejuvenates us and he completes his plan. His plan that he enacted when he promised it to Abraham, his plan that he reminded David of in 2 Samuel chapter 7 when he said the Messiah will sit on your throne, his plan that he told Mary about when he sent Jesus and his plan that seemed like it was done when Jesus hung on the cross and then the plan that the victory was won for on Easter when the tomb was empty. The plan that Jesus comes back for in Revelation 18 and 19 as the Lion of Judah, no longer the Lamb of God, when he makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and then he claims his creation back to him, to the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem as we surround the throne of God. That's his plan. And that's what he's enacted for you. And that's what he's done for them. That's the goal. That's what it's all about. And see, when we take Jeremiah 29, 11, and we make it mean this temporary situation is going to work out, we impoverish that text because it has such a greater meaning than that. It carries such greater significance than that. And in light of that, how much cooler is it that Haley gets to play that voicemail from her brother at her wedding because she knows that David knew Jesus. And the plan was murky and it was tough, but he's there waiting on her. And one day she will be restored. And one day they will be reunited. And one day they will see each other again because they each know Jesus because God's plan was to weave their lives back to him in such a way that they could spend eternity with him forever and he spent all of time acting out and initiating that plan for you and for them. When we do the work to understand the verses that mean so much to us, we will always find that there is more richness waiting there to be uncovered. So this morning, understand the dangers of plucking a verse out of context and throwing it on a t-shirt and letting it mean whatever we want it to mean. Because sometimes we mislead ourselves and others, and then even worse, we impoverish the text to such a degree that if we would just put in the time, I think we would be met with the richness and the fullness of God through his word as we are met with it over and over and over again. So listen, if you came in this morning and you love Jeremiah 29 11, take great comfort in Jeremiah 29 11. But take it in knowing that God's plan for you is that you know him. Take it in knowing that, yeah, God has a plan for you. It's to orchestrate everything in your life back to this wonderful tapestry so that you might know him. And I think that that's a pretty good plan. Let's pray. Father, I know that there are people here who are heartened by your eternal plan. But boy, God, if you could just kind of give them a temporary one, that'd be great too. So to those folks, I pray you would give them comfort and peace. For those folks, for all of us, I pray that we would see the things that we walk through in our life in light of eternity. In light of knowing that, yeah, you don't just have plans for us in this life, but God, you have a grand plan that you have been enacting since the dawn of time. And that one day you will restore us and return us all to the place, heaven, from which we have been exiled here. God, your word is amazing. I pray that we would all, every one of us, be more enthralled and awed by your word and that you would create within us a heart to mine it for all it's worth, God. In Jesus' name, amen.