Hebrews

Thank you, guys. Thank you, band. Thank you, Jordan, for the scripture reading this morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. It's so good to see everybody. You know, normally I've been making a very intentional choice to try not to differentiate between the in-person crowd and the online crowd, because I want folks who are not able to attend in person to feel no guilt or feel like second-class citizens for choosing to watch online, because I understand that's a necessity for a lot of you. But I will make an exception this morning and say that if you are here in person on Time Change Sunday, showered and attractive in appearance, you are a better Christian than the people who are at home watching. That's just how it goes. And I want you to know that. That's an encouragement to you from your pastor. This is week two of our series called Greater as we move through the book of Hebrews together. And it's called Greater because the author of Hebrews approaches the book through a lens of comparisons, of four main comparisons. Last week was a comparison to angels. We didn't get there. I don't regret it. You can read it in the Bible yourself. I think where we ended last week was more necessary and effective for the church. And this week we arrive at this comparison with Moses. And because of the way I'm wired, once I finish one sermon, I immediately begin to think about the next one because it's just, that's the life of the pastor. It's coming up in a week. You better get it together, pal. You got this many days to do the next one and do your thing. And so normally I finish prepping a sermon on a Wednesday or a Thursday, which means Thursday afternoon of last week, my mind immediately starts to work on this sermon that I'm giving you this week. And I know that it's on Moses. So I'm working out in my head this comparison to try to help us understand how important Moses was to the Hebrews in this culture. You'll remember that the letter of Hebrews was written to Hellenistic Jews who had converted to Christianity. So remember, a Hellenistic Jew is a Jewish person who grew up practicing Judaism or the Jewish faith, and then at some point or another converted to Christianity. And they're called Hellenistic Jews because they live outside of Israel. They grew up in a Greek context while being practicing Jews and then converted to the faith. And it's important that we also remember from last week that the recipients of this letter were undergoing persecution from without and within, from the Roman Empire violently persecuting them for declaring their faith, and from within, from their own Jewish communities that were trying to lull them and lure them back into a Jewish faith to walk away from this new radical Christian faith that they were claiming. So as we approach chapter 2, he makes a comparison that we're going to read in a second of Jesus to Moses and makes the point that Jesus is greater than Moses. And to help a 21st century American church understand the weight of this comparison. I was working on an illustration in my head that had to do with the framers of the Constitution and the original document of the United States and trying to figure out which founding father is Moses most like, which I've landed on George Washington, even though that is a perilous stance, I understand. But this is where I am. So I'm working all this out in preparation for the sermon. And then I sit down on Tuesday and really start to get into the text to figure out how I'm going to marry all the pieces together. And I read through chapters 3 and 4. And I realize the comparison that the author of Hebrews makes of Jesus to Moses is an important one, and we will look at it. But it's really a jumping off point to another comparison that he makes of the people of Hebrews to the ancient Hebrews in the desert. And that comparison actually allows us to apply this text to our lives today and is going to give us today a plea and an encouragement about our faith that I hope will inspire us and help us walk out the door more determined than ever to continue to walk in our Christian faith. And what I found in these chapters is actually this beautiful message of encouragement that I hope inspires you this morning. But to get there, we need to start where the author starts at the beginning of chapter 3 and look at the comparison that he makes between Jesus and Moses. And then I think what we'll do is we'll find something unexpected in the following text. Look with me in Hebrews chapter 3, verses 3 through 6. If you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. We're going to be all over chapter 3 and a little to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son, and we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope. So let me explain what's happening in these verses as he begins this comparison to Moses. He brings up Moses because, again, the audience is trying to be lured back into their old faith, into their heritage. And the author of that faith is presumed by the Jewish people to be Moses. He's the founding father of their faith. You can make a good argument for Abraham, but Moses is the one that wrote the first five books of the Bible. The first five books of the Bible are called the books of Moses, the books of the law that were authored by him. He's the George Washington. To a Hebrew person, Moses is what George Washington is to an American, like the founding father. This is the guy. That's how we understand him. We still look back on him. He was one of the framers of the Constitution. He helped with all that stuff. And like Thomas Jefferson, he's like a combo platter there. But that's the reverence that they had for him times like 10. He's the framer of everything that they believe. They would have said that Moses was the framer of the religion that they practiced. And what the author of Hebrews is saying is, no, no, no, no, no. He didn't frame this house. He didn't start that religion that they're trying to lure you back into. He didn't write those rules himself. That came from God. God built that house. He gets the honor from that. And the house isn't even the laws that you follow. The house is you. The house is the church. We are the kingdom of God and the body of Christ. The house persists now, 2,000 years later on a whole different continent. That's the house. And Moses wasn't the builder of the house. It's actually kind of shocking that he would say this. He's a servant in the house. But the beautiful part is, if Moses could be there in the audience hearing this read aloud, because that's what they would do with these letters, is they would, the pastor, the equivalent of the pastor would stand up and read the letter to them. And if Moses were in the audience hearing that letter, he would go, amen, I'm just a servant, you guys make too big of a deal out of me. I was just doing what God asked me to do. Jesus is the one that we should focus on. And so he sets their expectations from the very beginning by saying, it's not Moses that we should focus on. It's Christ. Christ is the framer of the house. You are the house. And Moses is no different than you. He's a servant within the house. We're cut from the same cloth. Peter tells us that you and Abraham, you and all the heroes of our faith are hewn from the same quarry by God. We all have the stuff in us of Moses. There was nothing special about Moses. Moses murdered a dude, went and hid out in the wilderness for 40 years, and then was called by a bush that wouldn't stop being on fire. And he argued with God five times until God finally says, just go do it, man. It says the wrath of the Lord was kindled against Moses, so then he went, okay? He stepped into the role that God asked him to play, but there's nothing fundamentally different about Moses than you. He was just obedient. He was a servant in the house. And this is what the author of Hebrews is setting up. But after he sets this up, he pretty much leaves the topic of Moses. It's kind of dumbfounding if you think about it. You think you're about to enter into this discourse about Moses. I've got this whole thing in my head about, okay, yeah, good. Let's dive into this Moses thing more. And I'm trying to figure out why does it matter to the American church, to the 21st century church, that Jesus is greater than Moses? Because listen, you all know that's not a new thing for you. You're not having a problem about which one to prioritize like they were. But then as you read the rest of the chapter, the comparison of Jesus to Moses is really not his focus in these next two chapters. He really jumps to another comparison that encourages them in a unique way and I think encourages us today. And so what we see is that Hebrews 3 and 4 are designed to be an encouragement by comparison. And not by comparison of Jesus to Moses, but by a comparison of generation to generation. He's not really going to belabor the point about Jesus being superior to Moses and all the ramifications of that. He jumps right from Moses into talking about the perils that were faced by the generation of Moses and the perils that are being faced by the Hebrews in this generation that he's writing to now. And I think that if we pay attention, then we can be encouraged in the same way the Hebrew audience was encouraged. He jumps right into this discourse that's summed up at the end of chapter 3. Chapter 3, verse 16 through chapter 4, the first verse. Chapter 4, 1. When we look at this verse, this is a good summary of what's going on in these two chapters. And I'm going to read it, and there's a good chance that a lot of us won't really know what any of it means. But then I'm going to explain it for several minutes because I really want us to understand what's going on here. In the time of Moses, you guys are probably familiar. If you go all the way back, second book of the Bible, you can read through the story of Moses. It is one of the most prolific stories in the Bible. If you've never read it, I would highly encourage you to do it. At my house, we have gotten into the habit of telling Lily a Bible story almost every night before bed. Before you go, oh man, that's impressive. We just started it like three weeks ago, okay? Because I realized I am way behind the eight ball in teaching the Bible to my own kids, so we need to get this started. And we started into the story of Moses, and I told it to her in like six parts, and she loves it. And it's really hard to tell the story of Moses to a five-year-old dodging, dancing through, like there is the inconvenient part about God killing the firstborn of all the Egyptian people. Probably not going to cover that with a five-year-old yet. So you kind of pick the parts that you can share, but we've walked through the story of Moses and she's compelled by it and I think you would be too. So if you never read it, you need to do it. And in the story of Moses, what we find is that after his time in the desert, God tells him, calls him through the burning bush, go back to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. The Hebrew people had lived as slaves in Egypt for 400 years, generation after generation of slaves. They never knew what it was to be free. And so Moses takes his brother Aaron, goes back to Pharaoh, insists that Pharaoh lets his people go. Pharaoh refuses. Then we have the 10 plagues that culminate in Passover that we still celebrate to this day. And Pharaoh lets the people go. The armies of Egypt who are in pursuit of the people perish in the Red Sea. And now they are in the desert and they're wandering through the desert for 40 years. And they're wandering through the desert until God feels like it is time for them to enter into the promised land. You've probably heard that phrase, the promised land. We throw it around in pop culture meaning different things in different places. But it really means the land that was promised to the descendants of Abraham. Back in Genesis 12, God makes three promises to Abraham. One of them is land. Your people will inherit this land on which you are standing, which is the land of Canaan, modern day Israel. And so they are working their way back to the promised land. And the way that it's phrased in Hebrews chapters three and four, the author talks about entering into that land as entering into rest. Because it's this idea of when it was Abraham and his family, they were nomads. They didn't set up permanent camp. They didn't have civilization to set up camp in Israel then. And eventually they had to move down to Egypt because of famine. And then in Egypt they lived as slaves. And now they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years, unpacking their stuff, setting up their tent, doing life for a couple of days, and then packing everything back up and moving down the road. Can you imagine trying to do that with elderly people and with children and how difficult that way of life would be? So 400 years of being slaves, 40 years of living in the desert, these people were not a people who knew what rest was. And so he says you're going to enter into rest because now you can finally, you can cross over the Jordan River, you can go into the promised land, you can build a permanent home, all the women can nest and do the things. I'm sure there was ancient Hebrew Kirklands where you could go buy all the clutter that you wanted and put it on your shelf, and now my house looks great. And they wanted to do this, and the men could go outside and work in the yard and all the stuff. Now we can set up camp, and we can do life, and we can just rest. And that's good. But all of that, while it was literally going on for the Hebrew people at the time of Moses, they were wandering through the desert, and there were struggles in the desert, and they were anticipating entering rest, entering into the promised land, and when they got there, they could finally rest. All that was literally true, but it's also one big, long metaphor for your salvation. The time in Egypt under slavery is when we are slaves to sin. It's a part of our life when we don't know Jesus. When we don't know who it is, we have no choice but to sin. Romans at length, in Romans, Paul tells us about how we are slaves to sin. We have no choice but to do evil, even when we want to do good. And then once we come to know Jesus, we're freed. We skip like a calf loosed from its stall, says Malachi. We're free to walk in the freedom of Jesus and to follow him. But in that freedom, we're in the desert. We're in life. We're going to face trials and struggles. We just talked about that in Ecclesiastes. But if we persevere, we will enter into the promised land. We will enter into God's rest. If you were here or paying attention in January, you'll remember that we did a whole week on Sabbath and what it means. And that this Sabbath rest is really a picture and a reminder of the eternity that waits on us after death, this eternal rest that we enter into with God. And I even in that sermon referred to Hebrews 3 and 4 and talked about the rest that this author describes. And so it's important to understand as we think about that story of Moses, they were intentionally taken through those seasons to mimic the seasons of your life, your time before Christ, and your time with Christ in this life in the desert when we're still not in eternity yet, and then entering into God's rest in eternity, spending eternity in heaven with God in the promised land. It's a metaphor for you and me. Do you understand? And it's important to understand that because one of the things that happened in the desert was that people would groan and complain. They were fed every day by manna. They would wake up in the morning and manna had fallen from the sky and that's what they ate. And the word manna literally in Hebrew means, what is it? We don't know what it is. It's just this nutrition brick that sits on the ground and everybody eats it. And as I was telling this story to Lily, she said, what's manna? I said, it's just a thing. Like we don't really know what it is. And she was like, I would get tired of that. I would want God to give me other food, like chicken nuggets and goldfish. That's what I want. And I thought, well, that's what the Hebrew people wanted too. They got ticked. God gave them quail and it made them sick. It's a whole different story. We didn't get into it. But they started to grumble, as would be natural. They were really thirsty sometimes. And they weren't being led to water. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night and they're just hoping that maybe tomorrow is the day that we get to the oasis of the river and we can finally drink some more and we can fill our vats again. Maybe that's when that will happen. We're sick and tired of man and there's all these struggles of living out in the desert and if you put yourself in that life, you can understand very quickly why people would complain about that. But in their complaining, they began to betray God. In their complaining, they began to say things like, Moses, take us back to Egypt. We would rather be slaves than live in the desert with you because at least there we had access to water every day. At least there I could cook, like, I don't know, a radish. Like, at least we had options back in Egypt. This stinks. One time they got so fed up with life in the desert that while Moses was away, they pulled all the gold that they had stolen from the Egyptian people and melted it down and fashioned it into a golden calf because they thought maybe this God will take better care of us in the desert than our current God. And they began to betray the very God that brought them out of slavery. And so this is what the author of Hebrews is referring to. When he talks about the people in the desert that failed because of unbelief, what happened was because they didn't believe, because they grumbled, Moses' generation that were the chief grumblers passed away. That's why God kept them in the desert for 40 years because he was waiting for that generation to go away so that the following faithful generation would be the one that would enter into the promised land. Those who grumbled and fell away and cursed God and built the golden calf and walked away in disbelief, those who walked away from their faith in the desert, they didn't enter into God's promised land. They never entered into God's rest. And so he's using that to encourage the Hebrew people in the first century A. Because they know the story very well. They know what happened in the desert. They don't need the robust explanation of these tight verses. Because they know good and well what happened to those people. They know what the author of Hebrews is referring to. And remember that they're facing persecution. They're facing violence and threats. If you proclaim Christ, they could take your life. They could arrest you. They could throw you in jail. They could harm your family. It was a really perilous time to be a believer. Their culture is ostracizing them and trying to woo them back to their old way of life, to what they would consider their heritage. You had to really, really want it to be a Christian. And you get the sense that there were some people within these churches to whom the letter was written that were falling away. You get the sense that these churches were going through a season of contraction, not expansion. You get the sense that it would have been really, really easy to just kind of quietly walk away from the faith and embrace an old way of life. And remember I told you last week that Hebrews is written to compel a persecuted church to persevere in their faith. And so in these chapters, he's trying to convince them to persevere by saying, remember the generation that came before you. Remember the story of your forefathers in the desert and how the ones who fell away, the ones who walked away from their faith, never entered into the promised land, never entered into God's rest. Well, now the same is at stake for you. Stay true to the faith, Hebrews. Don't walk away from the faith. Don't give in to persecution. Don't give in to ostracization. Don't give in to isolation. Stay true to the faith because there is a rest waiting for you. There is an eternity waiting for you. And he warns them at the end. He's imploring them and pleading with them. Hang in there. Don't give up on your faith. Don't walk away from God. I know it's hard. Stand firm in your faith. Look what happened in the previous generations. Don't you want to be the people who entered into the promised land instead of the people who perished in the desert, never experiencing God's rest. Hang in there. And I think that that's a remarkable message for us. The thing I love about that point, about what the author is doing here in chapters 3 and 4, is that it doesn't just apply to them. It doesn't just apply to this generation of believers. It applies to every generation of believers. This message echoes throughout the millennia since it was first preached to hang in there, to persevere in our faith. It applies to us as well. As a matter of fact, the biggest thing I take out of these passages is that your faith will never face a storm a previous generation hasn't weathered. Your faith, as you walk through this life, as you in a sense wander through the desert waiting for your turn to enter into the promised land, to enter into God's rest, your faith will not face a trial that a previous generation has not weathered. It is not unique to you. Consider the ones who came before you who persevered. If you have a godly parent or a grandparent, you stand on their shoulders, you watch them persevere. Do you think that their faith was always easy to them? Do you think that the spiritual heroes that you have in your life, that they didn't at some point in their life have a crisis of faith where they felt like walking away? I think now, as much as ever, there are those of us in our church. I mean, with the size church that we are, which is totally uncertain to me right now, there has to be people who feel like they're on the brink of just giving up on their faith. There has to be some of you here or watching or listening later in the week where 2020 has been really hard on your faith. I know that I had my own crisis of faith this year. I didn't realize it at the time, but when we had to go dark and only pre-record messages, and there was no people in the room when I would preach. At first, it wasn't that big of a deal to me because in my previous context at my old church, we used to pre-record our messages for our other campuses on Thursday every week anyways. We couldn't live stream. That was in the early times of live stream, and we just couldn't do it. And so it wasn't a big deal to me to come record a message in a room. That was fine. But it came to begin to feel like a performance instead of a spiritual exercise. And what I realized is when there's people in the room, when I get to look you in the eye, when I get to see head nods, when I get to sometimes see tears, when I know that the things that are connecting with me are also connecting with you, I feel like a pastor. I feel like I'm helping. I feel like I show up on Sunday morning, and maybe this isn't for everybody, and maybe everybody doesn't walk out of here going, man, Nate pitched a fastball today. Maybe you walk out going, that was terrible. That was the worst one he's ever done. But maybe for somebody else, it connected in such a way that was incredibly spiritually encouraging. And that's so much fun for me. That's so nourishing to me. And so in the week when I'm prepping and when I'm searching and when I'm praying, it's so helpful to me to know that when I get up and preach, it's going to be a spiritual exercise. If I've seemed more emotional since we've come back and began to gather again, that's why. Because when I just record onto a camera on Thursday or show up on Sunday with no one in the room, it just becomes a performance. And it was sucking me dry of anything spiritual that I had. And I don't say that for your sympathy. I say it so that you know I can offer you mine. So that if you've walked through a crisis of faith this year, that you know that you have company. The isolation that we felt this year, it would be really easy to fall away from faith. Matter of fact, my biggest fear in preaching this is that the people who need it most have already wandered off and are not going to hear it. And I would just say, if this is the first message you're listening to in a long time, this is why, pal. I'm glad you're here. I have spent a lot of time this year concerned about the people of our church beginning to drift away from God because the regularity of schedule hasn't been there that continues to draw us back into him. The meeting every week I think is powerful and effective. That's why we're told in Hebrews not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. There's an efficacy to that that I don't think we all the time understand on a head level. It's more of a soul thing. And the ease with which we could just simply drift away. Stop watching on Sunday and no one will know. Stop paying attention to small group because we're not meeting in person and we can't go anyways. Just how easy it would be to drift away from faith this last year has made me think that these chapters should resonate with us more deeply than maybe they ever have. And maybe some of us have walked through grief. Grief is always this big crucible of faith. I'm inclined to believe that faith isn't really mature and hardened and steadfast until it's walked through some sort of grief that makes you question the foundation of it. But then when we come through the other side of that strong, that's good, but some of us find ourselves in the middle of questioning. Some of us have doubts that we just continually push away and we never confront out of fear. And those work to weaken our faith. And you may be thinking, Nate, listen, man, yeah, sure, there's temptations to fall away from faith, but gosh, it's kind of difficult to compare us to those generations. Like, we're not wandering through the desert eating nutrition bricks every day, and we're not facing death and persecution for coming here on a Sunday morning. So take it easy on comparing us to that generation, and that's fair. But I actually think that all of us face a testing of our faith that those people never had to encounter. And I would actually argue with you that atrophy may be the biggest test of our faith. I think the atrophy of our faith may be the actual biggest test of our faith. I've been talking with some folks recently about sometimes I develop theories on life that are not really worth public consumption. But for the sake of an illustration, I'll share this one. I have this theory that our ability to handle stress and manage tasks atrophies as we get older and life doesn't require us to do as many things. So I think that if we go through life and we don't have daily demands on our schedule, we don't have problems that we have to solve, there's not stress that sits on us, that eventually what happens is our ability to manage tasks and to manage having full days and our ability to manage stress actually atrophies. So that when you get older, and I'm sorry, I'm going to get blowback from the generation that is my parents' age and older. I'm sorry. But what I've noticed is that sometimes you'll ask folks like, what are you doing Wednesday? And they're like, well, I was a kid. It's a busy day. I'm like, oh yeah, what are you doing? And they're like, well, you know, I gotta take my friend to the doctor at two. Okay, and then what? They're like, well, I'll probably just pack it in after that. All right, yeah, no, that's, get some good sleep on Tuesday, you know. And I think to them it feels full, but it's because for a long time they haven't had to have the fullness of schedule that I think, I would argue that when you have little kids and when you have kids in middle school, life demands a lot of you. Your capacity to handle stress and tasks is as high as it's going to get. But if you don't flex that muscle, it goes into atrophy so that taking a friend to the doctor at 2 o'clock feels busy. And that's fine. But it happens. I think our faith works the same way. I think when we're not forced to exercise our faith, it begins to atrophy. So that little tasks, little things that require little amounts of faith feel like these huge hills of godliness that we have to climb. Their life, the life of the people in these chapters, they required faith. Those people wandering through the desert, they don't make it through the day without faith. God literally lands food on their front yard every day. That requires faith to be hungry at night and believe that it's going to be there when I wake up in the morning. They're literally, they're formed in the desert. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night. They have to trust that that pillar is actually God and is actually taking them where they wanted to go. At one point or another, there was snakes in the camp and if they would bite you, you would die. And the only way to not die was to look at a cross with bronze serpents on it and know that that was God's blessing to you. You had to look at that cross in faith. It's the only way to heal you from death. Every day of their lives required their faith. Some of them got tired of that exercise and walked away. For the Hebrew people, every day of their lives required that faith. God, I am going to go walk in your presence today. I'm going to go proclaim your name today, and I'm trusting you to protect me and to protect my family. And if you don't, I trust that's okay too. It required faith. It is entirely possible to be a good Christian and yet have a life that requires very little faith. Parents, you want your kids to be Christians. And here's the good news. Statistically speaking, kids that grow up in a Christian home with a mom and a dad who both love Jesus, they're going to love Jesus too. The statistics are on your side that that child will accept Christ as their Savior. And that's a good thing. That's the most effective plan for evangelism that's ever existed. I love that truth. But I would also argue that because that's true, it doesn't really take a lot of faith on our part, a lot of hitting our knees and pleading with God to reach the hearts of our children and to enliven them to him. Because if we just bring them to church and put them around other people who love Jesus, they're probably going to get on board too. Raising good kids doesn't require a lot of faith. But if you want to release adults into the world, unleash disciples of Jesus who will impact their community and draw others to faith like a magnet and go and spend the rest of their lives making disciples. If you want to release eternity changers into the wild, then you better hit your knees. You better pray over that because that task is too big for you. We need to live lives that require faith of us. We need to set goals for our children that aren't easily attained by just coming to church every week, but by requiring us, by compelling us to get on our knees and pray for them and pour over them during the week while they sleep in their beds. Let's go into their rooms and let's get on our knees and let's plead with God to make them exactly who he created them to be and let's plead that they're better than us and that we don't get in the way. That takes faith. You want to go to work? Be a good worker. Be a good employee, employer. Have a good influence on the people around you. That's great. You don't really need faith to do that. You can figure that out all on your own. We know how to play the game and say the right things and not cuss when we're not supposed to and not get mad when we want to be mad. We know how to do that. You want to be a pastor and evangelist in your workplace? You want the people who work around you to come to know Jesus because they see him shining through you? You want that person that when you started that job who is very far from God, who is a militant atheist, you want them to come to faith? You better do more than just show up and be nice. You better hit your knees and pray for them. Grace, listen, American Christians have this unique privilege of living lives that look like good Christianity that really require very little soul-searching faith of us. And I'm deathly afraid that because of that, our faiths have atrophied to a place where one task, where one little thing seems like a mountain climb of faith. I would implore you this morning, not just to persevere in your faith, but to choose to live lives that require it. To dream God-sized dreams about, not about things that you will accomplish, but about people that you can impact, about things that you see happen in the lives of those around you. Let's begin to live lives that require faith. Anybody can lead a small group by just showing up and having a discussion and being nice. It doesn't require any faith. But what about if you decide that you want to disciple these people and see them have vibrant spiritual lives and vibrant marriages and see them disciple their children and see them radically reprioritize your lives? Then we need to pray. Let's choose to live lives that require faith of us. The other encouragement that he gives is the one that we actually started with today that Jordan read for us. It's the lone encouragement he gives in the chapter or piece of advice he gives in the chapter. He basically says, hey, hang in there. Stick with it. Don't fall away like the people in the desert. Be like the people who entered into the promised land. Persevere in your faith. He givesverance is virtually impossible without community. Perseverance is virtually impossible without community. And I just included that word virtually there because I was scared to say totally impossible without community, but that's really what I think. And I love it. Brothers and sisters, encourage one another in your faith today as long as it is called today. Every day, encourage the people around you. You may be listening to this sermon and think, Nate, you know, listen, I know other people are faltering in their faith. I've certainly moved through those seasons in my life, but I feel good right now. Me and God, like I'm walking with God and there's things I need to improve on, but like my faith is strong and that's great. Use that faith to encourage the people around you every day as long as it's called today. If you're struggling in your faith, if it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, then I did. I'm just kidding. If it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, if you feel weak in your faith, then draw on the strength of others. Look at other people who might be weak and say, listen, we don't have this all figured out, but let's encourage each other. There's practical ways to encourage each other. I don't want to get caught up in doing that because you're smart adults and you can figure that out. But I will say that one of the things that I'm in the practice of doing when I'm really focused on God and when I'm pursuing Him well is in my quiet times and in my prayers, He will always bring people to my mind. Oftentimes it's folks I haven't thought about in a number of months or a year or more. And I try to be obedient to sit down and to text them or to sit down and write them an email and just let them know I'm thinking about them and I'm praying for them. And you'd be surprised the number of times I get an email back that says, man, I can't believe the Lord put you on my heart this morning. This is what I'm dealing with. So I would leave you today with two encouragements. Let the message from Hebrews 3 and 4 echo down through the millennia to you and hang in there with your faith. Persevere. Don't walk away. Face your doubts. Face your fears. Face your grief. Persevere in your faith. One of the ways we can do that is to live lives that require it. The other way that we do that is to encourage those around us to live out their faith today as long as it is called today. This is something I think that grace is so good at. Let's lean on our community and use our community not just to make people feel welcome, not just to make people feel loved, but let us use and leverage our community to encourage one another in our faith. Let's infuse our friendships with spiritual encouragement. And let's be obedient and inspired, obedient to and inspired by the message of Hebrews 3 and 4. My prayer for you this week is that if any of you are on the brink of walking away, if any of you have been struggling in your faith, that this would be a week that encourages you to hang in there. And that the people around you would come around you even without you saying anything to them and they would encourage you in your faith today as long as it's called today. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for you. We are grateful for how big you are. We are grateful for how much you love us, for how much you strengthen us. God, I pray that we would see the shoulders that we stand on, the generations that come before us and the storms that they have weathered, that we would be heartened by that and that we would stand firm in our faith lest we fall away. God, for those of us for whom our faith is in atrophy, which is such an easy thing now, would you help us and show us how to choose lives that require faith? That force us to lean on you, knowing that if you don't come through, we will fall. God, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We know that it is in him that we can hope, that that is the hope that will not put us to shame, that that is the faith that we can have. I pray that if anyone doesn't know who he is, that they would today. For those of us who do know God but are tempted to walk away, would you help us to stand firm, pick us up by attending angels and draw our souls near to you even as we sing here in a minute. It's in your son's name that we pray these things. Amen.

Thank you, guys. Thank you, band. Thank you, Jordan, for the scripture reading this morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. It's so good to see everybody. You know, normally I've been making a very intentional choice to try not to differentiate between the in-person crowd and the online crowd, because I want folks who are not able to attend in person to feel no guilt or feel like second-class citizens for choosing to watch online, because I understand that's a necessity for a lot of you. But I will make an exception this morning and say that if you are here in person on Time Change Sunday, showered and attractive in appearance, you are a better Christian than the people who are at home watching. That's just how it goes. And I want you to know that. That's an encouragement to you from your pastor. This is week two of our series called Greater as we move through the book of Hebrews together. And it's called Greater because the author of Hebrews approaches the book through a lens of comparisons, of four main comparisons. Last week was a comparison to angels. We didn't get there. I don't regret it. You can read it in the Bible yourself. I think where we ended last week was more necessary and effective for the church. And this week we arrive at this comparison with Moses. And because of the way I'm wired, once I finish one sermon, I immediately begin to think about the next one because it's just, that's the life of the pastor. It's coming up in a week. You better get it together, pal. You got this many days to do the next one and do your thing. And so normally I finish prepping a sermon on a Wednesday or a Thursday, which means Thursday afternoon of last week, my mind immediately starts to work on this sermon that I'm giving you this week. And I know that it's on Moses. So I'm working out in my head this comparison to try to help us understand how important Moses was to the Hebrews in this culture. You'll remember that the letter of Hebrews was written to Hellenistic Jews who had converted to Christianity. So remember, a Hellenistic Jew is a Jewish person who grew up practicing Judaism or the Jewish faith, and then at some point or another converted to Christianity. And they're called Hellenistic Jews because they live outside of Israel. They grew up in a Greek context while being practicing Jews and then converted to the faith. And it's important that we also remember from last week that the recipients of this letter were undergoing persecution from without and within, from the Roman Empire violently persecuting them for declaring their faith, and from within, from their own Jewish communities that were trying to lull them and lure them back into a Jewish faith to walk away from this new radical Christian faith that they were claiming. So as we approach chapter 2, he makes a comparison that we're going to read in a second of Jesus to Moses and makes the point that Jesus is greater than Moses. And to help a 21st century American church understand the weight of this comparison. I was working on an illustration in my head that had to do with the framers of the Constitution and the original document of the United States and trying to figure out which founding father is Moses most like, which I've landed on George Washington, even though that is a perilous stance, I understand. But this is where I am. So I'm working all this out in preparation for the sermon. And then I sit down on Tuesday and really start to get into the text to figure out how I'm going to marry all the pieces together. And I read through chapters 3 and 4. And I realize the comparison that the author of Hebrews makes of Jesus to Moses is an important one, and we will look at it. But it's really a jumping off point to another comparison that he makes of the people of Hebrews to the ancient Hebrews in the desert. And that comparison actually allows us to apply this text to our lives today and is going to give us today a plea and an encouragement about our faith that I hope will inspire us and help us walk out the door more determined than ever to continue to walk in our Christian faith. And what I found in these chapters is actually this beautiful message of encouragement that I hope inspires you this morning. But to get there, we need to start where the author starts at the beginning of chapter 3 and look at the comparison that he makes between Jesus and Moses. And then I think what we'll do is we'll find something unexpected in the following text. Look with me in Hebrews chapter 3, verses 3 through 6. If you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. We're going to be all over chapter 3 and a little to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a son, and we are his house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope. So let me explain what's happening in these verses as he begins this comparison to Moses. He brings up Moses because, again, the audience is trying to be lured back into their old faith, into their heritage. And the author of that faith is presumed by the Jewish people to be Moses. He's the founding father of their faith. You can make a good argument for Abraham, but Moses is the one that wrote the first five books of the Bible. The first five books of the Bible are called the books of Moses, the books of the law that were authored by him. He's the George Washington. To a Hebrew person, Moses is what George Washington is to an American, like the founding father. This is the guy. That's how we understand him. We still look back on him. He was one of the framers of the Constitution. He helped with all that stuff. And like Thomas Jefferson, he's like a combo platter there. But that's the reverence that they had for him times like 10. He's the framer of everything that they believe. They would have said that Moses was the framer of the religion that they practiced. And what the author of Hebrews is saying is, no, no, no, no, no. He didn't frame this house. He didn't start that religion that they're trying to lure you back into. He didn't write those rules himself. That came from God. God built that house. He gets the honor from that. And the house isn't even the laws that you follow. The house is you. The house is the church. We are the kingdom of God and the body of Christ. The house persists now, 2,000 years later on a whole different continent. That's the house. And Moses wasn't the builder of the house. It's actually kind of shocking that he would say this. He's a servant in the house. But the beautiful part is, if Moses could be there in the audience hearing this read aloud, because that's what they would do with these letters, is they would, the pastor, the equivalent of the pastor would stand up and read the letter to them. And if Moses were in the audience hearing that letter, he would go, amen, I'm just a servant, you guys make too big of a deal out of me. I was just doing what God asked me to do. Jesus is the one that we should focus on. And so he sets their expectations from the very beginning by saying, it's not Moses that we should focus on. It's Christ. Christ is the framer of the house. You are the house. And Moses is no different than you. He's a servant within the house. We're cut from the same cloth. Peter tells us that you and Abraham, you and all the heroes of our faith are hewn from the same quarry by God. We all have the stuff in us of Moses. There was nothing special about Moses. Moses murdered a dude, went and hid out in the wilderness for 40 years, and then was called by a bush that wouldn't stop being on fire. And he argued with God five times until God finally says, just go do it, man. It says the wrath of the Lord was kindled against Moses, so then he went, okay? He stepped into the role that God asked him to play, but there's nothing fundamentally different about Moses than you. He was just obedient. He was a servant in the house. And this is what the author of Hebrews is setting up. But after he sets this up, he pretty much leaves the topic of Moses. It's kind of dumbfounding if you think about it. You think you're about to enter into this discourse about Moses. I've got this whole thing in my head about, okay, yeah, good. Let's dive into this Moses thing more. And I'm trying to figure out why does it matter to the American church, to the 21st century church, that Jesus is greater than Moses? Because listen, you all know that's not a new thing for you. You're not having a problem about which one to prioritize like they were. But then as you read the rest of the chapter, the comparison of Jesus to Moses is really not his focus in these next two chapters. He really jumps to another comparison that encourages them in a unique way and I think encourages us today. And so what we see is that Hebrews 3 and 4 are designed to be an encouragement by comparison. And not by comparison of Jesus to Moses, but by a comparison of generation to generation. He's not really going to belabor the point about Jesus being superior to Moses and all the ramifications of that. He jumps right from Moses into talking about the perils that were faced by the generation of Moses and the perils that are being faced by the Hebrews in this generation that he's writing to now. And I think that if we pay attention, then we can be encouraged in the same way the Hebrew audience was encouraged. He jumps right into this discourse that's summed up at the end of chapter 3. Chapter 3, verse 16 through chapter 4, the first verse. Chapter 4, 1. When we look at this verse, this is a good summary of what's going on in these two chapters. And I'm going to read it, and there's a good chance that a lot of us won't really know what any of it means. But then I'm going to explain it for several minutes because I really want us to understand what's going on here. In the time of Moses, you guys are probably familiar. If you go all the way back, second book of the Bible, you can read through the story of Moses. It is one of the most prolific stories in the Bible. If you've never read it, I would highly encourage you to do it. At my house, we have gotten into the habit of telling Lily a Bible story almost every night before bed. Before you go, oh man, that's impressive. We just started it like three weeks ago, okay? Because I realized I am way behind the eight ball in teaching the Bible to my own kids, so we need to get this started. And we started into the story of Moses, and I told it to her in like six parts, and she loves it. And it's really hard to tell the story of Moses to a five-year-old dodging, dancing through, like there is the inconvenient part about God killing the firstborn of all the Egyptian people. Probably not going to cover that with a five-year-old yet. So you kind of pick the parts that you can share, but we've walked through the story of Moses and she's compelled by it and I think you would be too. So if you never read it, you need to do it. And in the story of Moses, what we find is that after his time in the desert, God tells him, calls him through the burning bush, go back to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. The Hebrew people had lived as slaves in Egypt for 400 years, generation after generation of slaves. They never knew what it was to be free. And so Moses takes his brother Aaron, goes back to Pharaoh, insists that Pharaoh lets his people go. Pharaoh refuses. Then we have the 10 plagues that culminate in Passover that we still celebrate to this day. And Pharaoh lets the people go. The armies of Egypt who are in pursuit of the people perish in the Red Sea. And now they are in the desert and they're wandering through the desert for 40 years. And they're wandering through the desert until God feels like it is time for them to enter into the promised land. You've probably heard that phrase, the promised land. We throw it around in pop culture meaning different things in different places. But it really means the land that was promised to the descendants of Abraham. Back in Genesis 12, God makes three promises to Abraham. One of them is land. Your people will inherit this land on which you are standing, which is the land of Canaan, modern day Israel. And so they are working their way back to the promised land. And the way that it's phrased in Hebrews chapters three and four, the author talks about entering into that land as entering into rest. Because it's this idea of when it was Abraham and his family, they were nomads. They didn't set up permanent camp. They didn't have civilization to set up camp in Israel then. And eventually they had to move down to Egypt because of famine. And then in Egypt they lived as slaves. And now they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years, unpacking their stuff, setting up their tent, doing life for a couple of days, and then packing everything back up and moving down the road. Can you imagine trying to do that with elderly people and with children and how difficult that way of life would be? So 400 years of being slaves, 40 years of living in the desert, these people were not a people who knew what rest was. And so he says you're going to enter into rest because now you can finally, you can cross over the Jordan River, you can go into the promised land, you can build a permanent home, all the women can nest and do the things. I'm sure there was ancient Hebrew Kirklands where you could go buy all the clutter that you wanted and put it on your shelf, and now my house looks great. And they wanted to do this, and the men could go outside and work in the yard and all the stuff. Now we can set up camp, and we can do life, and we can just rest. And that's good. But all of that, while it was literally going on for the Hebrew people at the time of Moses, they were wandering through the desert, and there were struggles in the desert, and they were anticipating entering rest, entering into the promised land, and when they got there, they could finally rest. All that was literally true, but it's also one big, long metaphor for your salvation. The time in Egypt under slavery is when we are slaves to sin. It's a part of our life when we don't know Jesus. When we don't know who it is, we have no choice but to sin. Romans at length, in Romans, Paul tells us about how we are slaves to sin. We have no choice but to do evil, even when we want to do good. And then once we come to know Jesus, we're freed. We skip like a calf loosed from its stall, says Malachi. We're free to walk in the freedom of Jesus and to follow him. But in that freedom, we're in the desert. We're in life. We're going to face trials and struggles. We just talked about that in Ecclesiastes. But if we persevere, we will enter into the promised land. We will enter into God's rest. If you were here or paying attention in January, you'll remember that we did a whole week on Sabbath and what it means. And that this Sabbath rest is really a picture and a reminder of the eternity that waits on us after death, this eternal rest that we enter into with God. And I even in that sermon referred to Hebrews 3 and 4 and talked about the rest that this author describes. And so it's important to understand as we think about that story of Moses, they were intentionally taken through those seasons to mimic the seasons of your life, your time before Christ, and your time with Christ in this life in the desert when we're still not in eternity yet, and then entering into God's rest in eternity, spending eternity in heaven with God in the promised land. It's a metaphor for you and me. Do you understand? And it's important to understand that because one of the things that happened in the desert was that people would groan and complain. They were fed every day by manna. They would wake up in the morning and manna had fallen from the sky and that's what they ate. And the word manna literally in Hebrew means, what is it? We don't know what it is. It's just this nutrition brick that sits on the ground and everybody eats it. And as I was telling this story to Lily, she said, what's manna? I said, it's just a thing. Like we don't really know what it is. And she was like, I would get tired of that. I would want God to give me other food, like chicken nuggets and goldfish. That's what I want. And I thought, well, that's what the Hebrew people wanted too. They got ticked. God gave them quail and it made them sick. It's a whole different story. We didn't get into it. But they started to grumble, as would be natural. They were really thirsty sometimes. And they weren't being led to water. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night and they're just hoping that maybe tomorrow is the day that we get to the oasis of the river and we can finally drink some more and we can fill our vats again. Maybe that's when that will happen. We're sick and tired of man and there's all these struggles of living out in the desert and if you put yourself in that life, you can understand very quickly why people would complain about that. But in their complaining, they began to betray God. In their complaining, they began to say things like, Moses, take us back to Egypt. We would rather be slaves than live in the desert with you because at least there we had access to water every day. At least there I could cook, like, I don't know, a radish. Like, at least we had options back in Egypt. This stinks. One time they got so fed up with life in the desert that while Moses was away, they pulled all the gold that they had stolen from the Egyptian people and melted it down and fashioned it into a golden calf because they thought maybe this God will take better care of us in the desert than our current God. And they began to betray the very God that brought them out of slavery. And so this is what the author of Hebrews is referring to. When he talks about the people in the desert that failed because of unbelief, what happened was because they didn't believe, because they grumbled, Moses' generation that were the chief grumblers passed away. That's why God kept them in the desert for 40 years because he was waiting for that generation to go away so that the following faithful generation would be the one that would enter into the promised land. Those who grumbled and fell away and cursed God and built the golden calf and walked away in disbelief, those who walked away from their faith in the desert, they didn't enter into God's promised land. They never entered into God's rest. And so he's using that to encourage the Hebrew people in the first century A. Because they know the story very well. They know what happened in the desert. They don't need the robust explanation of these tight verses. Because they know good and well what happened to those people. They know what the author of Hebrews is referring to. And remember that they're facing persecution. They're facing violence and threats. If you proclaim Christ, they could take your life. They could arrest you. They could throw you in jail. They could harm your family. It was a really perilous time to be a believer. Their culture is ostracizing them and trying to woo them back to their old way of life, to what they would consider their heritage. You had to really, really want it to be a Christian. And you get the sense that there were some people within these churches to whom the letter was written that were falling away. You get the sense that these churches were going through a season of contraction, not expansion. You get the sense that it would have been really, really easy to just kind of quietly walk away from the faith and embrace an old way of life. And remember I told you last week that Hebrews is written to compel a persecuted church to persevere in their faith. And so in these chapters, he's trying to convince them to persevere by saying, remember the generation that came before you. Remember the story of your forefathers in the desert and how the ones who fell away, the ones who walked away from their faith, never entered into the promised land, never entered into God's rest. Well, now the same is at stake for you. Stay true to the faith, Hebrews. Don't walk away from the faith. Don't give in to persecution. Don't give in to ostracization. Don't give in to isolation. Stay true to the faith because there is a rest waiting for you. There is an eternity waiting for you. And he warns them at the end. He's imploring them and pleading with them. Hang in there. Don't give up on your faith. Don't walk away from God. I know it's hard. Stand firm in your faith. Look what happened in the previous generations. Don't you want to be the people who entered into the promised land instead of the people who perished in the desert, never experiencing God's rest. Hang in there. And I think that that's a remarkable message for us. The thing I love about that point, about what the author is doing here in chapters 3 and 4, is that it doesn't just apply to them. It doesn't just apply to this generation of believers. It applies to every generation of believers. This message echoes throughout the millennia since it was first preached to hang in there, to persevere in our faith. It applies to us as well. As a matter of fact, the biggest thing I take out of these passages is that your faith will never face a storm a previous generation hasn't weathered. Your faith, as you walk through this life, as you in a sense wander through the desert waiting for your turn to enter into the promised land, to enter into God's rest, your faith will not face a trial that a previous generation has not weathered. It is not unique to you. Consider the ones who came before you who persevered. If you have a godly parent or a grandparent, you stand on their shoulders, you watch them persevere. Do you think that their faith was always easy to them? Do you think that the spiritual heroes that you have in your life, that they didn't at some point in their life have a crisis of faith where they felt like walking away? I think now, as much as ever, there are those of us in our church. I mean, with the size church that we are, which is totally uncertain to me right now, there has to be people who feel like they're on the brink of just giving up on their faith. There has to be some of you here or watching or listening later in the week where 2020 has been really hard on your faith. I know that I had my own crisis of faith this year. I didn't realize it at the time, but when we had to go dark and only pre-record messages, and there was no people in the room when I would preach. At first, it wasn't that big of a deal to me because in my previous context at my old church, we used to pre-record our messages for our other campuses on Thursday every week anyways. We couldn't live stream. That was in the early times of live stream, and we just couldn't do it. And so it wasn't a big deal to me to come record a message in a room. That was fine. But it came to begin to feel like a performance instead of a spiritual exercise. And what I realized is when there's people in the room, when I get to look you in the eye, when I get to see head nods, when I get to sometimes see tears, when I know that the things that are connecting with me are also connecting with you, I feel like a pastor. I feel like I'm helping. I feel like I show up on Sunday morning, and maybe this isn't for everybody, and maybe everybody doesn't walk out of here going, man, Nate pitched a fastball today. Maybe you walk out going, that was terrible. That was the worst one he's ever done. But maybe for somebody else, it connected in such a way that was incredibly spiritually encouraging. And that's so much fun for me. That's so nourishing to me. And so in the week when I'm prepping and when I'm searching and when I'm praying, it's so helpful to me to know that when I get up and preach, it's going to be a spiritual exercise. If I've seemed more emotional since we've come back and began to gather again, that's why. Because when I just record onto a camera on Thursday or show up on Sunday with no one in the room, it just becomes a performance. And it was sucking me dry of anything spiritual that I had. And I don't say that for your sympathy. I say it so that you know I can offer you mine. So that if you've walked through a crisis of faith this year, that you know that you have company. The isolation that we felt this year, it would be really easy to fall away from faith. Matter of fact, my biggest fear in preaching this is that the people who need it most have already wandered off and are not going to hear it. And I would just say, if this is the first message you're listening to in a long time, this is why, pal. I'm glad you're here. I have spent a lot of time this year concerned about the people of our church beginning to drift away from God because the regularity of schedule hasn't been there that continues to draw us back into him. The meeting every week I think is powerful and effective. That's why we're told in Hebrews not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. There's an efficacy to that that I don't think we all the time understand on a head level. It's more of a soul thing. And the ease with which we could just simply drift away. Stop watching on Sunday and no one will know. Stop paying attention to small group because we're not meeting in person and we can't go anyways. Just how easy it would be to drift away from faith this last year has made me think that these chapters should resonate with us more deeply than maybe they ever have. And maybe some of us have walked through grief. Grief is always this big crucible of faith. I'm inclined to believe that faith isn't really mature and hardened and steadfast until it's walked through some sort of grief that makes you question the foundation of it. But then when we come through the other side of that strong, that's good, but some of us find ourselves in the middle of questioning. Some of us have doubts that we just continually push away and we never confront out of fear. And those work to weaken our faith. And you may be thinking, Nate, listen, man, yeah, sure, there's temptations to fall away from faith, but gosh, it's kind of difficult to compare us to those generations. Like, we're not wandering through the desert eating nutrition bricks every day, and we're not facing death and persecution for coming here on a Sunday morning. So take it easy on comparing us to that generation, and that's fair. But I actually think that all of us face a testing of our faith that those people never had to encounter. And I would actually argue with you that atrophy may be the biggest test of our faith. I think the atrophy of our faith may be the actual biggest test of our faith. I've been talking with some folks recently about sometimes I develop theories on life that are not really worth public consumption. But for the sake of an illustration, I'll share this one. I have this theory that our ability to handle stress and manage tasks atrophies as we get older and life doesn't require us to do as many things. So I think that if we go through life and we don't have daily demands on our schedule, we don't have problems that we have to solve, there's not stress that sits on us, that eventually what happens is our ability to manage tasks and to manage having full days and our ability to manage stress actually atrophies. So that when you get older, and I'm sorry, I'm going to get blowback from the generation that is my parents' age and older. I'm sorry. But what I've noticed is that sometimes you'll ask folks like, what are you doing Wednesday? And they're like, well, I was a kid. It's a busy day. I'm like, oh yeah, what are you doing? And they're like, well, you know, I gotta take my friend to the doctor at two. Okay, and then what? They're like, well, I'll probably just pack it in after that. All right, yeah, no, that's, get some good sleep on Tuesday, you know. And I think to them it feels full, but it's because for a long time they haven't had to have the fullness of schedule that I think, I would argue that when you have little kids and when you have kids in middle school, life demands a lot of you. Your capacity to handle stress and tasks is as high as it's going to get. But if you don't flex that muscle, it goes into atrophy so that taking a friend to the doctor at 2 o'clock feels busy. And that's fine. But it happens. I think our faith works the same way. I think when we're not forced to exercise our faith, it begins to atrophy. So that little tasks, little things that require little amounts of faith feel like these huge hills of godliness that we have to climb. Their life, the life of the people in these chapters, they required faith. Those people wandering through the desert, they don't make it through the day without faith. God literally lands food on their front yard every day. That requires faith to be hungry at night and believe that it's going to be there when I wake up in the morning. They're literally, they're formed in the desert. They're following a pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night. They have to trust that that pillar is actually God and is actually taking them where they wanted to go. At one point or another, there was snakes in the camp and if they would bite you, you would die. And the only way to not die was to look at a cross with bronze serpents on it and know that that was God's blessing to you. You had to look at that cross in faith. It's the only way to heal you from death. Every day of their lives required their faith. Some of them got tired of that exercise and walked away. For the Hebrew people, every day of their lives required that faith. God, I am going to go walk in your presence today. I'm going to go proclaim your name today, and I'm trusting you to protect me and to protect my family. And if you don't, I trust that's okay too. It required faith. It is entirely possible to be a good Christian and yet have a life that requires very little faith. Parents, you want your kids to be Christians. And here's the good news. Statistically speaking, kids that grow up in a Christian home with a mom and a dad who both love Jesus, they're going to love Jesus too. The statistics are on your side that that child will accept Christ as their Savior. And that's a good thing. That's the most effective plan for evangelism that's ever existed. I love that truth. But I would also argue that because that's true, it doesn't really take a lot of faith on our part, a lot of hitting our knees and pleading with God to reach the hearts of our children and to enliven them to him. Because if we just bring them to church and put them around other people who love Jesus, they're probably going to get on board too. Raising good kids doesn't require a lot of faith. But if you want to release adults into the world, unleash disciples of Jesus who will impact their community and draw others to faith like a magnet and go and spend the rest of their lives making disciples. If you want to release eternity changers into the wild, then you better hit your knees. You better pray over that because that task is too big for you. We need to live lives that require faith of us. We need to set goals for our children that aren't easily attained by just coming to church every week, but by requiring us, by compelling us to get on our knees and pray for them and pour over them during the week while they sleep in their beds. Let's go into their rooms and let's get on our knees and let's plead with God to make them exactly who he created them to be and let's plead that they're better than us and that we don't get in the way. That takes faith. You want to go to work? Be a good worker. Be a good employee, employer. Have a good influence on the people around you. That's great. You don't really need faith to do that. You can figure that out all on your own. We know how to play the game and say the right things and not cuss when we're not supposed to and not get mad when we want to be mad. We know how to do that. You want to be a pastor and evangelist in your workplace? You want the people who work around you to come to know Jesus because they see him shining through you? You want that person that when you started that job who is very far from God, who is a militant atheist, you want them to come to faith? You better do more than just show up and be nice. You better hit your knees and pray for them. Grace, listen, American Christians have this unique privilege of living lives that look like good Christianity that really require very little soul-searching faith of us. And I'm deathly afraid that because of that, our faiths have atrophied to a place where one task, where one little thing seems like a mountain climb of faith. I would implore you this morning, not just to persevere in your faith, but to choose to live lives that require it. To dream God-sized dreams about, not about things that you will accomplish, but about people that you can impact, about things that you see happen in the lives of those around you. Let's begin to live lives that require faith. Anybody can lead a small group by just showing up and having a discussion and being nice. It doesn't require any faith. But what about if you decide that you want to disciple these people and see them have vibrant spiritual lives and vibrant marriages and see them disciple their children and see them radically reprioritize your lives? Then we need to pray. Let's choose to live lives that require faith of us. The other encouragement that he gives is the one that we actually started with today that Jordan read for us. It's the lone encouragement he gives in the chapter or piece of advice he gives in the chapter. He basically says, hey, hang in there. Stick with it. Don't fall away like the people in the desert. Be like the people who entered into the promised land. Persevere in your faith. He givesverance is virtually impossible without community. Perseverance is virtually impossible without community. And I just included that word virtually there because I was scared to say totally impossible without community, but that's really what I think. And I love it. Brothers and sisters, encourage one another in your faith today as long as it is called today. Every day, encourage the people around you. You may be listening to this sermon and think, Nate, you know, listen, I know other people are faltering in their faith. I've certainly moved through those seasons in my life, but I feel good right now. Me and God, like I'm walking with God and there's things I need to improve on, but like my faith is strong and that's great. Use that faith to encourage the people around you every day as long as it's called today. If you're struggling in your faith, if it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, then I did. I'm just kidding. If it feels like I wrote this sermon for you, if you feel weak in your faith, then draw on the strength of others. Look at other people who might be weak and say, listen, we don't have this all figured out, but let's encourage each other. There's practical ways to encourage each other. I don't want to get caught up in doing that because you're smart adults and you can figure that out. But I will say that one of the things that I'm in the practice of doing when I'm really focused on God and when I'm pursuing Him well is in my quiet times and in my prayers, He will always bring people to my mind. Oftentimes it's folks I haven't thought about in a number of months or a year or more. And I try to be obedient to sit down and to text them or to sit down and write them an email and just let them know I'm thinking about them and I'm praying for them. And you'd be surprised the number of times I get an email back that says, man, I can't believe the Lord put you on my heart this morning. This is what I'm dealing with. So I would leave you today with two encouragements. Let the message from Hebrews 3 and 4 echo down through the millennia to you and hang in there with your faith. Persevere. Don't walk away. Face your doubts. Face your fears. Face your grief. Persevere in your faith. One of the ways we can do that is to live lives that require it. The other way that we do that is to encourage those around us to live out their faith today as long as it is called today. This is something I think that grace is so good at. Let's lean on our community and use our community not just to make people feel welcome, not just to make people feel loved, but let us use and leverage our community to encourage one another in our faith. Let's infuse our friendships with spiritual encouragement. And let's be obedient and inspired, obedient to and inspired by the message of Hebrews 3 and 4. My prayer for you this week is that if any of you are on the brink of walking away, if any of you have been struggling in your faith, that this would be a week that encourages you to hang in there. And that the people around you would come around you even without you saying anything to them and they would encourage you in your faith today as long as it's called today. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for you. We are grateful for how big you are. We are grateful for how much you love us, for how much you strengthen us. God, I pray that we would see the shoulders that we stand on, the generations that come before us and the storms that they have weathered, that we would be heartened by that and that we would stand firm in our faith lest we fall away. God, for those of us for whom our faith is in atrophy, which is such an easy thing now, would you help us and show us how to choose lives that require faith? That force us to lean on you, knowing that if you don't come through, we will fall. God, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We know that it is in him that we can hope, that that is the hope that will not put us to shame, that that is the faith that we can have. I pray that if anyone doesn't know who he is, that they would today. For those of us who do know God but are tempted to walk away, would you help us to stand firm, pick us up by attending angels and draw our souls near to you even as we sing here in a minute. It's in your son's name that we pray these things. Amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. I'll be right there at those double doors. Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself and teach me your name and give me about three or four weeks and I'll try to remember it. A big thank you to Kyle, our worship pastor, who stepped in for me last week. About 6 a.m. last Sunday morning, I had been up most of the night and texted Gibby, our worship pastor, hey man, I'm not going to make it. And I went back through some sermons and I found one from last January where I talked about community. I knew it was going to be small group Sunday, so I said this will be appropriate. I said just show this one from last January and we'll be fine. And so then I turned on the TV around 10 o'clock just to see how things were going, and I was as surprised as you to see Kyle up here once the bumper video got done. But he did a great job. I'm so grateful for him. It's kind of a rite of passage as a teacher and communicator to find out the morning of that you're actually preaching that day. And so it's a good experience for everybody. But I'm grateful to him. This week, we're going to continue right on in our series. I was going to preach about marriage last week and prayers for our marriage. And we decided to continue in that series. Next week, we're going to do prayers for our finances, and then we're going to get into a series in Mark that's going to carry us all the way through Easter. So I'm very much looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in the Gospel of Mark with you. But this morning, we look at prayers, a prayer for our marriages. And I don't often do sermons on marriage. And I'll be honest with you, the main reason I don't often specifically target marriage in a church service, probably to our detriment. I should probably do it more. But the main reason I don't is just because I know that even though, as I look out, most of us in this room are married. I hope happily so. Most of us are married, but I'm also aware that we have single people in our congregation as well. And some of you are single right now by choice. You'd like to be married one day, but you're not yet, and that's fine. Or you'd like to be married again someday, and you're not right now, and that's okay. Some of you are widows or widowers, and for different reasons and different walks of life, we have single people in our midst. And so in doing a sermon on marriage, I always worry about ostracizing that part of our population, and so I'm sorry for that. So this morning, I'm going to unapologetically focus on marriage and what God's role for marriage is and what our purpose within our marriages are according to Scripture. And so I would say to you, if you're a single person this morning who's listening to me, if you're watching online and you haven't turned it off yet, I would say if you're not married and you want to be, then hang on to this for the kind of marriage that you want and the kind of spouse that you want to find, the kind of spouse that you want to be. If you're not married and you don't want to be, then the best I can do is to say hang on to this so you can advise your married friends or just open up the Bible and start reading it for the next 30 minutes. That'll be great for you too. With that caveat, let's approach this topic of marriage and ask ourselves, what is God's purpose for marriage? And what is our role supposed to be within our marriages? Now, I don't think that there's any passage that addresses God's purpose for marriage and our role within marriage more clearly than Ephesians chapter 5. Really starting, I believe, in verse 21. Yes, verse 21 through the end of the chapter in verse 32. Now, in Ephesians, sorry, Ephesians chapter 5. In Ephesians and in Colossians and in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes about what theologians refer to as the household codes. In Christ, in church, in this new way of life, in this new way of understanding faith, here are the codes by which we should live within our households. Here's how wives and husbands should interact and children and parents should interact. And there's even a portion about slaves and masters and how they should interact. And so he introduces what we refer to as the household codes. And these, we should understand, are revolutionary for the time. Because at this point in history, it's a heavily patriarchal society. And marriage is really a one-way street. Marriage is really about the man. The woman is ancillary to the marriage. She's almost very close to property, if not just out-and-out property. And so it's within that context that these household codes are introduced. And what we see is that they are revolutionary for the time in which they are introduced. But for us this morning, as we look at them, I want us to be thinking, what's God's purpose for marriage? What does God want to see happen in my marriage? And what is my role within that marriage? How does God want to use me to bring about his desired outcome for us and for my spouse? And again, I don't think that this issue is addressed anywhere more clearly than it is in Ephesians chapter 5. So I want to read to you, beginning in verse one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. But I am talking about Christ and the church. In the verse 33, however, each one of you must also, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. There's a lot packed in there. We could do a series from those verses. But I want us to see the main priority for marriage, What Paul depicts, we believe through the instruction of God, as the main purpose for marriage, which is to prepare the bride for the bridegroom. Which is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it, that he might prepare it, wash it, so that it might be presented without blemish or spot to God on the day of atonement, on the day of glory, that we might present one another as blameless to God at the end of this life. And so here's what I'm going to do with this passage. And I just want to admit this up front so we all know what I'm doing. I've always tried to teach you like you are intelligent adults who have the Holy Spirit. Most of you are adults. Most of you are intelligent. And if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to talk to you that way. I am taking an interpretive and theological license in my application of this passage this morning. This passage on its surface seems to be talking directly to the husbands with the line at the end that says, and wives seek that you respect your husbands. But what I believe about this passage is that there is an implied reciprocity. That if it is my job as a husband to present my wife without blemish or spot, to do what I can to prepare her for heaven, to do what I can to love her towards Christ, then it is likewise the responsibility of my wife to love me towards Jesus. That there is a reciprocital expectation in this passage. I don't even know if reciprocital is a word, but there you go. There's that expectation in this passage, I believe, that both parties would seek to love each other towards Christ. And if you can't go there with me, and you go, listen, man, on the surface, it seems like it's talking to the husbands. That's how I'm going to take it at face value. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm just talking to the husbands today. But by the way, husbands, you don't have to respect your wives because there's no reciprocity in the passage. But that's the license that I'm going to take is that this is for both of us. And if it's for both of us, here's what this passage clearly says is the responsibility of each spouse in a marriage. Okay. This is the purpose of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to sanctify you, to make you more like Christ in character. I'm going to sit more on that in a minute, to make you more like Christ in character, to move you through this spirit, this process of spiritual maturation. And that as such, as the spouse, here's what this passage is teaching us. And we're going to unpack this. You, husbands, you, wives, if you're married, you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's lives. If you're married, this passage teaches us that you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's life. Now, let's stop and talk about this word sanctification, because this is one of those spongy church words that we hear a lot, and you church people probably know that word, you've heard it, but if I were to make you stand up right now and be like, Karen, why don't you stand up and tell us what sanctification means? You'd be like, oh my gosh, I hate you. I've never come back to this church in my whole life, right? Nobody wants to do that right now. But it's a word that shows up again and again in Scripture. It's a word that is referred to again and again in Scripture. And it's a summary word for what happens during our life. So it's important that we understand what sanctification is. It's a very simple definition, and there's no blank for this, but if you want to write it down because it's helpful, you can write this down. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. We see throughout Scripture these encouragements that we should be Christ-like, that we should be like Jesus. We pray and we sing, more of you and less of me. More of you, Christ, less of me. If all I ever get is you, that's good enough. I want more of you, less of me. We pray that we would become Christ-like. We pray for our children to become Christ-like. These are all references to what Scripture calls sanctification, the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is an unavoidable portion of the salvation process. See, a lot of us think of salvation as this inflection point, this point in time, this moment in time in which we become saved. But scripture actually teaches us that salvation is a process that begins at the point of justification or some would argue predestination and then continues through sanctification until glorification. And here's how I know that I'm right about this. I'm not making it up. That's basically a direct quote of Romans chapter 8 verse 29. We know verse 28. We love that verse. For all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Great. But 29 says, for those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he justified. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. Those whom he sanctified, he glorified. So let's look at that process. Jesus, God, through his spirit, calls us to himself. He calls us with his Holy Spirit. He chisels away at our blind and darkened heart. He softens us to the good news and the mystery of the gospel until one day our soul is in a place where we're willing to accept Christ as our Savior. We repent of who we thought Jesus was. We accept who Jesus says he is, and we step forward in faith. This looks a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different traditions. We pray the believer's prayer or that we pray the sinner's prayer. We ask Jesus into our heart. We confess Jesus as our savior. However it is you want to phrase it, this for many of us is the point of salvation. It's what we think of as the time we got saved, but that's really the justification process. So God, God calls us then at that moment of what we would call our salvation, that's really justification. That's when we accept the blood of Christ as a cover over our sins. And God looks at us and he does not judge us based on our actions. He judges us based on the righteousness of Christ and says that he sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. This is Isaiah chapter 1 where he puts his arm around us and he says, Come now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. At the point of justification, Jesus, by hanging on the cross, has made our sins as white as snow. He has covered over us with our righteousness. And God in heaven looks down on us and he sees not us, but he sees his Son and we are justified in the court of divine righteousness and made worthy of heaven through the blood of Christ. When we accept that, we are justified. After we are justified, we are sanctified. After we are sanctified, we are glorified. We are glorified when we meet our Father in heaven and our glorified bodies, when we do not need faith anymore because we're looking our Savior in the eye. We are glorified in heaven. So that means that between the time of justification in your life, the moment you became a Christian, to the point of glorification, the moment you meet God in eternity forever. Everything that happens in between that is your sanctification. That God is using day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade to slowly chisel you into someone who is more like him in character, whose heart beats along with him for the things he wants. We are told that if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, that walk with God through the process of sanctification, our heart begins to beat with his so that the things that we desire are the things that he desires and he brings those about for the good of us and those who are called according to his purpose. This is the process of sanctification. Spending our entire life growing closer and closer and closer to Jesus. Now this process can be thwarted. It can get short-circuited by sin and by other ailments, by the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, according to Hebrews 12, verse 1. This process can get sidelined. But as Christians, we are perpetually going through the process of sanctification until we enter glorification. This means that in our 70s, our faith and our depths of insight and understanding and our knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil and being filled with the knowledge of God and the maturity with which we walk and the love that we express and the selflessness that we live with and the humility in which we walk should be vastly different than it was in our 30s. Because God has had 40 years to sanctify us and make us more like his son in character. So that in our 70s we ought to walk with so much more wisdom and godliness than we did in our 30s. Not because we can't be godly in our 30s, but just because he's had 40 more years to sanctify us. That's the call of the Christian life. And what Paul is saying about marriage is that your spouse ought to be the chief agent of sanctification in your life. Meaning, your husband or your wife has been placed in your life by God to be the primary tool he uses to chisel away at your rough edges and reveal within you the person that he's always wanted you to become. They are the primary tool that God uses to chisel away the elements of the world that are still a part of you so that your character might emerge as more Christ-like. That is the purpose of marriage. If you are married, God's primary purpose for you in that marriage is to use you as the primary tool that he chooses to make your spouse more like him in character. That is the role of a husband or a wife. And nothing short of it. And here's what I think is interesting about that point. Here's what I think is interesting. I think that if I were to sit down with any of you over coffee who are married. And say, do you consider yourself a good wife? Do you consider yourself a good husband? You would say yes or no. You would say, you know, for the most part, I think I'm pretty good, or gosh, I haven't been doing great lately, or some of you, I hope, would say, yeah, I think I'm nailing it. That's great. Some of you would be like, I'm failing miserably. Okay. Whatever your answer was in how you're doing, good or bad, neutral or not, the next question is the important one. How good are you doing at being a husband? I think I'm doing okay here. I think I've got some things to work on there. I think I can get better. But overall, I think I've been pretty good. Okay. Why? That's the important question. Why do you think you're a good husband? Why do you think you're a bad husband? Why do you think you've been a good wife? What's your criteria? Why do you think you've been a bad wife? I think a lot of us, if we had to make lists, even if we take your marriage out of it, and I were to ask you, what makes a husband a good husband? If I were to ask you, think of somebody that you think has a great marriage, and they're a great husband, and they're a great wife. What makes them great? What are the qualities? I think we would say things like, well, he loves her really well. He's unselfish with her. He's patient with her. They've been married for 40 years. He's faithful to her. She's faithful to him. She's patient with him. She supports him. Or if they're bad, we would say, well, he's selfish. He doesn't see her. He pretends that the yard needs work for eight hours on a Saturday while she deals with three-year-olds. She doesn't support him. She gets on to him all the time. He ignores her. How far down the list, here's the important part. If I were to ask you what makes you or what makes that person a good husband or a good wife? How many items would you list off before you said that man's a good husband because the way that he loves his wife loves her closer to Jesus? That man's a good husband because his wife is an incredible believer because of the way that he's loved her towards him. How many of you, how far down the list would we have to get before you said that woman is a wonderful wife to that man? Because she has been used by God over and over again and she steps into her role of sanctification in his life. And because of her influence in his life, that man is walking more closely with Jesus than he would have without her. How far down our list of good or bad husband or wife criteria do we need to go before we get to the very first criteria laid out by God in Scripture? Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Present her holy and blameless before the throne. That's tops. That's the number one thing. That's the standard. And yet, so many of us, and listen, well, I'll say this in a second. So many of us have that so far down our list of what a responsible spouse should do that it wouldn't even go mentioned, that we haven't even thought of it. And here's what I want to be really honest with you about, okay? As I prepared this sermon, and I was confronted with this standard from Scripture of what my role as a husband is. I was deeply, deeply convicted. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm not saying that for show. I'm not saying that like, well, you know, we could all improve a little bit. I could too, so I'm going to act convicted here so you feel safe in your conviction. No. I was deeply convicted and went home and apologized to Jen for not being the husband I was going to preach that I needed to be. I apologized to her because I'm about to come out. I might not be much, but I like to think I have some integrity. And I'm not going to come in here and look you men in the eye and tell you what Scripture calls you to be, knowing good and well I've fallen short of that in my own house. So the first thing I did is I went home. I didn't know she was going to be in the fourth and fifth grade room this morning. That makes this part a lot easier. I thought she was going to be sitting right there. And that if I didn't apologize to her, she was going to be sitting there going, what are you talking about, man? There have been seasons where I have done this by God's grace. There have also been seasons when I have not. And so if you are convicted this morning as I lay out the standard that is set forth in scripture for what marriage is and what a spouse ought to be in that marriage. If that's hard to hear and you feel that you've fallen short, I am the captain of your team, pal. I'm with you. I am not preaching this as if I were on some marital mountaintop and I figured it out and I would like for you to get on my level. I am preaching this here. Saying, hey, this is what scripture calls us to. We've all got to step up together. This is what we're called to. So let's be that. To that end, as I was talking through this with Jen this week, she brought up, yeah, that's good, that makes sense. I like that. If both parties are spiritually engaged, it's a really good and helpful thing to tell the couples of grace. I like it. But what do you tell the spouse who is spiritually engaged, whose spouse is spiritually disengaged? To put a finer point on it, more often than not, what do you tell the women who care about Jesus and would really, really love for their husband to be this for them and are trying desperately to be that for their husband, but they can't get his attention? Now, sometimes it's flipped. Sometimes it's the man who's spiritually engaged and the woman who's spiritually disengaged, but that's the exception in my experience in churches. So what do we tell those people? Well, I would tell you two things. First, sometimes when we're unequally yoked in that way, it's our job, and 1 Corinthians speaks to this, it's our job to quietly, patiently love them towards Christ until the Holy Spirit convicts them and they're able to come home and apologize and then step into who they need to be. Sometimes it's our job to patiently wait and pray and love them towards Jesus when they're not able to love us towards Jesus. And we wait on them to step into what they're supposed to be. The other thing I would say is this. I'm going to quote, I wish Keith Cathcart were here, one of my buddies. Keck, you'll have to tell him to listen to this sermon. Because I'm going to quote Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, and Keith is going to lose his ever-loving mind. I quoted Tomlin in the sermon. But Coach Tomlin is a coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He's an incredible leader of men. He's an incredible leader. He's one of the all-time greatest coaches. I have a large amount of respect for him, and he's got a lot of these quick little one-liners that are really good. But one of the things I like about what he says about Pittsburgh Steelers football is the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. The standard in Pittsburgh is Super Bowls. We do not settle for divisional championships, which means, those of you who are not sports inclined, marginal success. We do not settle for marginal success. We are number one or bust. If you don't know what the Super Bowl is, this is America, man. Get with it. Also, go Bills. Yeah, there we go, baby. Mike Thomas says the standard is the standard. Meaning, we have the highest possible standard in our organization. We have the highest standard for what we want to achieve as a team, and we have the highest possible standard for what we expect from each position group and each portion of this team. The standard is the standard, and the standard does not change based on your feelings about your inability to reach it. The standard does not change based on previous performance. The standard does not change based upon how you feel. The standard is the standard. We confront it with honesty and we meet it or don't, but the standard doesn't change. That's how we will approach marriage. The standard is the standard. And the standard is that it is my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus. That's the standard. If you are married, whether you knew it or not when you stood at the altar, what you accepted is this mantle. It is now and forevermore my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus Christ. And here's why it's so important to accept this mantle because people come and go in our lives, man. Jen and I have been together since I was 20 and she was 19. I'm 43. She's 32. I'm just kidding. I'm just not going to tell you her age. I'm 43. We've been together a long time. There have been people, men, in that season, in those years, in those decades, who have come into my life and have been more of a catalyst for change and sanctification in my life than she was at the time. But that flares out. People come and go. And sometimes God in his grace uses them to compel you and to convict you in wonderful ways towards a deeper relationship with him. But day in and day out, year in and year out, she is the presence in my life. She is the one who sees me wake up and go to sleep. She is the one that God has placed there to be used as an agent to change me. And when she does, and when she engages in that, it is so powerful, I can't describe it to you. And that is our sacred duty, to love our spouses towards Jesus. And listen, if you feel like that's too tall an order, if you feel like you haven't done that in a long time and you're not sure if you can do that and you don't know how to do that, what I would say to you is I love you so much and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but what I would say to you is listen, the standard is the standard. That's your sacred duty. Accept it or don't. But if you do not accept your sacred duty to love your spouse towards Christ and be the chief agent of sanctification in their life, then you are absconding on your commitment as a husband or a wife. And if this brings upon you a deep conviction, good. Sit in it. Your wife and your husband or your husband will benefit from that. React to it. Respond to it. Accept it. Step into it. Your kids will be better off for your conviction and your acceptance of this mantle. You will have a marriage that they look at as worthy of emulation if you will receive this mantle, this standard from Paul. It is our sacred duty to love our spouses towards Jesus. Full stop. That's what we must do. Now, as I wrap up, I want to give you guys just a few practical things to do to keep this standard the standard in your marriage. I want to give you a couple. So we go, okay, I accept this. It is my job to love my spouse towards Christ. I accept that mantle. I want to do that. I'm going to be the chief agent of sanctification in their life that I believe you. I want to do it. Let's go. What do I do? What does that practically look like? This is, I'm going to give you four things. So obviously there's more to do than this. This is not an exhaustive list, but four quick things that you can do in your marriages starting right now, starting today to love your spouse towards Christ. Four quick things. Number one, hold them accountable for accountability. Hold them accountable for accountability. I have never thought it's the best idea for your husband or your wife to be your accountability partner. If you decide that you want to develop a new discipline of waking up every day and praying and reading the Bible, spending time in God's word and spending time in God's presence through prayer, if that's what you want to do, probably don't tell your wife that this is what I'm going to do. And when I don't do it, I would like you to call me out on it because of all the other things that exist in your life that she nagged you about and that you get mad about. Let's not add one more. All right. Similarly, wives don't need husbands hounding them about one more thing that they were supposed to do. All right. So let's, let's let other people hold us accountable for things like that. And let's let our spouses hold us accountable for accountability. I've told you before, and this was actually the sermon that I thought you were going to watch last week. It's okay that you didn't. But in that sermon from last year, I talked about the idea of sacred spaces, having spaces in our life, two or three people at the most who know everything about us, who love you and love Jesus and are given permission to tell you the truth about yourself. I shared with you then that there's two men that I meet with, two men from the church that I meet with pretty much once a month. And the very first thing we ask is, what are you struggling with? What's stopping you from following God as well as you can right now? What's going on in your life? Is there anything that you need to share? And it's an opportunity to be held accountable for anything and everything that may be going on in our life that is keeping us from pursuing Jesus the way we need to do it. Jen needs to hold me accountable to go and meet with them and tell them the truth, but she doesn't need to be my primary accountability agent in that, if that makes sense. But spouses, responsible ones, hold each other accountable for accountability. So a wonderful conversation to have in your car at lunch, tonight when the kids go down, whenever, might be where is your accountability in your life and how can we encourage each other to find that more. The second thing we can do to love our spouse towards Christ and accept this mantle is to take their spiritual temperature. Just take their spiritual temperature. Just know how they're doing. If I were to ask any of you who are married, how's the spiritual health of your wife? How's the spiritual health of your husband? How are they doing? How good of an answer could you give me? How good of an answer would you like to be able to give? If you're going to see yourself as sincerely the chief agent of sanctification in their life as bestowed upon you by God, how good of an answer to that question do you think you need to be able to give? And is it good enough right now? All right, moving quickly. Next thing. Love them sacrificially, not selfishly. Love them selflessly, not selfishly. Often we fall into these habits as married people where we love transactionally. I'm going to love you like this, so you love me like this. A husband might think to himself, I'm going to be on the Saturday. I'm going to be present with the kids on Saturday. I'm going to love by cleaning things I haven't been asked to clean. I'm going to do everything I need to do. I'm going to do all the things that she likes for me to do. I'm going to love her in that way so that maybe later when the kids go down, she can express love in a different way. That's what I'm going to do. And listen, that's a sound strategy. Okay, tried and true. Stick with it. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there needs to be more to love than that. Loving selfishly is loving with the expectation of reciprocity. I'm going to love in this way, and they're going to love me in this way. But loving selflessly says, no, I'm going to love them because I love them and I want them to see someone that loves them no matter what. We have a quote in our hallway at the top of our stairs from a guy named W.H. Autzen. I have no idea who that is. I've never, ever Googled him a single time. I just really like this quote that I saw at someone else's house, so I had it done for us. And it says, if greater affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. That's sacrificial selfless love in a marriage. If equal affection cannot be, let the greater love be me. So if it's got to be disproportionate, let it be disproportionate in their favor. And I'll tell you how I've seen this lived out. I have a very good friend whose wife is going through, this is understated, an extremely traumatic time in her life that doesn't have anything to do with him. It's just a really, really difficult time. And because of that, rightly so, she has nothing in her cup left to be the mother that she needs to be to their three children. She has nothing in her cup left to be the wife that she needs to be to him. She has nothing to give. And he is choosing day in and day out to love her, to stay faithful to her, to serve her, to step up and to care for the kids and to love her in that way without expectation of reciprocity, without expecting that she's going to turn around and thank him for that. He's just loving her to get her through this season because he loves her. That's loving sacrificially, not selfishly. Love for love's sake. Last one. This one's so simple. It's so simple. Pray for them and with them. Pray for them and with them. Very simply, I'm not going to belabor this because I don't need to. How can we claim to have accepted the mantle of chief agent of sanctification in the life of our spouse if we can't remember the last time we prayed for them? If we're not praying for them every day? How can the Holy Spirit speak into our hearts and in our minds what they need and where they're at and how to best pray for them if we don't give him space to do that. How can we claim that Jesus is the center of our home, the center of our marriage, and that our marriage is being used to sanctify one another towards Christ if we're not praying with each other with a great degree of regularity? I don't need to belabor this point. You guys know it's right. I know it's right. If we want to love our spouse towards Christ, then we ought to pray for them and with them with a high degree of regularity. Yes? So that's my hope and prayer for you and for your marriages. That you'll accept the standard as the standard. And the standard is you are to be the chief agent of sanctification, of the process of spiritual maturity, becoming more like Christ in character in your spouse's life, and that it is your sacred duty to step into that role. So I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray that you would accept that mantle and that you would walk with humility and meekness as you seek to love your spouse towards Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and how you love us. God, we thank you for our husbands and our wives. God, I thank you publicly for my wife and the ways that she has faithfully loved me towards you. Help me love her towards you. God, for those of us who walk away convicted, I pray that we would sit in that conviction, that we would accept it, that we would be spurned on by it. And that from today, you would produce in all of us an ardent desire to see our spouse come to know you more. Help the husbands in this room to love their wives sacrificially. To love them well, to pray for them. To lay down their lives for them. Help the wives in this room to love their husbands faithfully and earnestly, believing in them as they pray them and love them towards you. God, be with the marriages in this room. We praise you for the good ones that reflect you. We lift up the hard ones and ask that they would reflect you. And we ask that you would be with us as we go from here. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. I'll be right there at those double doors. Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself and teach me your name and give me about three or four weeks and I'll try to remember it. A big thank you to Kyle, our worship pastor, who stepped in for me last week. About 6 a.m. last Sunday morning, I had been up most of the night and texted Gibby, our worship pastor, hey man, I'm not going to make it. And I went back through some sermons and I found one from last January where I talked about community. I knew it was going to be small group Sunday, so I said this will be appropriate. I said just show this one from last January and we'll be fine. And so then I turned on the TV around 10 o'clock just to see how things were going, and I was as surprised as you to see Kyle up here once the bumper video got done. But he did a great job. I'm so grateful for him. It's kind of a rite of passage as a teacher and communicator to find out the morning of that you're actually preaching that day. And so it's a good experience for everybody. But I'm grateful to him. This week, we're going to continue right on in our series. I was going to preach about marriage last week and prayers for our marriage. And we decided to continue in that series. Next week, we're going to do prayers for our finances, and then we're going to get into a series in Mark that's going to carry us all the way through Easter. So I'm very much looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in the Gospel of Mark with you. But this morning, we look at prayers, a prayer for our marriages. And I don't often do sermons on marriage. And I'll be honest with you, the main reason I don't often specifically target marriage in a church service, probably to our detriment. I should probably do it more. But the main reason I don't is just because I know that even though, as I look out, most of us in this room are married. I hope happily so. Most of us are married, but I'm also aware that we have single people in our congregation as well. And some of you are single right now by choice. You'd like to be married one day, but you're not yet, and that's fine. Or you'd like to be married again someday, and you're not right now, and that's okay. Some of you are widows or widowers, and for different reasons and different walks of life, we have single people in our midst. And so in doing a sermon on marriage, I always worry about ostracizing that part of our population, and so I'm sorry for that. So this morning, I'm going to unapologetically focus on marriage and what God's role for marriage is and what our purpose within our marriages are according to Scripture. And so I would say to you, if you're a single person this morning who's listening to me, if you're watching online and you haven't turned it off yet, I would say if you're not married and you want to be, then hang on to this for the kind of marriage that you want and the kind of spouse that you want to find, the kind of spouse that you want to be. If you're not married and you don't want to be, then the best I can do is to say hang on to this so you can advise your married friends or just open up the Bible and start reading it for the next 30 minutes. That'll be great for you too. With that caveat, let's approach this topic of marriage and ask ourselves, what is God's purpose for marriage? And what is our role supposed to be within our marriages? Now, I don't think that there's any passage that addresses God's purpose for marriage and our role within marriage more clearly than Ephesians chapter 5. Really starting, I believe, in verse 21. Yes, verse 21 through the end of the chapter in verse 32. Now, in Ephesians, sorry, Ephesians chapter 5. In Ephesians and in Colossians and in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes about what theologians refer to as the household codes. In Christ, in church, in this new way of life, in this new way of understanding faith, here are the codes by which we should live within our households. Here's how wives and husbands should interact and children and parents should interact. And there's even a portion about slaves and masters and how they should interact. And so he introduces what we refer to as the household codes. And these, we should understand, are revolutionary for the time. Because at this point in history, it's a heavily patriarchal society. And marriage is really a one-way street. Marriage is really about the man. The woman is ancillary to the marriage. She's almost very close to property, if not just out-and-out property. And so it's within that context that these household codes are introduced. And what we see is that they are revolutionary for the time in which they are introduced. But for us this morning, as we look at them, I want us to be thinking, what's God's purpose for marriage? What does God want to see happen in my marriage? And what is my role within that marriage? How does God want to use me to bring about his desired outcome for us and for my spouse? And again, I don't think that this issue is addressed anywhere more clearly than it is in Ephesians chapter 5. So I want to read to you, beginning in verse one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. But I am talking about Christ and the church. In the verse 33, however, each one of you must also, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. There's a lot packed in there. We could do a series from those verses. But I want us to see the main priority for marriage, What Paul depicts, we believe through the instruction of God, as the main purpose for marriage, which is to prepare the bride for the bridegroom. Which is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it, that he might prepare it, wash it, so that it might be presented without blemish or spot to God on the day of atonement, on the day of glory, that we might present one another as blameless to God at the end of this life. And so here's what I'm going to do with this passage. And I just want to admit this up front so we all know what I'm doing. I've always tried to teach you like you are intelligent adults who have the Holy Spirit. Most of you are adults. Most of you are intelligent. And if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to talk to you that way. I am taking an interpretive and theological license in my application of this passage this morning. This passage on its surface seems to be talking directly to the husbands with the line at the end that says, and wives seek that you respect your husbands. But what I believe about this passage is that there is an implied reciprocity. That if it is my job as a husband to present my wife without blemish or spot, to do what I can to prepare her for heaven, to do what I can to love her towards Christ, then it is likewise the responsibility of my wife to love me towards Jesus. That there is a reciprocital expectation in this passage. I don't even know if reciprocital is a word, but there you go. There's that expectation in this passage, I believe, that both parties would seek to love each other towards Christ. And if you can't go there with me, and you go, listen, man, on the surface, it seems like it's talking to the husbands. That's how I'm going to take it at face value. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm just talking to the husbands today. But by the way, husbands, you don't have to respect your wives because there's no reciprocity in the passage. But that's the license that I'm going to take is that this is for both of us. And if it's for both of us, here's what this passage clearly says is the responsibility of each spouse in a marriage. Okay. This is the purpose of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to sanctify you, to make you more like Christ in character. I'm going to sit more on that in a minute, to make you more like Christ in character, to move you through this spirit, this process of spiritual maturation. And that as such, as the spouse, here's what this passage is teaching us. And we're going to unpack this. You, husbands, you, wives, if you're married, you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's lives. If you're married, this passage teaches us that you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's life. Now, let's stop and talk about this word sanctification, because this is one of those spongy church words that we hear a lot, and you church people probably know that word, you've heard it, but if I were to make you stand up right now and be like, Karen, why don't you stand up and tell us what sanctification means? You'd be like, oh my gosh, I hate you. I've never come back to this church in my whole life, right? Nobody wants to do that right now. But it's a word that shows up again and again in Scripture. It's a word that is referred to again and again in Scripture. And it's a summary word for what happens during our life. So it's important that we understand what sanctification is. It's a very simple definition, and there's no blank for this, but if you want to write it down because it's helpful, you can write this down. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. We see throughout Scripture these encouragements that we should be Christ-like, that we should be like Jesus. We pray and we sing, more of you and less of me. More of you, Christ, less of me. If all I ever get is you, that's good enough. I want more of you, less of me. We pray that we would become Christ-like. We pray for our children to become Christ-like. These are all references to what Scripture calls sanctification, the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is an unavoidable portion of the salvation process. See, a lot of us think of salvation as this inflection point, this point in time, this moment in time in which we become saved. But scripture actually teaches us that salvation is a process that begins at the point of justification or some would argue predestination and then continues through sanctification until glorification. And here's how I know that I'm right about this. I'm not making it up. That's basically a direct quote of Romans chapter 8 verse 29. We know verse 28. We love that verse. For all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Great. But 29 says, for those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he justified. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. Those whom he sanctified, he glorified. So let's look at that process. Jesus, God, through his spirit, calls us to himself. He calls us with his Holy Spirit. He chisels away at our blind and darkened heart. He softens us to the good news and the mystery of the gospel until one day our soul is in a place where we're willing to accept Christ as our Savior. We repent of who we thought Jesus was. We accept who Jesus says he is, and we step forward in faith. This looks a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different traditions. We pray the believer's prayer or that we pray the sinner's prayer. We ask Jesus into our heart. We confess Jesus as our savior. However it is you want to phrase it, this for many of us is the point of salvation. It's what we think of as the time we got saved, but that's really the justification process. So God, God calls us then at that moment of what we would call our salvation, that's really justification. That's when we accept the blood of Christ as a cover over our sins. And God looks at us and he does not judge us based on our actions. He judges us based on the righteousness of Christ and says that he sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. This is Isaiah chapter 1 where he puts his arm around us and he says, Come now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. At the point of justification, Jesus, by hanging on the cross, has made our sins as white as snow. He has covered over us with our righteousness. And God in heaven looks down on us and he sees not us, but he sees his Son and we are justified in the court of divine righteousness and made worthy of heaven through the blood of Christ. When we accept that, we are justified. After we are justified, we are sanctified. After we are sanctified, we are glorified. We are glorified when we meet our Father in heaven and our glorified bodies, when we do not need faith anymore because we're looking our Savior in the eye. We are glorified in heaven. So that means that between the time of justification in your life, the moment you became a Christian, to the point of glorification, the moment you meet God in eternity forever. Everything that happens in between that is your sanctification. That God is using day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade to slowly chisel you into someone who is more like him in character, whose heart beats along with him for the things he wants. We are told that if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, that walk with God through the process of sanctification, our heart begins to beat with his so that the things that we desire are the things that he desires and he brings those about for the good of us and those who are called according to his purpose. This is the process of sanctification. Spending our entire life growing closer and closer and closer to Jesus. Now this process can be thwarted. It can get short-circuited by sin and by other ailments, by the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, according to Hebrews 12, verse 1. This process can get sidelined. But as Christians, we are perpetually going through the process of sanctification until we enter glorification. This means that in our 70s, our faith and our depths of insight and understanding and our knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil and being filled with the knowledge of God and the maturity with which we walk and the love that we express and the selflessness that we live with and the humility in which we walk should be vastly different than it was in our 30s. Because God has had 40 years to sanctify us and make us more like his son in character. So that in our 70s we ought to walk with so much more wisdom and godliness than we did in our 30s. Not because we can't be godly in our 30s, but just because he's had 40 more years to sanctify us. That's the call of the Christian life. And what Paul is saying about marriage is that your spouse ought to be the chief agent of sanctification in your life. Meaning, your husband or your wife has been placed in your life by God to be the primary tool he uses to chisel away at your rough edges and reveal within you the person that he's always wanted you to become. They are the primary tool that God uses to chisel away the elements of the world that are still a part of you so that your character might emerge as more Christ-like. That is the purpose of marriage. If you are married, God's primary purpose for you in that marriage is to use you as the primary tool that he chooses to make your spouse more like him in character. That is the role of a husband or a wife. And nothing short of it. And here's what I think is interesting about that point. Here's what I think is interesting. I think that if I were to sit down with any of you over coffee who are married. And say, do you consider yourself a good wife? Do you consider yourself a good husband? You would say yes or no. You would say, you know, for the most part, I think I'm pretty good, or gosh, I haven't been doing great lately, or some of you, I hope, would say, yeah, I think I'm nailing it. That's great. Some of you would be like, I'm failing miserably. Okay. Whatever your answer was in how you're doing, good or bad, neutral or not, the next question is the important one. How good are you doing at being a husband? I think I'm doing okay here. I think I've got some things to work on there. I think I can get better. But overall, I think I've been pretty good. Okay. Why? That's the important question. Why do you think you're a good husband? Why do you think you're a bad husband? Why do you think you've been a good wife? What's your criteria? Why do you think you've been a bad wife? I think a lot of us, if we had to make lists, even if we take your marriage out of it, and I were to ask you, what makes a husband a good husband? If I were to ask you, think of somebody that you think has a great marriage, and they're a great husband, and they're a great wife. What makes them great? What are the qualities? I think we would say things like, well, he loves her really well. He's unselfish with her. He's patient with her. They've been married for 40 years. He's faithful to her. She's faithful to him. She's patient with him. She supports him. Or if they're bad, we would say, well, he's selfish. He doesn't see her. He pretends that the yard needs work for eight hours on a Saturday while she deals with three-year-olds. She doesn't support him. She gets on to him all the time. He ignores her. How far down the list, here's the important part. If I were to ask you what makes you or what makes that person a good husband or a good wife? How many items would you list off before you said that man's a good husband because the way that he loves his wife loves her closer to Jesus? That man's a good husband because his wife is an incredible believer because of the way that he's loved her towards him. How many of you, how far down the list would we have to get before you said that woman is a wonderful wife to that man? Because she has been used by God over and over again and she steps into her role of sanctification in his life. And because of her influence in his life, that man is walking more closely with Jesus than he would have without her. How far down our list of good or bad husband or wife criteria do we need to go before we get to the very first criteria laid out by God in Scripture? Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Present her holy and blameless before the throne. That's tops. That's the number one thing. That's the standard. And yet, so many of us, and listen, well, I'll say this in a second. So many of us have that so far down our list of what a responsible spouse should do that it wouldn't even go mentioned, that we haven't even thought of it. And here's what I want to be really honest with you about, okay? As I prepared this sermon, and I was confronted with this standard from Scripture of what my role as a husband is. I was deeply, deeply convicted. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm not saying that for show. I'm not saying that like, well, you know, we could all improve a little bit. I could too, so I'm going to act convicted here so you feel safe in your conviction. No. I was deeply convicted and went home and apologized to Jen for not being the husband I was going to preach that I needed to be. I apologized to her because I'm about to come out. I might not be much, but I like to think I have some integrity. And I'm not going to come in here and look you men in the eye and tell you what Scripture calls you to be, knowing good and well I've fallen short of that in my own house. So the first thing I did is I went home. I didn't know she was going to be in the fourth and fifth grade room this morning. That makes this part a lot easier. I thought she was going to be sitting right there. And that if I didn't apologize to her, she was going to be sitting there going, what are you talking about, man? There have been seasons where I have done this by God's grace. There have also been seasons when I have not. And so if you are convicted this morning as I lay out the standard that is set forth in scripture for what marriage is and what a spouse ought to be in that marriage. If that's hard to hear and you feel that you've fallen short, I am the captain of your team, pal. I'm with you. I am not preaching this as if I were on some marital mountaintop and I figured it out and I would like for you to get on my level. I am preaching this here. Saying, hey, this is what scripture calls us to. We've all got to step up together. This is what we're called to. So let's be that. To that end, as I was talking through this with Jen this week, she brought up, yeah, that's good, that makes sense. I like that. If both parties are spiritually engaged, it's a really good and helpful thing to tell the couples of grace. I like it. But what do you tell the spouse who is spiritually engaged, whose spouse is spiritually disengaged? To put a finer point on it, more often than not, what do you tell the women who care about Jesus and would really, really love for their husband to be this for them and are trying desperately to be that for their husband, but they can't get his attention? Now, sometimes it's flipped. Sometimes it's the man who's spiritually engaged and the woman who's spiritually disengaged, but that's the exception in my experience in churches. So what do we tell those people? Well, I would tell you two things. First, sometimes when we're unequally yoked in that way, it's our job, and 1 Corinthians speaks to this, it's our job to quietly, patiently love them towards Christ until the Holy Spirit convicts them and they're able to come home and apologize and then step into who they need to be. Sometimes it's our job to patiently wait and pray and love them towards Jesus when they're not able to love us towards Jesus. And we wait on them to step into what they're supposed to be. The other thing I would say is this. I'm going to quote, I wish Keith Cathcart were here, one of my buddies. Keck, you'll have to tell him to listen to this sermon. Because I'm going to quote Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, and Keith is going to lose his ever-loving mind. I quoted Tomlin in the sermon. But Coach Tomlin is a coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He's an incredible leader of men. He's an incredible leader. He's one of the all-time greatest coaches. I have a large amount of respect for him, and he's got a lot of these quick little one-liners that are really good. But one of the things I like about what he says about Pittsburgh Steelers football is the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. The standard in Pittsburgh is Super Bowls. We do not settle for divisional championships, which means, those of you who are not sports inclined, marginal success. We do not settle for marginal success. We are number one or bust. If you don't know what the Super Bowl is, this is America, man. Get with it. Also, go Bills. Yeah, there we go, baby. Mike Thomas says the standard is the standard. Meaning, we have the highest possible standard in our organization. We have the highest standard for what we want to achieve as a team, and we have the highest possible standard for what we expect from each position group and each portion of this team. The standard is the standard, and the standard does not change based on your feelings about your inability to reach it. The standard does not change based on previous performance. The standard does not change based upon how you feel. The standard is the standard. We confront it with honesty and we meet it or don't, but the standard doesn't change. That's how we will approach marriage. The standard is the standard. And the standard is that it is my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus. That's the standard. If you are married, whether you knew it or not when you stood at the altar, what you accepted is this mantle. It is now and forevermore my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus Christ. And here's why it's so important to accept this mantle because people come and go in our lives, man. Jen and I have been together since I was 20 and she was 19. I'm 43. She's 32. I'm just kidding. I'm just not going to tell you her age. I'm 43. We've been together a long time. There have been people, men, in that season, in those years, in those decades, who have come into my life and have been more of a catalyst for change and sanctification in my life than she was at the time. But that flares out. People come and go. And sometimes God in his grace uses them to compel you and to convict you in wonderful ways towards a deeper relationship with him. But day in and day out, year in and year out, she is the presence in my life. She is the one who sees me wake up and go to sleep. She is the one that God has placed there to be used as an agent to change me. And when she does, and when she engages in that, it is so powerful, I can't describe it to you. And that is our sacred duty, to love our spouses towards Jesus. And listen, if you feel like that's too tall an order, if you feel like you haven't done that in a long time and you're not sure if you can do that and you don't know how to do that, what I would say to you is I love you so much and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but what I would say to you is listen, the standard is the standard. That's your sacred duty. Accept it or don't. But if you do not accept your sacred duty to love your spouse towards Christ and be the chief agent of sanctification in their life, then you are absconding on your commitment as a husband or a wife. And if this brings upon you a deep conviction, good. Sit in it. Your wife and your husband or your husband will benefit from that. React to it. Respond to it. Accept it. Step into it. Your kids will be better off for your conviction and your acceptance of this mantle. You will have a marriage that they look at as worthy of emulation if you will receive this mantle, this standard from Paul. It is our sacred duty to love our spouses towards Jesus. Full stop. That's what we must do. Now, as I wrap up, I want to give you guys just a few practical things to do to keep this standard the standard in your marriage. I want to give you a couple. So we go, okay, I accept this. It is my job to love my spouse towards Christ. I accept that mantle. I want to do that. I'm going to be the chief agent of sanctification in their life that I believe you. I want to do it. Let's go. What do I do? What does that practically look like? This is, I'm going to give you four things. So obviously there's more to do than this. This is not an exhaustive list, but four quick things that you can do in your marriages starting right now, starting today to love your spouse towards Christ. Four quick things. Number one, hold them accountable for accountability. Hold them accountable for accountability. I have never thought it's the best idea for your husband or your wife to be your accountability partner. If you decide that you want to develop a new discipline of waking up every day and praying and reading the Bible, spending time in God's word and spending time in God's presence through prayer, if that's what you want to do, probably don't tell your wife that this is what I'm going to do. And when I don't do it, I would like you to call me out on it because of all the other things that exist in your life that she nagged you about and that you get mad about. Let's not add one more. All right. Similarly, wives don't need husbands hounding them about one more thing that they were supposed to do. All right. So let's, let's let other people hold us accountable for things like that. And let's let our spouses hold us accountable for accountability. I've told you before, and this was actually the sermon that I thought you were going to watch last week. It's okay that you didn't. But in that sermon from last year, I talked about the idea of sacred spaces, having spaces in our life, two or three people at the most who know everything about us, who love you and love Jesus and are given permission to tell you the truth about yourself. I shared with you then that there's two men that I meet with, two men from the church that I meet with pretty much once a month. And the very first thing we ask is, what are you struggling with? What's stopping you from following God as well as you can right now? What's going on in your life? Is there anything that you need to share? And it's an opportunity to be held accountable for anything and everything that may be going on in our life that is keeping us from pursuing Jesus the way we need to do it. Jen needs to hold me accountable to go and meet with them and tell them the truth, but she doesn't need to be my primary accountability agent in that, if that makes sense. But spouses, responsible ones, hold each other accountable for accountability. So a wonderful conversation to have in your car at lunch, tonight when the kids go down, whenever, might be where is your accountability in your life and how can we encourage each other to find that more. The second thing we can do to love our spouse towards Christ and accept this mantle is to take their spiritual temperature. Just take their spiritual temperature. Just know how they're doing. If I were to ask any of you who are married, how's the spiritual health of your wife? How's the spiritual health of your husband? How are they doing? How good of an answer could you give me? How good of an answer would you like to be able to give? If you're going to see yourself as sincerely the chief agent of sanctification in their life as bestowed upon you by God, how good of an answer to that question do you think you need to be able to give? And is it good enough right now? All right, moving quickly. Next thing. Love them sacrificially, not selfishly. Love them selflessly, not selfishly. Often we fall into these habits as married people where we love transactionally. I'm going to love you like this, so you love me like this. A husband might think to himself, I'm going to be on the Saturday. I'm going to be present with the kids on Saturday. I'm going to love by cleaning things I haven't been asked to clean. I'm going to do everything I need to do. I'm going to do all the things that she likes for me to do. I'm going to love her in that way so that maybe later when the kids go down, she can express love in a different way. That's what I'm going to do. And listen, that's a sound strategy. Okay, tried and true. Stick with it. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there needs to be more to love than that. Loving selfishly is loving with the expectation of reciprocity. I'm going to love in this way, and they're going to love me in this way. But loving selflessly says, no, I'm going to love them because I love them and I want them to see someone that loves them no matter what. We have a quote in our hallway at the top of our stairs from a guy named W.H. Autzen. I have no idea who that is. I've never, ever Googled him a single time. I just really like this quote that I saw at someone else's house, so I had it done for us. And it says, if greater affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. That's sacrificial selfless love in a marriage. If equal affection cannot be, let the greater love be me. So if it's got to be disproportionate, let it be disproportionate in their favor. And I'll tell you how I've seen this lived out. I have a very good friend whose wife is going through, this is understated, an extremely traumatic time in her life that doesn't have anything to do with him. It's just a really, really difficult time. And because of that, rightly so, she has nothing in her cup left to be the mother that she needs to be to their three children. She has nothing in her cup left to be the wife that she needs to be to him. She has nothing to give. And he is choosing day in and day out to love her, to stay faithful to her, to serve her, to step up and to care for the kids and to love her in that way without expectation of reciprocity, without expecting that she's going to turn around and thank him for that. He's just loving her to get her through this season because he loves her. That's loving sacrificially, not selfishly. Love for love's sake. Last one. This one's so simple. It's so simple. Pray for them and with them. Pray for them and with them. Very simply, I'm not going to belabor this because I don't need to. How can we claim to have accepted the mantle of chief agent of sanctification in the life of our spouse if we can't remember the last time we prayed for them? If we're not praying for them every day? How can the Holy Spirit speak into our hearts and in our minds what they need and where they're at and how to best pray for them if we don't give him space to do that. How can we claim that Jesus is the center of our home, the center of our marriage, and that our marriage is being used to sanctify one another towards Christ if we're not praying with each other with a great degree of regularity? I don't need to belabor this point. You guys know it's right. I know it's right. If we want to love our spouse towards Christ, then we ought to pray for them and with them with a high degree of regularity. Yes? So that's my hope and prayer for you and for your marriages. That you'll accept the standard as the standard. And the standard is you are to be the chief agent of sanctification, of the process of spiritual maturity, becoming more like Christ in character in your spouse's life, and that it is your sacred duty to step into that role. So I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray that you would accept that mantle and that you would walk with humility and meekness as you seek to love your spouse towards Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and how you love us. God, we thank you for our husbands and our wives. God, I thank you publicly for my wife and the ways that she has faithfully loved me towards you. Help me love her towards you. God, for those of us who walk away convicted, I pray that we would sit in that conviction, that we would accept it, that we would be spurned on by it. And that from today, you would produce in all of us an ardent desire to see our spouse come to know you more. Help the husbands in this room to love their wives sacrificially. To love them well, to pray for them. To lay down their lives for them. Help the wives in this room to love their husbands faithfully and earnestly, believing in them as they pray them and love them towards you. God, be with the marriages in this room. We praise you for the good ones that reflect you. We lift up the hard ones and ask that they would reflect you. And we ask that you would be with us as we go from here. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. I'll be right there at those double doors. Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself and teach me your name and give me about three or four weeks and I'll try to remember it. A big thank you to Kyle, our worship pastor, who stepped in for me last week. About 6 a.m. last Sunday morning, I had been up most of the night and texted Gibby, our worship pastor, hey man, I'm not going to make it. And I went back through some sermons and I found one from last January where I talked about community. I knew it was going to be small group Sunday, so I said this will be appropriate. I said just show this one from last January and we'll be fine. And so then I turned on the TV around 10 o'clock just to see how things were going, and I was as surprised as you to see Kyle up here once the bumper video got done. But he did a great job. I'm so grateful for him. It's kind of a rite of passage as a teacher and communicator to find out the morning of that you're actually preaching that day. And so it's a good experience for everybody. But I'm grateful to him. This week, we're going to continue right on in our series. I was going to preach about marriage last week and prayers for our marriage. And we decided to continue in that series. Next week, we're going to do prayers for our finances, and then we're going to get into a series in Mark that's going to carry us all the way through Easter. So I'm very much looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in the Gospel of Mark with you. But this morning, we look at prayers, a prayer for our marriages. And I don't often do sermons on marriage. And I'll be honest with you, the main reason I don't often specifically target marriage in a church service, probably to our detriment. I should probably do it more. But the main reason I don't is just because I know that even though, as I look out, most of us in this room are married. I hope happily so. Most of us are married, but I'm also aware that we have single people in our congregation as well. And some of you are single right now by choice. You'd like to be married one day, but you're not yet, and that's fine. Or you'd like to be married again someday, and you're not right now, and that's okay. Some of you are widows or widowers, and for different reasons and different walks of life, we have single people in our midst. And so in doing a sermon on marriage, I always worry about ostracizing that part of our population, and so I'm sorry for that. So this morning, I'm going to unapologetically focus on marriage and what God's role for marriage is and what our purpose within our marriages are according to Scripture. And so I would say to you, if you're a single person this morning who's listening to me, if you're watching online and you haven't turned it off yet, I would say if you're not married and you want to be, then hang on to this for the kind of marriage that you want and the kind of spouse that you want to find, the kind of spouse that you want to be. If you're not married and you don't want to be, then the best I can do is to say hang on to this so you can advise your married friends or just open up the Bible and start reading it for the next 30 minutes. That'll be great for you too. With that caveat, let's approach this topic of marriage and ask ourselves, what is God's purpose for marriage? And what is our role supposed to be within our marriages? Now, I don't think that there's any passage that addresses God's purpose for marriage and our role within marriage more clearly than Ephesians chapter 5. Really starting, I believe, in verse 21. Yes, verse 21 through the end of the chapter in verse 32. Now, in Ephesians, sorry, Ephesians chapter 5. In Ephesians and in Colossians and in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes about what theologians refer to as the household codes. In Christ, in church, in this new way of life, in this new way of understanding faith, here are the codes by which we should live within our households. Here's how wives and husbands should interact and children and parents should interact. And there's even a portion about slaves and masters and how they should interact. And so he introduces what we refer to as the household codes. And these, we should understand, are revolutionary for the time. Because at this point in history, it's a heavily patriarchal society. And marriage is really a one-way street. Marriage is really about the man. The woman is ancillary to the marriage. She's almost very close to property, if not just out-and-out property. And so it's within that context that these household codes are introduced. And what we see is that they are revolutionary for the time in which they are introduced. But for us this morning, as we look at them, I want us to be thinking, what's God's purpose for marriage? What does God want to see happen in my marriage? And what is my role within that marriage? How does God want to use me to bring about his desired outcome for us and for my spouse? And again, I don't think that this issue is addressed anywhere more clearly than it is in Ephesians chapter 5. So I want to read to you, beginning in verse one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. But I am talking about Christ and the church. In the verse 33, however, each one of you must also, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. There's a lot packed in there. We could do a series from those verses. But I want us to see the main priority for marriage, What Paul depicts, we believe through the instruction of God, as the main purpose for marriage, which is to prepare the bride for the bridegroom. Which is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it, that he might prepare it, wash it, so that it might be presented without blemish or spot to God on the day of atonement, on the day of glory, that we might present one another as blameless to God at the end of this life. And so here's what I'm going to do with this passage. And I just want to admit this up front so we all know what I'm doing. I've always tried to teach you like you are intelligent adults who have the Holy Spirit. Most of you are adults. Most of you are intelligent. And if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to talk to you that way. I am taking an interpretive and theological license in my application of this passage this morning. This passage on its surface seems to be talking directly to the husbands with the line at the end that says, and wives seek that you respect your husbands. But what I believe about this passage is that there is an implied reciprocity. That if it is my job as a husband to present my wife without blemish or spot, to do what I can to prepare her for heaven, to do what I can to love her towards Christ, then it is likewise the responsibility of my wife to love me towards Jesus. That there is a reciprocital expectation in this passage. I don't even know if reciprocital is a word, but there you go. There's that expectation in this passage, I believe, that both parties would seek to love each other towards Christ. And if you can't go there with me, and you go, listen, man, on the surface, it seems like it's talking to the husbands. That's how I'm going to take it at face value. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm just talking to the husbands today. But by the way, husbands, you don't have to respect your wives because there's no reciprocity in the passage. But that's the license that I'm going to take is that this is for both of us. And if it's for both of us, here's what this passage clearly says is the responsibility of each spouse in a marriage. Okay. This is the purpose of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to sanctify you, to make you more like Christ in character. I'm going to sit more on that in a minute, to make you more like Christ in character, to move you through this spirit, this process of spiritual maturation. And that as such, as the spouse, here's what this passage is teaching us. And we're going to unpack this. You, husbands, you, wives, if you're married, you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's lives. If you're married, this passage teaches us that you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's life. Now, let's stop and talk about this word sanctification, because this is one of those spongy church words that we hear a lot, and you church people probably know that word, you've heard it, but if I were to make you stand up right now and be like, Karen, why don't you stand up and tell us what sanctification means? You'd be like, oh my gosh, I hate you. I've never come back to this church in my whole life, right? Nobody wants to do that right now. But it's a word that shows up again and again in Scripture. It's a word that is referred to again and again in Scripture. And it's a summary word for what happens during our life. So it's important that we understand what sanctification is. It's a very simple definition, and there's no blank for this, but if you want to write it down because it's helpful, you can write this down. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. We see throughout Scripture these encouragements that we should be Christ-like, that we should be like Jesus. We pray and we sing, more of you and less of me. More of you, Christ, less of me. If all I ever get is you, that's good enough. I want more of you, less of me. We pray that we would become Christ-like. We pray for our children to become Christ-like. These are all references to what Scripture calls sanctification, the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is an unavoidable portion of the salvation process. See, a lot of us think of salvation as this inflection point, this point in time, this moment in time in which we become saved. But scripture actually teaches us that salvation is a process that begins at the point of justification or some would argue predestination and then continues through sanctification until glorification. And here's how I know that I'm right about this. I'm not making it up. That's basically a direct quote of Romans chapter 8 verse 29. We know verse 28. We love that verse. For all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Great. But 29 says, for those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he justified. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. Those whom he sanctified, he glorified. So let's look at that process. Jesus, God, through his spirit, calls us to himself. He calls us with his Holy Spirit. He chisels away at our blind and darkened heart. He softens us to the good news and the mystery of the gospel until one day our soul is in a place where we're willing to accept Christ as our Savior. We repent of who we thought Jesus was. We accept who Jesus says he is, and we step forward in faith. This looks a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different traditions. We pray the believer's prayer or that we pray the sinner's prayer. We ask Jesus into our heart. We confess Jesus as our savior. However it is you want to phrase it, this for many of us is the point of salvation. It's what we think of as the time we got saved, but that's really the justification process. So God, God calls us then at that moment of what we would call our salvation, that's really justification. That's when we accept the blood of Christ as a cover over our sins. And God looks at us and he does not judge us based on our actions. He judges us based on the righteousness of Christ and says that he sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. This is Isaiah chapter 1 where he puts his arm around us and he says, Come now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. At the point of justification, Jesus, by hanging on the cross, has made our sins as white as snow. He has covered over us with our righteousness. And God in heaven looks down on us and he sees not us, but he sees his Son and we are justified in the court of divine righteousness and made worthy of heaven through the blood of Christ. When we accept that, we are justified. After we are justified, we are sanctified. After we are sanctified, we are glorified. We are glorified when we meet our Father in heaven and our glorified bodies, when we do not need faith anymore because we're looking our Savior in the eye. We are glorified in heaven. So that means that between the time of justification in your life, the moment you became a Christian, to the point of glorification, the moment you meet God in eternity forever. Everything that happens in between that is your sanctification. That God is using day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade to slowly chisel you into someone who is more like him in character, whose heart beats along with him for the things he wants. We are told that if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, that walk with God through the process of sanctification, our heart begins to beat with his so that the things that we desire are the things that he desires and he brings those about for the good of us and those who are called according to his purpose. This is the process of sanctification. Spending our entire life growing closer and closer and closer to Jesus. Now this process can be thwarted. It can get short-circuited by sin and by other ailments, by the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, according to Hebrews 12, verse 1. This process can get sidelined. But as Christians, we are perpetually going through the process of sanctification until we enter glorification. This means that in our 70s, our faith and our depths of insight and understanding and our knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil and being filled with the knowledge of God and the maturity with which we walk and the love that we express and the selflessness that we live with and the humility in which we walk should be vastly different than it was in our 30s. Because God has had 40 years to sanctify us and make us more like his son in character. So that in our 70s we ought to walk with so much more wisdom and godliness than we did in our 30s. Not because we can't be godly in our 30s, but just because he's had 40 more years to sanctify us. That's the call of the Christian life. And what Paul is saying about marriage is that your spouse ought to be the chief agent of sanctification in your life. Meaning, your husband or your wife has been placed in your life by God to be the primary tool he uses to chisel away at your rough edges and reveal within you the person that he's always wanted you to become. They are the primary tool that God uses to chisel away the elements of the world that are still a part of you so that your character might emerge as more Christ-like. That is the purpose of marriage. If you are married, God's primary purpose for you in that marriage is to use you as the primary tool that he chooses to make your spouse more like him in character. That is the role of a husband or a wife. And nothing short of it. And here's what I think is interesting about that point. Here's what I think is interesting. I think that if I were to sit down with any of you over coffee who are married. And say, do you consider yourself a good wife? Do you consider yourself a good husband? You would say yes or no. You would say, you know, for the most part, I think I'm pretty good, or gosh, I haven't been doing great lately, or some of you, I hope, would say, yeah, I think I'm nailing it. That's great. Some of you would be like, I'm failing miserably. Okay. Whatever your answer was in how you're doing, good or bad, neutral or not, the next question is the important one. How good are you doing at being a husband? I think I'm doing okay here. I think I've got some things to work on there. I think I can get better. But overall, I think I've been pretty good. Okay. Why? That's the important question. Why do you think you're a good husband? Why do you think you're a bad husband? Why do you think you've been a good wife? What's your criteria? Why do you think you've been a bad wife? I think a lot of us, if we had to make lists, even if we take your marriage out of it, and I were to ask you, what makes a husband a good husband? If I were to ask you, think of somebody that you think has a great marriage, and they're a great husband, and they're a great wife. What makes them great? What are the qualities? I think we would say things like, well, he loves her really well. He's unselfish with her. He's patient with her. They've been married for 40 years. He's faithful to her. She's faithful to him. She's patient with him. She supports him. Or if they're bad, we would say, well, he's selfish. He doesn't see her. He pretends that the yard needs work for eight hours on a Saturday while she deals with three-year-olds. She doesn't support him. She gets on to him all the time. He ignores her. How far down the list, here's the important part. If I were to ask you what makes you or what makes that person a good husband or a good wife? How many items would you list off before you said that man's a good husband because the way that he loves his wife loves her closer to Jesus? That man's a good husband because his wife is an incredible believer because of the way that he's loved her towards him. How many of you, how far down the list would we have to get before you said that woman is a wonderful wife to that man? Because she has been used by God over and over again and she steps into her role of sanctification in his life. And because of her influence in his life, that man is walking more closely with Jesus than he would have without her. How far down our list of good or bad husband or wife criteria do we need to go before we get to the very first criteria laid out by God in Scripture? Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Present her holy and blameless before the throne. That's tops. That's the number one thing. That's the standard. And yet, so many of us, and listen, well, I'll say this in a second. So many of us have that so far down our list of what a responsible spouse should do that it wouldn't even go mentioned, that we haven't even thought of it. And here's what I want to be really honest with you about, okay? As I prepared this sermon, and I was confronted with this standard from Scripture of what my role as a husband is. I was deeply, deeply convicted. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm not saying that for show. I'm not saying that like, well, you know, we could all improve a little bit. I could too, so I'm going to act convicted here so you feel safe in your conviction. No. I was deeply convicted and went home and apologized to Jen for not being the husband I was going to preach that I needed to be. I apologized to her because I'm about to come out. I might not be much, but I like to think I have some integrity. And I'm not going to come in here and look you men in the eye and tell you what Scripture calls you to be, knowing good and well I've fallen short of that in my own house. So the first thing I did is I went home. I didn't know she was going to be in the fourth and fifth grade room this morning. That makes this part a lot easier. I thought she was going to be sitting right there. And that if I didn't apologize to her, she was going to be sitting there going, what are you talking about, man? There have been seasons where I have done this by God's grace. There have also been seasons when I have not. And so if you are convicted this morning as I lay out the standard that is set forth in scripture for what marriage is and what a spouse ought to be in that marriage. If that's hard to hear and you feel that you've fallen short, I am the captain of your team, pal. I'm with you. I am not preaching this as if I were on some marital mountaintop and I figured it out and I would like for you to get on my level. I am preaching this here. Saying, hey, this is what scripture calls us to. We've all got to step up together. This is what we're called to. So let's be that. To that end, as I was talking through this with Jen this week, she brought up, yeah, that's good, that makes sense. I like that. If both parties are spiritually engaged, it's a really good and helpful thing to tell the couples of grace. I like it. But what do you tell the spouse who is spiritually engaged, whose spouse is spiritually disengaged? To put a finer point on it, more often than not, what do you tell the women who care about Jesus and would really, really love for their husband to be this for them and are trying desperately to be that for their husband, but they can't get his attention? Now, sometimes it's flipped. Sometimes it's the man who's spiritually engaged and the woman who's spiritually disengaged, but that's the exception in my experience in churches. So what do we tell those people? Well, I would tell you two things. First, sometimes when we're unequally yoked in that way, it's our job, and 1 Corinthians speaks to this, it's our job to quietly, patiently love them towards Christ until the Holy Spirit convicts them and they're able to come home and apologize and then step into who they need to be. Sometimes it's our job to patiently wait and pray and love them towards Jesus when they're not able to love us towards Jesus. And we wait on them to step into what they're supposed to be. The other thing I would say is this. I'm going to quote, I wish Keith Cathcart were here, one of my buddies. Keck, you'll have to tell him to listen to this sermon. Because I'm going to quote Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, and Keith is going to lose his ever-loving mind. I quoted Tomlin in the sermon. But Coach Tomlin is a coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He's an incredible leader of men. He's an incredible leader. He's one of the all-time greatest coaches. I have a large amount of respect for him, and he's got a lot of these quick little one-liners that are really good. But one of the things I like about what he says about Pittsburgh Steelers football is the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. The standard in Pittsburgh is Super Bowls. We do not settle for divisional championships, which means, those of you who are not sports inclined, marginal success. We do not settle for marginal success. We are number one or bust. If you don't know what the Super Bowl is, this is America, man. Get with it. Also, go Bills. Yeah, there we go, baby. Mike Thomas says the standard is the standard. Meaning, we have the highest possible standard in our organization. We have the highest standard for what we want to achieve as a team, and we have the highest possible standard for what we expect from each position group and each portion of this team. The standard is the standard, and the standard does not change based on your feelings about your inability to reach it. The standard does not change based on previous performance. The standard does not change based upon how you feel. The standard is the standard. We confront it with honesty and we meet it or don't, but the standard doesn't change. That's how we will approach marriage. The standard is the standard. And the standard is that it is my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus. That's the standard. If you are married, whether you knew it or not when you stood at the altar, what you accepted is this mantle. It is now and forevermore my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus Christ. And here's why it's so important to accept this mantle because people come and go in our lives, man. Jen and I have been together since I was 20 and she was 19. I'm 43. She's 32. I'm just kidding. I'm just not going to tell you her age. I'm 43. We've been together a long time. There have been people, men, in that season, in those years, in those decades, who have come into my life and have been more of a catalyst for change and sanctification in my life than she was at the time. But that flares out. People come and go. And sometimes God in his grace uses them to compel you and to convict you in wonderful ways towards a deeper relationship with him. But day in and day out, year in and year out, she is the presence in my life. She is the one who sees me wake up and go to sleep. She is the one that God has placed there to be used as an agent to change me. And when she does, and when she engages in that, it is so powerful, I can't describe it to you. And that is our sacred duty, to love our spouses towards Jesus. And listen, if you feel like that's too tall an order, if you feel like you haven't done that in a long time and you're not sure if you can do that and you don't know how to do that, what I would say to you is I love you so much and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but what I would say to you is listen, the standard is the standard. That's your sacred duty. Accept it or don't. But if you do not accept your sacred duty to love your spouse towards Christ and be the chief agent of sanctification in their life, then you are absconding on your commitment as a husband or a wife. And if this brings upon you a deep conviction, good. Sit in it. Your wife and your husband or your husband will benefit from that. React to it. Respond to it. Accept it. Step into it. Your kids will be better off for your conviction and your acceptance of this mantle. You will have a marriage that they look at as worthy of emulation if you will receive this mantle, this standard from Paul. It is our sacred duty to love our spouses towards Jesus. Full stop. That's what we must do. Now, as I wrap up, I want to give you guys just a few practical things to do to keep this standard the standard in your marriage. I want to give you a couple. So we go, okay, I accept this. It is my job to love my spouse towards Christ. I accept that mantle. I want to do that. I'm going to be the chief agent of sanctification in their life that I believe you. I want to do it. Let's go. What do I do? What does that practically look like? This is, I'm going to give you four things. So obviously there's more to do than this. This is not an exhaustive list, but four quick things that you can do in your marriages starting right now, starting today to love your spouse towards Christ. Four quick things. Number one, hold them accountable for accountability. Hold them accountable for accountability. I have never thought it's the best idea for your husband or your wife to be your accountability partner. If you decide that you want to develop a new discipline of waking up every day and praying and reading the Bible, spending time in God's word and spending time in God's presence through prayer, if that's what you want to do, probably don't tell your wife that this is what I'm going to do. And when I don't do it, I would like you to call me out on it because of all the other things that exist in your life that she nagged you about and that you get mad about. Let's not add one more. All right. Similarly, wives don't need husbands hounding them about one more thing that they were supposed to do. All right. So let's, let's let other people hold us accountable for things like that. And let's let our spouses hold us accountable for accountability. I've told you before, and this was actually the sermon that I thought you were going to watch last week. It's okay that you didn't. But in that sermon from last year, I talked about the idea of sacred spaces, having spaces in our life, two or three people at the most who know everything about us, who love you and love Jesus and are given permission to tell you the truth about yourself. I shared with you then that there's two men that I meet with, two men from the church that I meet with pretty much once a month. And the very first thing we ask is, what are you struggling with? What's stopping you from following God as well as you can right now? What's going on in your life? Is there anything that you need to share? And it's an opportunity to be held accountable for anything and everything that may be going on in our life that is keeping us from pursuing Jesus the way we need to do it. Jen needs to hold me accountable to go and meet with them and tell them the truth, but she doesn't need to be my primary accountability agent in that, if that makes sense. But spouses, responsible ones, hold each other accountable for accountability. So a wonderful conversation to have in your car at lunch, tonight when the kids go down, whenever, might be where is your accountability in your life and how can we encourage each other to find that more. The second thing we can do to love our spouse towards Christ and accept this mantle is to take their spiritual temperature. Just take their spiritual temperature. Just know how they're doing. If I were to ask any of you who are married, how's the spiritual health of your wife? How's the spiritual health of your husband? How are they doing? How good of an answer could you give me? How good of an answer would you like to be able to give? If you're going to see yourself as sincerely the chief agent of sanctification in their life as bestowed upon you by God, how good of an answer to that question do you think you need to be able to give? And is it good enough right now? All right, moving quickly. Next thing. Love them sacrificially, not selfishly. Love them selflessly, not selfishly. Often we fall into these habits as married people where we love transactionally. I'm going to love you like this, so you love me like this. A husband might think to himself, I'm going to be on the Saturday. I'm going to be present with the kids on Saturday. I'm going to love by cleaning things I haven't been asked to clean. I'm going to do everything I need to do. I'm going to do all the things that she likes for me to do. I'm going to love her in that way so that maybe later when the kids go down, she can express love in a different way. That's what I'm going to do. And listen, that's a sound strategy. Okay, tried and true. Stick with it. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there needs to be more to love than that. Loving selfishly is loving with the expectation of reciprocity. I'm going to love in this way, and they're going to love me in this way. But loving selflessly says, no, I'm going to love them because I love them and I want them to see someone that loves them no matter what. We have a quote in our hallway at the top of our stairs from a guy named W.H. Autzen. I have no idea who that is. I've never, ever Googled him a single time. I just really like this quote that I saw at someone else's house, so I had it done for us. And it says, if greater affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. That's sacrificial selfless love in a marriage. If equal affection cannot be, let the greater love be me. So if it's got to be disproportionate, let it be disproportionate in their favor. And I'll tell you how I've seen this lived out. I have a very good friend whose wife is going through, this is understated, an extremely traumatic time in her life that doesn't have anything to do with him. It's just a really, really difficult time. And because of that, rightly so, she has nothing in her cup left to be the mother that she needs to be to their three children. She has nothing in her cup left to be the wife that she needs to be to him. She has nothing to give. And he is choosing day in and day out to love her, to stay faithful to her, to serve her, to step up and to care for the kids and to love her in that way without expectation of reciprocity, without expecting that she's going to turn around and thank him for that. He's just loving her to get her through this season because he loves her. That's loving sacrificially, not selfishly. Love for love's sake. Last one. This one's so simple. It's so simple. Pray for them and with them. Pray for them and with them. Very simply, I'm not going to belabor this because I don't need to. How can we claim to have accepted the mantle of chief agent of sanctification in the life of our spouse if we can't remember the last time we prayed for them? If we're not praying for them every day? How can the Holy Spirit speak into our hearts and in our minds what they need and where they're at and how to best pray for them if we don't give him space to do that. How can we claim that Jesus is the center of our home, the center of our marriage, and that our marriage is being used to sanctify one another towards Christ if we're not praying with each other with a great degree of regularity? I don't need to belabor this point. You guys know it's right. I know it's right. If we want to love our spouse towards Christ, then we ought to pray for them and with them with a high degree of regularity. Yes? So that's my hope and prayer for you and for your marriages. That you'll accept the standard as the standard. And the standard is you are to be the chief agent of sanctification, of the process of spiritual maturity, becoming more like Christ in character in your spouse's life, and that it is your sacred duty to step into that role. So I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray that you would accept that mantle and that you would walk with humility and meekness as you seek to love your spouse towards Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and how you love us. God, we thank you for our husbands and our wives. God, I thank you publicly for my wife and the ways that she has faithfully loved me towards you. Help me love her towards you. God, for those of us who walk away convicted, I pray that we would sit in that conviction, that we would accept it, that we would be spurned on by it. And that from today, you would produce in all of us an ardent desire to see our spouse come to know you more. Help the husbands in this room to love their wives sacrificially. To love them well, to pray for them. To lay down their lives for them. Help the wives in this room to love their husbands faithfully and earnestly, believing in them as they pray them and love them towards you. God, be with the marriages in this room. We praise you for the good ones that reflect you. We lift up the hard ones and ask that they would reflect you. And we ask that you would be with us as we go from here. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. I'll be right there at those double doors. Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself and teach me your name and give me about three or four weeks and I'll try to remember it. A big thank you to Kyle, our worship pastor, who stepped in for me last week. About 6 a.m. last Sunday morning, I had been up most of the night and texted Gibby, our worship pastor, hey man, I'm not going to make it. And I went back through some sermons and I found one from last January where I talked about community. I knew it was going to be small group Sunday, so I said this will be appropriate. I said just show this one from last January and we'll be fine. And so then I turned on the TV around 10 o'clock just to see how things were going, and I was as surprised as you to see Kyle up here once the bumper video got done. But he did a great job. I'm so grateful for him. It's kind of a rite of passage as a teacher and communicator to find out the morning of that you're actually preaching that day. And so it's a good experience for everybody. But I'm grateful to him. This week, we're going to continue right on in our series. I was going to preach about marriage last week and prayers for our marriage. And we decided to continue in that series. Next week, we're going to do prayers for our finances, and then we're going to get into a series in Mark that's going to carry us all the way through Easter. So I'm very much looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in the Gospel of Mark with you. But this morning, we look at prayers, a prayer for our marriages. And I don't often do sermons on marriage. And I'll be honest with you, the main reason I don't often specifically target marriage in a church service, probably to our detriment. I should probably do it more. But the main reason I don't is just because I know that even though, as I look out, most of us in this room are married. I hope happily so. Most of us are married, but I'm also aware that we have single people in our congregation as well. And some of you are single right now by choice. You'd like to be married one day, but you're not yet, and that's fine. Or you'd like to be married again someday, and you're not right now, and that's okay. Some of you are widows or widowers, and for different reasons and different walks of life, we have single people in our midst. And so in doing a sermon on marriage, I always worry about ostracizing that part of our population, and so I'm sorry for that. So this morning, I'm going to unapologetically focus on marriage and what God's role for marriage is and what our purpose within our marriages are according to Scripture. And so I would say to you, if you're a single person this morning who's listening to me, if you're watching online and you haven't turned it off yet, I would say if you're not married and you want to be, then hang on to this for the kind of marriage that you want and the kind of spouse that you want to find, the kind of spouse that you want to be. If you're not married and you don't want to be, then the best I can do is to say hang on to this so you can advise your married friends or just open up the Bible and start reading it for the next 30 minutes. That'll be great for you too. With that caveat, let's approach this topic of marriage and ask ourselves, what is God's purpose for marriage? And what is our role supposed to be within our marriages? Now, I don't think that there's any passage that addresses God's purpose for marriage and our role within marriage more clearly than Ephesians chapter 5. Really starting, I believe, in verse 21. Yes, verse 21 through the end of the chapter in verse 32. Now, in Ephesians, sorry, Ephesians chapter 5. In Ephesians and in Colossians and in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes about what theologians refer to as the household codes. In Christ, in church, in this new way of life, in this new way of understanding faith, here are the codes by which we should live within our households. Here's how wives and husbands should interact and children and parents should interact. And there's even a portion about slaves and masters and how they should interact. And so he introduces what we refer to as the household codes. And these, we should understand, are revolutionary for the time. Because at this point in history, it's a heavily patriarchal society. And marriage is really a one-way street. Marriage is really about the man. The woman is ancillary to the marriage. She's almost very close to property, if not just out-and-out property. And so it's within that context that these household codes are introduced. And what we see is that they are revolutionary for the time in which they are introduced. But for us this morning, as we look at them, I want us to be thinking, what's God's purpose for marriage? What does God want to see happen in my marriage? And what is my role within that marriage? How does God want to use me to bring about his desired outcome for us and for my spouse? And again, I don't think that this issue is addressed anywhere more clearly than it is in Ephesians chapter 5. So I want to read to you, beginning in verse one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. But I am talking about Christ and the church. In the verse 33, however, each one of you must also, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. There's a lot packed in there. We could do a series from those verses. But I want us to see the main priority for marriage, What Paul depicts, we believe through the instruction of God, as the main purpose for marriage, which is to prepare the bride for the bridegroom. Which is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it, that he might prepare it, wash it, so that it might be presented without blemish or spot to God on the day of atonement, on the day of glory, that we might present one another as blameless to God at the end of this life. And so here's what I'm going to do with this passage. And I just want to admit this up front so we all know what I'm doing. I've always tried to teach you like you are intelligent adults who have the Holy Spirit. Most of you are adults. Most of you are intelligent. And if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to talk to you that way. I am taking an interpretive and theological license in my application of this passage this morning. This passage on its surface seems to be talking directly to the husbands with the line at the end that says, and wives seek that you respect your husbands. But what I believe about this passage is that there is an implied reciprocity. That if it is my job as a husband to present my wife without blemish or spot, to do what I can to prepare her for heaven, to do what I can to love her towards Christ, then it is likewise the responsibility of my wife to love me towards Jesus. That there is a reciprocital expectation in this passage. I don't even know if reciprocital is a word, but there you go. There's that expectation in this passage, I believe, that both parties would seek to love each other towards Christ. And if you can't go there with me, and you go, listen, man, on the surface, it seems like it's talking to the husbands. That's how I'm going to take it at face value. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm just talking to the husbands today. But by the way, husbands, you don't have to respect your wives because there's no reciprocity in the passage. But that's the license that I'm going to take is that this is for both of us. And if it's for both of us, here's what this passage clearly says is the responsibility of each spouse in a marriage. Okay. This is the purpose of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to sanctify you, to make you more like Christ in character. I'm going to sit more on that in a minute, to make you more like Christ in character, to move you through this spirit, this process of spiritual maturation. And that as such, as the spouse, here's what this passage is teaching us. And we're going to unpack this. You, husbands, you, wives, if you're married, you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's lives. If you're married, this passage teaches us that you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's life. Now, let's stop and talk about this word sanctification, because this is one of those spongy church words that we hear a lot, and you church people probably know that word, you've heard it, but if I were to make you stand up right now and be like, Karen, why don't you stand up and tell us what sanctification means? You'd be like, oh my gosh, I hate you. I've never come back to this church in my whole life, right? Nobody wants to do that right now. But it's a word that shows up again and again in Scripture. It's a word that is referred to again and again in Scripture. And it's a summary word for what happens during our life. So it's important that we understand what sanctification is. It's a very simple definition, and there's no blank for this, but if you want to write it down because it's helpful, you can write this down. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. We see throughout Scripture these encouragements that we should be Christ-like, that we should be like Jesus. We pray and we sing, more of you and less of me. More of you, Christ, less of me. If all I ever get is you, that's good enough. I want more of you, less of me. We pray that we would become Christ-like. We pray for our children to become Christ-like. These are all references to what Scripture calls sanctification, the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is an unavoidable portion of the salvation process. See, a lot of us think of salvation as this inflection point, this point in time, this moment in time in which we become saved. But scripture actually teaches us that salvation is a process that begins at the point of justification or some would argue predestination and then continues through sanctification until glorification. And here's how I know that I'm right about this. I'm not making it up. That's basically a direct quote of Romans chapter 8 verse 29. We know verse 28. We love that verse. For all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Great. But 29 says, for those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he justified. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. Those whom he sanctified, he glorified. So let's look at that process. Jesus, God, through his spirit, calls us to himself. He calls us with his Holy Spirit. He chisels away at our blind and darkened heart. He softens us to the good news and the mystery of the gospel until one day our soul is in a place where we're willing to accept Christ as our Savior. We repent of who we thought Jesus was. We accept who Jesus says he is, and we step forward in faith. This looks a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different traditions. We pray the believer's prayer or that we pray the sinner's prayer. We ask Jesus into our heart. We confess Jesus as our savior. However it is you want to phrase it, this for many of us is the point of salvation. It's what we think of as the time we got saved, but that's really the justification process. So God, God calls us then at that moment of what we would call our salvation, that's really justification. That's when we accept the blood of Christ as a cover over our sins. And God looks at us and he does not judge us based on our actions. He judges us based on the righteousness of Christ and says that he sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. This is Isaiah chapter 1 where he puts his arm around us and he says, Come now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. At the point of justification, Jesus, by hanging on the cross, has made our sins as white as snow. He has covered over us with our righteousness. And God in heaven looks down on us and he sees not us, but he sees his Son and we are justified in the court of divine righteousness and made worthy of heaven through the blood of Christ. When we accept that, we are justified. After we are justified, we are sanctified. After we are sanctified, we are glorified. We are glorified when we meet our Father in heaven and our glorified bodies, when we do not need faith anymore because we're looking our Savior in the eye. We are glorified in heaven. So that means that between the time of justification in your life, the moment you became a Christian, to the point of glorification, the moment you meet God in eternity forever. Everything that happens in between that is your sanctification. That God is using day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade to slowly chisel you into someone who is more like him in character, whose heart beats along with him for the things he wants. We are told that if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, that walk with God through the process of sanctification, our heart begins to beat with his so that the things that we desire are the things that he desires and he brings those about for the good of us and those who are called according to his purpose. This is the process of sanctification. Spending our entire life growing closer and closer and closer to Jesus. Now this process can be thwarted. It can get short-circuited by sin and by other ailments, by the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, according to Hebrews 12, verse 1. This process can get sidelined. But as Christians, we are perpetually going through the process of sanctification until we enter glorification. This means that in our 70s, our faith and our depths of insight and understanding and our knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil and being filled with the knowledge of God and the maturity with which we walk and the love that we express and the selflessness that we live with and the humility in which we walk should be vastly different than it was in our 30s. Because God has had 40 years to sanctify us and make us more like his son in character. So that in our 70s we ought to walk with so much more wisdom and godliness than we did in our 30s. Not because we can't be godly in our 30s, but just because he's had 40 more years to sanctify us. That's the call of the Christian life. And what Paul is saying about marriage is that your spouse ought to be the chief agent of sanctification in your life. Meaning, your husband or your wife has been placed in your life by God to be the primary tool he uses to chisel away at your rough edges and reveal within you the person that he's always wanted you to become. They are the primary tool that God uses to chisel away the elements of the world that are still a part of you so that your character might emerge as more Christ-like. That is the purpose of marriage. If you are married, God's primary purpose for you in that marriage is to use you as the primary tool that he chooses to make your spouse more like him in character. That is the role of a husband or a wife. And nothing short of it. And here's what I think is interesting about that point. Here's what I think is interesting. I think that if I were to sit down with any of you over coffee who are married. And say, do you consider yourself a good wife? Do you consider yourself a good husband? You would say yes or no. You would say, you know, for the most part, I think I'm pretty good, or gosh, I haven't been doing great lately, or some of you, I hope, would say, yeah, I think I'm nailing it. That's great. Some of you would be like, I'm failing miserably. Okay. Whatever your answer was in how you're doing, good or bad, neutral or not, the next question is the important one. How good are you doing at being a husband? I think I'm doing okay here. I think I've got some things to work on there. I think I can get better. But overall, I think I've been pretty good. Okay. Why? That's the important question. Why do you think you're a good husband? Why do you think you're a bad husband? Why do you think you've been a good wife? What's your criteria? Why do you think you've been a bad wife? I think a lot of us, if we had to make lists, even if we take your marriage out of it, and I were to ask you, what makes a husband a good husband? If I were to ask you, think of somebody that you think has a great marriage, and they're a great husband, and they're a great wife. What makes them great? What are the qualities? I think we would say things like, well, he loves her really well. He's unselfish with her. He's patient with her. They've been married for 40 years. He's faithful to her. She's faithful to him. She's patient with him. She supports him. Or if they're bad, we would say, well, he's selfish. He doesn't see her. He pretends that the yard needs work for eight hours on a Saturday while she deals with three-year-olds. She doesn't support him. She gets on to him all the time. He ignores her. How far down the list, here's the important part. If I were to ask you what makes you or what makes that person a good husband or a good wife? How many items would you list off before you said that man's a good husband because the way that he loves his wife loves her closer to Jesus? That man's a good husband because his wife is an incredible believer because of the way that he's loved her towards him. How many of you, how far down the list would we have to get before you said that woman is a wonderful wife to that man? Because she has been used by God over and over again and she steps into her role of sanctification in his life. And because of her influence in his life, that man is walking more closely with Jesus than he would have without her. How far down our list of good or bad husband or wife criteria do we need to go before we get to the very first criteria laid out by God in Scripture? Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Present her holy and blameless before the throne. That's tops. That's the number one thing. That's the standard. And yet, so many of us, and listen, well, I'll say this in a second. So many of us have that so far down our list of what a responsible spouse should do that it wouldn't even go mentioned, that we haven't even thought of it. And here's what I want to be really honest with you about, okay? As I prepared this sermon, and I was confronted with this standard from Scripture of what my role as a husband is. I was deeply, deeply convicted. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm not saying that for show. I'm not saying that like, well, you know, we could all improve a little bit. I could too, so I'm going to act convicted here so you feel safe in your conviction. No. I was deeply convicted and went home and apologized to Jen for not being the husband I was going to preach that I needed to be. I apologized to her because I'm about to come out. I might not be much, but I like to think I have some integrity. And I'm not going to come in here and look you men in the eye and tell you what Scripture calls you to be, knowing good and well I've fallen short of that in my own house. So the first thing I did is I went home. I didn't know she was going to be in the fourth and fifth grade room this morning. That makes this part a lot easier. I thought she was going to be sitting right there. And that if I didn't apologize to her, she was going to be sitting there going, what are you talking about, man? There have been seasons where I have done this by God's grace. There have also been seasons when I have not. And so if you are convicted this morning as I lay out the standard that is set forth in scripture for what marriage is and what a spouse ought to be in that marriage. If that's hard to hear and you feel that you've fallen short, I am the captain of your team, pal. I'm with you. I am not preaching this as if I were on some marital mountaintop and I figured it out and I would like for you to get on my level. I am preaching this here. Saying, hey, this is what scripture calls us to. We've all got to step up together. This is what we're called to. So let's be that. To that end, as I was talking through this with Jen this week, she brought up, yeah, that's good, that makes sense. I like that. If both parties are spiritually engaged, it's a really good and helpful thing to tell the couples of grace. I like it. But what do you tell the spouse who is spiritually engaged, whose spouse is spiritually disengaged? To put a finer point on it, more often than not, what do you tell the women who care about Jesus and would really, really love for their husband to be this for them and are trying desperately to be that for their husband, but they can't get his attention? Now, sometimes it's flipped. Sometimes it's the man who's spiritually engaged and the woman who's spiritually disengaged, but that's the exception in my experience in churches. So what do we tell those people? Well, I would tell you two things. First, sometimes when we're unequally yoked in that way, it's our job, and 1 Corinthians speaks to this, it's our job to quietly, patiently love them towards Christ until the Holy Spirit convicts them and they're able to come home and apologize and then step into who they need to be. Sometimes it's our job to patiently wait and pray and love them towards Jesus when they're not able to love us towards Jesus. And we wait on them to step into what they're supposed to be. The other thing I would say is this. I'm going to quote, I wish Keith Cathcart were here, one of my buddies. Keck, you'll have to tell him to listen to this sermon. Because I'm going to quote Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, and Keith is going to lose his ever-loving mind. I quoted Tomlin in the sermon. But Coach Tomlin is a coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He's an incredible leader of men. He's an incredible leader. He's one of the all-time greatest coaches. I have a large amount of respect for him, and he's got a lot of these quick little one-liners that are really good. But one of the things I like about what he says about Pittsburgh Steelers football is the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. The standard in Pittsburgh is Super Bowls. We do not settle for divisional championships, which means, those of you who are not sports inclined, marginal success. We do not settle for marginal success. We are number one or bust. If you don't know what the Super Bowl is, this is America, man. Get with it. Also, go Bills. Yeah, there we go, baby. Mike Thomas says the standard is the standard. Meaning, we have the highest possible standard in our organization. We have the highest standard for what we want to achieve as a team, and we have the highest possible standard for what we expect from each position group and each portion of this team. The standard is the standard, and the standard does not change based on your feelings about your inability to reach it. The standard does not change based on previous performance. The standard does not change based upon how you feel. The standard is the standard. We confront it with honesty and we meet it or don't, but the standard doesn't change. That's how we will approach marriage. The standard is the standard. And the standard is that it is my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus. That's the standard. If you are married, whether you knew it or not when you stood at the altar, what you accepted is this mantle. It is now and forevermore my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus Christ. And here's why it's so important to accept this mantle because people come and go in our lives, man. Jen and I have been together since I was 20 and she was 19. I'm 43. She's 32. I'm just kidding. I'm just not going to tell you her age. I'm 43. We've been together a long time. There have been people, men, in that season, in those years, in those decades, who have come into my life and have been more of a catalyst for change and sanctification in my life than she was at the time. But that flares out. People come and go. And sometimes God in his grace uses them to compel you and to convict you in wonderful ways towards a deeper relationship with him. But day in and day out, year in and year out, she is the presence in my life. She is the one who sees me wake up and go to sleep. She is the one that God has placed there to be used as an agent to change me. And when she does, and when she engages in that, it is so powerful, I can't describe it to you. And that is our sacred duty, to love our spouses towards Jesus. And listen, if you feel like that's too tall an order, if you feel like you haven't done that in a long time and you're not sure if you can do that and you don't know how to do that, what I would say to you is I love you so much and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but what I would say to you is listen, the standard is the standard. That's your sacred duty. Accept it or don't. But if you do not accept your sacred duty to love your spouse towards Christ and be the chief agent of sanctification in their life, then you are absconding on your commitment as a husband or a wife. And if this brings upon you a deep conviction, good. Sit in it. Your wife and your husband or your husband will benefit from that. React to it. Respond to it. Accept it. Step into it. Your kids will be better off for your conviction and your acceptance of this mantle. You will have a marriage that they look at as worthy of emulation if you will receive this mantle, this standard from Paul. It is our sacred duty to love our spouses towards Jesus. Full stop. That's what we must do. Now, as I wrap up, I want to give you guys just a few practical things to do to keep this standard the standard in your marriage. I want to give you a couple. So we go, okay, I accept this. It is my job to love my spouse towards Christ. I accept that mantle. I want to do that. I'm going to be the chief agent of sanctification in their life that I believe you. I want to do it. Let's go. What do I do? What does that practically look like? This is, I'm going to give you four things. So obviously there's more to do than this. This is not an exhaustive list, but four quick things that you can do in your marriages starting right now, starting today to love your spouse towards Christ. Four quick things. Number one, hold them accountable for accountability. Hold them accountable for accountability. I have never thought it's the best idea for your husband or your wife to be your accountability partner. If you decide that you want to develop a new discipline of waking up every day and praying and reading the Bible, spending time in God's word and spending time in God's presence through prayer, if that's what you want to do, probably don't tell your wife that this is what I'm going to do. And when I don't do it, I would like you to call me out on it because of all the other things that exist in your life that she nagged you about and that you get mad about. Let's not add one more. All right. Similarly, wives don't need husbands hounding them about one more thing that they were supposed to do. All right. So let's, let's let other people hold us accountable for things like that. And let's let our spouses hold us accountable for accountability. I've told you before, and this was actually the sermon that I thought you were going to watch last week. It's okay that you didn't. But in that sermon from last year, I talked about the idea of sacred spaces, having spaces in our life, two or three people at the most who know everything about us, who love you and love Jesus and are given permission to tell you the truth about yourself. I shared with you then that there's two men that I meet with, two men from the church that I meet with pretty much once a month. And the very first thing we ask is, what are you struggling with? What's stopping you from following God as well as you can right now? What's going on in your life? Is there anything that you need to share? And it's an opportunity to be held accountable for anything and everything that may be going on in our life that is keeping us from pursuing Jesus the way we need to do it. Jen needs to hold me accountable to go and meet with them and tell them the truth, but she doesn't need to be my primary accountability agent in that, if that makes sense. But spouses, responsible ones, hold each other accountable for accountability. So a wonderful conversation to have in your car at lunch, tonight when the kids go down, whenever, might be where is your accountability in your life and how can we encourage each other to find that more. The second thing we can do to love our spouse towards Christ and accept this mantle is to take their spiritual temperature. Just take their spiritual temperature. Just know how they're doing. If I were to ask any of you who are married, how's the spiritual health of your wife? How's the spiritual health of your husband? How are they doing? How good of an answer could you give me? How good of an answer would you like to be able to give? If you're going to see yourself as sincerely the chief agent of sanctification in their life as bestowed upon you by God, how good of an answer to that question do you think you need to be able to give? And is it good enough right now? All right, moving quickly. Next thing. Love them sacrificially, not selfishly. Love them selflessly, not selfishly. Often we fall into these habits as married people where we love transactionally. I'm going to love you like this, so you love me like this. A husband might think to himself, I'm going to be on the Saturday. I'm going to be present with the kids on Saturday. I'm going to love by cleaning things I haven't been asked to clean. I'm going to do everything I need to do. I'm going to do all the things that she likes for me to do. I'm going to love her in that way so that maybe later when the kids go down, she can express love in a different way. That's what I'm going to do. And listen, that's a sound strategy. Okay, tried and true. Stick with it. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there needs to be more to love than that. Loving selfishly is loving with the expectation of reciprocity. I'm going to love in this way, and they're going to love me in this way. But loving selflessly says, no, I'm going to love them because I love them and I want them to see someone that loves them no matter what. We have a quote in our hallway at the top of our stairs from a guy named W.H. Autzen. I have no idea who that is. I've never, ever Googled him a single time. I just really like this quote that I saw at someone else's house, so I had it done for us. And it says, if greater affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. That's sacrificial selfless love in a marriage. If equal affection cannot be, let the greater love be me. So if it's got to be disproportionate, let it be disproportionate in their favor. And I'll tell you how I've seen this lived out. I have a very good friend whose wife is going through, this is understated, an extremely traumatic time in her life that doesn't have anything to do with him. It's just a really, really difficult time. And because of that, rightly so, she has nothing in her cup left to be the mother that she needs to be to their three children. She has nothing in her cup left to be the wife that she needs to be to him. She has nothing to give. And he is choosing day in and day out to love her, to stay faithful to her, to serve her, to step up and to care for the kids and to love her in that way without expectation of reciprocity, without expecting that she's going to turn around and thank him for that. He's just loving her to get her through this season because he loves her. That's loving sacrificially, not selfishly. Love for love's sake. Last one. This one's so simple. It's so simple. Pray for them and with them. Pray for them and with them. Very simply, I'm not going to belabor this because I don't need to. How can we claim to have accepted the mantle of chief agent of sanctification in the life of our spouse if we can't remember the last time we prayed for them? If we're not praying for them every day? How can the Holy Spirit speak into our hearts and in our minds what they need and where they're at and how to best pray for them if we don't give him space to do that. How can we claim that Jesus is the center of our home, the center of our marriage, and that our marriage is being used to sanctify one another towards Christ if we're not praying with each other with a great degree of regularity? I don't need to belabor this point. You guys know it's right. I know it's right. If we want to love our spouse towards Christ, then we ought to pray for them and with them with a high degree of regularity. Yes? So that's my hope and prayer for you and for your marriages. That you'll accept the standard as the standard. And the standard is you are to be the chief agent of sanctification, of the process of spiritual maturity, becoming more like Christ in character in your spouse's life, and that it is your sacred duty to step into that role. So I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray that you would accept that mantle and that you would walk with humility and meekness as you seek to love your spouse towards Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and how you love us. God, we thank you for our husbands and our wives. God, I thank you publicly for my wife and the ways that she has faithfully loved me towards you. Help me love her towards you. God, for those of us who walk away convicted, I pray that we would sit in that conviction, that we would accept it, that we would be spurned on by it. And that from today, you would produce in all of us an ardent desire to see our spouse come to know you more. Help the husbands in this room to love their wives sacrificially. To love them well, to pray for them. To lay down their lives for them. Help the wives in this room to love their husbands faithfully and earnestly, believing in them as they pray them and love them towards you. God, be with the marriages in this room. We praise you for the good ones that reflect you. We lift up the hard ones and ask that they would reflect you. And we ask that you would be with us as we go from here. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. I'll be right there at those double doors. Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself and teach me your name and give me about three or four weeks and I'll try to remember it. A big thank you to Kyle, our worship pastor, who stepped in for me last week. About 6 a.m. last Sunday morning, I had been up most of the night and texted Gibby, our worship pastor, hey man, I'm not going to make it. And I went back through some sermons and I found one from last January where I talked about community. I knew it was going to be small group Sunday, so I said this will be appropriate. I said just show this one from last January and we'll be fine. And so then I turned on the TV around 10 o'clock just to see how things were going, and I was as surprised as you to see Kyle up here once the bumper video got done. But he did a great job. I'm so grateful for him. It's kind of a rite of passage as a teacher and communicator to find out the morning of that you're actually preaching that day. And so it's a good experience for everybody. But I'm grateful to him. This week, we're going to continue right on in our series. I was going to preach about marriage last week and prayers for our marriage. And we decided to continue in that series. Next week, we're going to do prayers for our finances, and then we're going to get into a series in Mark that's going to carry us all the way through Easter. So I'm very much looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in the Gospel of Mark with you. But this morning, we look at prayers, a prayer for our marriages. And I don't often do sermons on marriage. And I'll be honest with you, the main reason I don't often specifically target marriage in a church service, probably to our detriment. I should probably do it more. But the main reason I don't is just because I know that even though, as I look out, most of us in this room are married. I hope happily so. Most of us are married, but I'm also aware that we have single people in our congregation as well. And some of you are single right now by choice. You'd like to be married one day, but you're not yet, and that's fine. Or you'd like to be married again someday, and you're not right now, and that's okay. Some of you are widows or widowers, and for different reasons and different walks of life, we have single people in our midst. And so in doing a sermon on marriage, I always worry about ostracizing that part of our population, and so I'm sorry for that. So this morning, I'm going to unapologetically focus on marriage and what God's role for marriage is and what our purpose within our marriages are according to Scripture. And so I would say to you, if you're a single person this morning who's listening to me, if you're watching online and you haven't turned it off yet, I would say if you're not married and you want to be, then hang on to this for the kind of marriage that you want and the kind of spouse that you want to find, the kind of spouse that you want to be. If you're not married and you don't want to be, then the best I can do is to say hang on to this so you can advise your married friends or just open up the Bible and start reading it for the next 30 minutes. That'll be great for you too. With that caveat, let's approach this topic of marriage and ask ourselves, what is God's purpose for marriage? And what is our role supposed to be within our marriages? Now, I don't think that there's any passage that addresses God's purpose for marriage and our role within marriage more clearly than Ephesians chapter 5. Really starting, I believe, in verse 21. Yes, verse 21 through the end of the chapter in verse 32. Now, in Ephesians, sorry, Ephesians chapter 5. In Ephesians and in Colossians and in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes about what theologians refer to as the household codes. In Christ, in church, in this new way of life, in this new way of understanding faith, here are the codes by which we should live within our households. Here's how wives and husbands should interact and children and parents should interact. And there's even a portion about slaves and masters and how they should interact. And so he introduces what we refer to as the household codes. And these, we should understand, are revolutionary for the time. Because at this point in history, it's a heavily patriarchal society. And marriage is really a one-way street. Marriage is really about the man. The woman is ancillary to the marriage. She's almost very close to property, if not just out-and-out property. And so it's within that context that these household codes are introduced. And what we see is that they are revolutionary for the time in which they are introduced. But for us this morning, as we look at them, I want us to be thinking, what's God's purpose for marriage? What does God want to see happen in my marriage? And what is my role within that marriage? How does God want to use me to bring about his desired outcome for us and for my spouse? And again, I don't think that this issue is addressed anywhere more clearly than it is in Ephesians chapter 5. So I want to read to you, beginning in verse one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. But I am talking about Christ and the church. In the verse 33, however, each one of you must also, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. There's a lot packed in there. We could do a series from those verses. But I want us to see the main priority for marriage, What Paul depicts, we believe through the instruction of God, as the main purpose for marriage, which is to prepare the bride for the bridegroom. Which is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it, that he might prepare it, wash it, so that it might be presented without blemish or spot to God on the day of atonement, on the day of glory, that we might present one another as blameless to God at the end of this life. And so here's what I'm going to do with this passage. And I just want to admit this up front so we all know what I'm doing. I've always tried to teach you like you are intelligent adults who have the Holy Spirit. Most of you are adults. Most of you are intelligent. And if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to talk to you that way. I am taking an interpretive and theological license in my application of this passage this morning. This passage on its surface seems to be talking directly to the husbands with the line at the end that says, and wives seek that you respect your husbands. But what I believe about this passage is that there is an implied reciprocity. That if it is my job as a husband to present my wife without blemish or spot, to do what I can to prepare her for heaven, to do what I can to love her towards Christ, then it is likewise the responsibility of my wife to love me towards Jesus. That there is a reciprocital expectation in this passage. I don't even know if reciprocital is a word, but there you go. There's that expectation in this passage, I believe, that both parties would seek to love each other towards Christ. And if you can't go there with me, and you go, listen, man, on the surface, it seems like it's talking to the husbands. That's how I'm going to take it at face value. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm just talking to the husbands today. But by the way, husbands, you don't have to respect your wives because there's no reciprocity in the passage. But that's the license that I'm going to take is that this is for both of us. And if it's for both of us, here's what this passage clearly says is the responsibility of each spouse in a marriage. Okay. This is the purpose of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to sanctify you, to make you more like Christ in character. I'm going to sit more on that in a minute, to make you more like Christ in character, to move you through this spirit, this process of spiritual maturation. And that as such, as the spouse, here's what this passage is teaching us. And we're going to unpack this. You, husbands, you, wives, if you're married, you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's lives. If you're married, this passage teaches us that you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's life. Now, let's stop and talk about this word sanctification, because this is one of those spongy church words that we hear a lot, and you church people probably know that word, you've heard it, but if I were to make you stand up right now and be like, Karen, why don't you stand up and tell us what sanctification means? You'd be like, oh my gosh, I hate you. I've never come back to this church in my whole life, right? Nobody wants to do that right now. But it's a word that shows up again and again in Scripture. It's a word that is referred to again and again in Scripture. And it's a summary word for what happens during our life. So it's important that we understand what sanctification is. It's a very simple definition, and there's no blank for this, but if you want to write it down because it's helpful, you can write this down. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. We see throughout Scripture these encouragements that we should be Christ-like, that we should be like Jesus. We pray and we sing, more of you and less of me. More of you, Christ, less of me. If all I ever get is you, that's good enough. I want more of you, less of me. We pray that we would become Christ-like. We pray for our children to become Christ-like. These are all references to what Scripture calls sanctification, the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is an unavoidable portion of the salvation process. See, a lot of us think of salvation as this inflection point, this point in time, this moment in time in which we become saved. But scripture actually teaches us that salvation is a process that begins at the point of justification or some would argue predestination and then continues through sanctification until glorification. And here's how I know that I'm right about this. I'm not making it up. That's basically a direct quote of Romans chapter 8 verse 29. We know verse 28. We love that verse. For all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Great. But 29 says, for those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he justified. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. Those whom he sanctified, he glorified. So let's look at that process. Jesus, God, through his spirit, calls us to himself. He calls us with his Holy Spirit. He chisels away at our blind and darkened heart. He softens us to the good news and the mystery of the gospel until one day our soul is in a place where we're willing to accept Christ as our Savior. We repent of who we thought Jesus was. We accept who Jesus says he is, and we step forward in faith. This looks a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different traditions. We pray the believer's prayer or that we pray the sinner's prayer. We ask Jesus into our heart. We confess Jesus as our savior. However it is you want to phrase it, this for many of us is the point of salvation. It's what we think of as the time we got saved, but that's really the justification process. So God, God calls us then at that moment of what we would call our salvation, that's really justification. That's when we accept the blood of Christ as a cover over our sins. And God looks at us and he does not judge us based on our actions. He judges us based on the righteousness of Christ and says that he sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. This is Isaiah chapter 1 where he puts his arm around us and he says, Come now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. At the point of justification, Jesus, by hanging on the cross, has made our sins as white as snow. He has covered over us with our righteousness. And God in heaven looks down on us and he sees not us, but he sees his Son and we are justified in the court of divine righteousness and made worthy of heaven through the blood of Christ. When we accept that, we are justified. After we are justified, we are sanctified. After we are sanctified, we are glorified. We are glorified when we meet our Father in heaven and our glorified bodies, when we do not need faith anymore because we're looking our Savior in the eye. We are glorified in heaven. So that means that between the time of justification in your life, the moment you became a Christian, to the point of glorification, the moment you meet God in eternity forever. Everything that happens in between that is your sanctification. That God is using day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade to slowly chisel you into someone who is more like him in character, whose heart beats along with him for the things he wants. We are told that if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, that walk with God through the process of sanctification, our heart begins to beat with his so that the things that we desire are the things that he desires and he brings those about for the good of us and those who are called according to his purpose. This is the process of sanctification. Spending our entire life growing closer and closer and closer to Jesus. Now this process can be thwarted. It can get short-circuited by sin and by other ailments, by the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, according to Hebrews 12, verse 1. This process can get sidelined. But as Christians, we are perpetually going through the process of sanctification until we enter glorification. This means that in our 70s, our faith and our depths of insight and understanding and our knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil and being filled with the knowledge of God and the maturity with which we walk and the love that we express and the selflessness that we live with and the humility in which we walk should be vastly different than it was in our 30s. Because God has had 40 years to sanctify us and make us more like his son in character. So that in our 70s we ought to walk with so much more wisdom and godliness than we did in our 30s. Not because we can't be godly in our 30s, but just because he's had 40 more years to sanctify us. That's the call of the Christian life. And what Paul is saying about marriage is that your spouse ought to be the chief agent of sanctification in your life. Meaning, your husband or your wife has been placed in your life by God to be the primary tool he uses to chisel away at your rough edges and reveal within you the person that he's always wanted you to become. They are the primary tool that God uses to chisel away the elements of the world that are still a part of you so that your character might emerge as more Christ-like. That is the purpose of marriage. If you are married, God's primary purpose for you in that marriage is to use you as the primary tool that he chooses to make your spouse more like him in character. That is the role of a husband or a wife. And nothing short of it. And here's what I think is interesting about that point. Here's what I think is interesting. I think that if I were to sit down with any of you over coffee who are married. And say, do you consider yourself a good wife? Do you consider yourself a good husband? You would say yes or no. You would say, you know, for the most part, I think I'm pretty good, or gosh, I haven't been doing great lately, or some of you, I hope, would say, yeah, I think I'm nailing it. That's great. Some of you would be like, I'm failing miserably. Okay. Whatever your answer was in how you're doing, good or bad, neutral or not, the next question is the important one. How good are you doing at being a husband? I think I'm doing okay here. I think I've got some things to work on there. I think I can get better. But overall, I think I've been pretty good. Okay. Why? That's the important question. Why do you think you're a good husband? Why do you think you're a bad husband? Why do you think you've been a good wife? What's your criteria? Why do you think you've been a bad wife? I think a lot of us, if we had to make lists, even if we take your marriage out of it, and I were to ask you, what makes a husband a good husband? If I were to ask you, think of somebody that you think has a great marriage, and they're a great husband, and they're a great wife. What makes them great? What are the qualities? I think we would say things like, well, he loves her really well. He's unselfish with her. He's patient with her. They've been married for 40 years. He's faithful to her. She's faithful to him. She's patient with him. She supports him. Or if they're bad, we would say, well, he's selfish. He doesn't see her. He pretends that the yard needs work for eight hours on a Saturday while she deals with three-year-olds. She doesn't support him. She gets on to him all the time. He ignores her. How far down the list, here's the important part. If I were to ask you what makes you or what makes that person a good husband or a good wife? How many items would you list off before you said that man's a good husband because the way that he loves his wife loves her closer to Jesus? That man's a good husband because his wife is an incredible believer because of the way that he's loved her towards him. How many of you, how far down the list would we have to get before you said that woman is a wonderful wife to that man? Because she has been used by God over and over again and she steps into her role of sanctification in his life. And because of her influence in his life, that man is walking more closely with Jesus than he would have without her. How far down our list of good or bad husband or wife criteria do we need to go before we get to the very first criteria laid out by God in Scripture? Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Present her holy and blameless before the throne. That's tops. That's the number one thing. That's the standard. And yet, so many of us, and listen, well, I'll say this in a second. So many of us have that so far down our list of what a responsible spouse should do that it wouldn't even go mentioned, that we haven't even thought of it. And here's what I want to be really honest with you about, okay? As I prepared this sermon, and I was confronted with this standard from Scripture of what my role as a husband is. I was deeply, deeply convicted. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm not saying that for show. I'm not saying that like, well, you know, we could all improve a little bit. I could too, so I'm going to act convicted here so you feel safe in your conviction. No. I was deeply convicted and went home and apologized to Jen for not being the husband I was going to preach that I needed to be. I apologized to her because I'm about to come out. I might not be much, but I like to think I have some integrity. And I'm not going to come in here and look you men in the eye and tell you what Scripture calls you to be, knowing good and well I've fallen short of that in my own house. So the first thing I did is I went home. I didn't know she was going to be in the fourth and fifth grade room this morning. That makes this part a lot easier. I thought she was going to be sitting right there. And that if I didn't apologize to her, she was going to be sitting there going, what are you talking about, man? There have been seasons where I have done this by God's grace. There have also been seasons when I have not. And so if you are convicted this morning as I lay out the standard that is set forth in scripture for what marriage is and what a spouse ought to be in that marriage. If that's hard to hear and you feel that you've fallen short, I am the captain of your team, pal. I'm with you. I am not preaching this as if I were on some marital mountaintop and I figured it out and I would like for you to get on my level. I am preaching this here. Saying, hey, this is what scripture calls us to. We've all got to step up together. This is what we're called to. So let's be that. To that end, as I was talking through this with Jen this week, she brought up, yeah, that's good, that makes sense. I like that. If both parties are spiritually engaged, it's a really good and helpful thing to tell the couples of grace. I like it. But what do you tell the spouse who is spiritually engaged, whose spouse is spiritually disengaged? To put a finer point on it, more often than not, what do you tell the women who care about Jesus and would really, really love for their husband to be this for them and are trying desperately to be that for their husband, but they can't get his attention? Now, sometimes it's flipped. Sometimes it's the man who's spiritually engaged and the woman who's spiritually disengaged, but that's the exception in my experience in churches. So what do we tell those people? Well, I would tell you two things. First, sometimes when we're unequally yoked in that way, it's our job, and 1 Corinthians speaks to this, it's our job to quietly, patiently love them towards Christ until the Holy Spirit convicts them and they're able to come home and apologize and then step into who they need to be. Sometimes it's our job to patiently wait and pray and love them towards Jesus when they're not able to love us towards Jesus. And we wait on them to step into what they're supposed to be. The other thing I would say is this. I'm going to quote, I wish Keith Cathcart were here, one of my buddies. Keck, you'll have to tell him to listen to this sermon. Because I'm going to quote Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, and Keith is going to lose his ever-loving mind. I quoted Tomlin in the sermon. But Coach Tomlin is a coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He's an incredible leader of men. He's an incredible leader. He's one of the all-time greatest coaches. I have a large amount of respect for him, and he's got a lot of these quick little one-liners that are really good. But one of the things I like about what he says about Pittsburgh Steelers football is the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. The standard in Pittsburgh is Super Bowls. We do not settle for divisional championships, which means, those of you who are not sports inclined, marginal success. We do not settle for marginal success. We are number one or bust. If you don't know what the Super Bowl is, this is America, man. Get with it. Also, go Bills. Yeah, there we go, baby. Mike Thomas says the standard is the standard. Meaning, we have the highest possible standard in our organization. We have the highest standard for what we want to achieve as a team, and we have the highest possible standard for what we expect from each position group and each portion of this team. The standard is the standard, and the standard does not change based on your feelings about your inability to reach it. The standard does not change based on previous performance. The standard does not change based upon how you feel. The standard is the standard. We confront it with honesty and we meet it or don't, but the standard doesn't change. That's how we will approach marriage. The standard is the standard. And the standard is that it is my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus. That's the standard. If you are married, whether you knew it or not when you stood at the altar, what you accepted is this mantle. It is now and forevermore my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus Christ. And here's why it's so important to accept this mantle because people come and go in our lives, man. Jen and I have been together since I was 20 and she was 19. I'm 43. She's 32. I'm just kidding. I'm just not going to tell you her age. I'm 43. We've been together a long time. There have been people, men, in that season, in those years, in those decades, who have come into my life and have been more of a catalyst for change and sanctification in my life than she was at the time. But that flares out. People come and go. And sometimes God in his grace uses them to compel you and to convict you in wonderful ways towards a deeper relationship with him. But day in and day out, year in and year out, she is the presence in my life. She is the one who sees me wake up and go to sleep. She is the one that God has placed there to be used as an agent to change me. And when she does, and when she engages in that, it is so powerful, I can't describe it to you. And that is our sacred duty, to love our spouses towards Jesus. And listen, if you feel like that's too tall an order, if you feel like you haven't done that in a long time and you're not sure if you can do that and you don't know how to do that, what I would say to you is I love you so much and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but what I would say to you is listen, the standard is the standard. That's your sacred duty. Accept it or don't. But if you do not accept your sacred duty to love your spouse towards Christ and be the chief agent of sanctification in their life, then you are absconding on your commitment as a husband or a wife. And if this brings upon you a deep conviction, good. Sit in it. Your wife and your husband or your husband will benefit from that. React to it. Respond to it. Accept it. Step into it. Your kids will be better off for your conviction and your acceptance of this mantle. You will have a marriage that they look at as worthy of emulation if you will receive this mantle, this standard from Paul. It is our sacred duty to love our spouses towards Jesus. Full stop. That's what we must do. Now, as I wrap up, I want to give you guys just a few practical things to do to keep this standard the standard in your marriage. I want to give you a couple. So we go, okay, I accept this. It is my job to love my spouse towards Christ. I accept that mantle. I want to do that. I'm going to be the chief agent of sanctification in their life that I believe you. I want to do it. Let's go. What do I do? What does that practically look like? This is, I'm going to give you four things. So obviously there's more to do than this. This is not an exhaustive list, but four quick things that you can do in your marriages starting right now, starting today to love your spouse towards Christ. Four quick things. Number one, hold them accountable for accountability. Hold them accountable for accountability. I have never thought it's the best idea for your husband or your wife to be your accountability partner. If you decide that you want to develop a new discipline of waking up every day and praying and reading the Bible, spending time in God's word and spending time in God's presence through prayer, if that's what you want to do, probably don't tell your wife that this is what I'm going to do. And when I don't do it, I would like you to call me out on it because of all the other things that exist in your life that she nagged you about and that you get mad about. Let's not add one more. All right. Similarly, wives don't need husbands hounding them about one more thing that they were supposed to do. All right. So let's, let's let other people hold us accountable for things like that. And let's let our spouses hold us accountable for accountability. I've told you before, and this was actually the sermon that I thought you were going to watch last week. It's okay that you didn't. But in that sermon from last year, I talked about the idea of sacred spaces, having spaces in our life, two or three people at the most who know everything about us, who love you and love Jesus and are given permission to tell you the truth about yourself. I shared with you then that there's two men that I meet with, two men from the church that I meet with pretty much once a month. And the very first thing we ask is, what are you struggling with? What's stopping you from following God as well as you can right now? What's going on in your life? Is there anything that you need to share? And it's an opportunity to be held accountable for anything and everything that may be going on in our life that is keeping us from pursuing Jesus the way we need to do it. Jen needs to hold me accountable to go and meet with them and tell them the truth, but she doesn't need to be my primary accountability agent in that, if that makes sense. But spouses, responsible ones, hold each other accountable for accountability. So a wonderful conversation to have in your car at lunch, tonight when the kids go down, whenever, might be where is your accountability in your life and how can we encourage each other to find that more. The second thing we can do to love our spouse towards Christ and accept this mantle is to take their spiritual temperature. Just take their spiritual temperature. Just know how they're doing. If I were to ask any of you who are married, how's the spiritual health of your wife? How's the spiritual health of your husband? How are they doing? How good of an answer could you give me? How good of an answer would you like to be able to give? If you're going to see yourself as sincerely the chief agent of sanctification in their life as bestowed upon you by God, how good of an answer to that question do you think you need to be able to give? And is it good enough right now? All right, moving quickly. Next thing. Love them sacrificially, not selfishly. Love them selflessly, not selfishly. Often we fall into these habits as married people where we love transactionally. I'm going to love you like this, so you love me like this. A husband might think to himself, I'm going to be on the Saturday. I'm going to be present with the kids on Saturday. I'm going to love by cleaning things I haven't been asked to clean. I'm going to do everything I need to do. I'm going to do all the things that she likes for me to do. I'm going to love her in that way so that maybe later when the kids go down, she can express love in a different way. That's what I'm going to do. And listen, that's a sound strategy. Okay, tried and true. Stick with it. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there needs to be more to love than that. Loving selfishly is loving with the expectation of reciprocity. I'm going to love in this way, and they're going to love me in this way. But loving selflessly says, no, I'm going to love them because I love them and I want them to see someone that loves them no matter what. We have a quote in our hallway at the top of our stairs from a guy named W.H. Autzen. I have no idea who that is. I've never, ever Googled him a single time. I just really like this quote that I saw at someone else's house, so I had it done for us. And it says, if greater affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. That's sacrificial selfless love in a marriage. If equal affection cannot be, let the greater love be me. So if it's got to be disproportionate, let it be disproportionate in their favor. And I'll tell you how I've seen this lived out. I have a very good friend whose wife is going through, this is understated, an extremely traumatic time in her life that doesn't have anything to do with him. It's just a really, really difficult time. And because of that, rightly so, she has nothing in her cup left to be the mother that she needs to be to their three children. She has nothing in her cup left to be the wife that she needs to be to him. She has nothing to give. And he is choosing day in and day out to love her, to stay faithful to her, to serve her, to step up and to care for the kids and to love her in that way without expectation of reciprocity, without expecting that she's going to turn around and thank him for that. He's just loving her to get her through this season because he loves her. That's loving sacrificially, not selfishly. Love for love's sake. Last one. This one's so simple. It's so simple. Pray for them and with them. Pray for them and with them. Very simply, I'm not going to belabor this because I don't need to. How can we claim to have accepted the mantle of chief agent of sanctification in the life of our spouse if we can't remember the last time we prayed for them? If we're not praying for them every day? How can the Holy Spirit speak into our hearts and in our minds what they need and where they're at and how to best pray for them if we don't give him space to do that. How can we claim that Jesus is the center of our home, the center of our marriage, and that our marriage is being used to sanctify one another towards Christ if we're not praying with each other with a great degree of regularity? I don't need to belabor this point. You guys know it's right. I know it's right. If we want to love our spouse towards Christ, then we ought to pray for them and with them with a high degree of regularity. Yes? So that's my hope and prayer for you and for your marriages. That you'll accept the standard as the standard. And the standard is you are to be the chief agent of sanctification, of the process of spiritual maturity, becoming more like Christ in character in your spouse's life, and that it is your sacred duty to step into that role. So I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray that you would accept that mantle and that you would walk with humility and meekness as you seek to love your spouse towards Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and how you love us. God, we thank you for our husbands and our wives. God, I thank you publicly for my wife and the ways that she has faithfully loved me towards you. Help me love her towards you. God, for those of us who walk away convicted, I pray that we would sit in that conviction, that we would accept it, that we would be spurned on by it. And that from today, you would produce in all of us an ardent desire to see our spouse come to know you more. Help the husbands in this room to love their wives sacrificially. To love them well, to pray for them. To lay down their lives for them. Help the wives in this room to love their husbands faithfully and earnestly, believing in them as they pray them and love them towards you. God, be with the marriages in this room. We praise you for the good ones that reflect you. We lift up the hard ones and ask that they would reflect you. And we ask that you would be with us as we go from here. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you very much. Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. There you go. Now they can see me on video. Isn't that so much better? If you are joining us online, thank you for doing that. And I would just say gently for those who are joining us online, if you're doing that consistently, there is nothing quite like worshiping together as a family. So if you can get here and worship with us, do that because it's a sweet, sweet time, and it's my favorite part of the week, every week when I get to worship with you guys. We are in the third part of our series called Traits of Grace, and these are kind of five distinctive characteristics that make grace, grace. I am a firm believer, and will wholeheartedly share it with whomever is curious that grace is not, we're not nailing it as a church. Okay. We haven't like figured out how to do church the right way and all the other churches are doing it wrong. Okay. They're, they're worse than us. You guys are the good Christians who've really figured out how to love Jesus well. And the other churches are apostate and we should pray for them. Like we don't believe that. We believe that there are plenty of churches in the city of Raleigh that are doing wonderful jobs, pushing people towards Jesus and making disciples. I would even say that there's got to be plenty of them who are doing better than us. But you guys are here this morning. So we're going to make the best of it together while you think about a better church to go to next week. But there's plenty of great churches doing plenty of great things, and so I think it's important for churches to figure out what is it that makes us us? What has God wired us to do? A few weeks ago, we talked about being kingdom builders, and I kind of left you guys with the question of what is your good work? Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And so we asked, what is your good work? And I think similarly, it's wise for churches to ask, what is our good work? Every church is supposed to make disciples, but how would God have us go about it? How has he uniquely wired and gathered and impassioned us to do it? And as we were having the discussion about what makes grace, grace last fall, we came up as a staff and then as elders with these five traits. So we've talked about the fact that partners at grace are kingdom builders. Then we talked last week about how partners at Grace are conduits of Grace. We stay connected to Jesus and we pour out all the love and all the goodness and all the grace that we receive from Jesus onto others. We are conduits of Grace. And so this week we arrive at the third trait that we feel like we are at Grace. And I realized this morning as I was reviewing and preparing that I didn't put this in your notes anywhere. So I don't know if this is going to be unofficial or something. I hope I haven't done something wrong and now this one doesn't count. But we are people of devotion. That's the third trait of grace. We are people of devotion. And when I say devotion, obviously that can mean multiple things, but it really means what it meant back in 1985. We are people who have devotions. You have heard me say many times, if you've been at grace for any period of time, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, a lot of you can finish this sentence, is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. That is the most important thing, the most important habit that any single one of us can develop at any point in our life. And I believe that to be true, and we hit on that to be true, and we remind you of that all the time, because I also try to remind you that I am not enough. You can't come listen to me talk for 30 minutes a week and know the breadth and the depth of the God that's waiting for you in this text. You can't listen to whatever I choose to pick out and talk about just this little tiny snippet within here and somehow hope to understand the whole book. That's just not how that works. So it takes more than 30 minutes a week. It takes more than just one small group a week, which we'd love to say is an hour a week talking about spiritual things, but really it's about 45 minutes a week talking about whatever the heck and then about 15 minutes of good spiritual conversation. If you're in a small group, you know what I'm talking about. So that's not enough. We've got to spend time in God's Word, and we've got to spend time in God's presence through prayer. So when we thought about what are we at Grace, what do we want partners to be at Grace? We want to be people of devotion. We want to be people who develop that habit. And as we think about it this morning, I don't know about you, but I feel that when God is speaking to us, he often speaks in stereo. When someone will ask me, hey, how do I hear God's voice? How do I know what he's saying to me? How do I discern God's will for my life? I often will say, one of the first things I'll tell him is, God speaks, when he speaks to me, he speaks in stereo. He tells me from this source and this source and this source and this source, and it just kind of continues to come up in my life. And one of the themes that has been coming up for me in my life before the summer, but in particular the summer, you guys gave me the great privilege and rest of not having to preach in the month of July to just kind of settle and work on some other things in the church and allow God to refresh me a little bit. And it was wonderful. And one of the things that I brought out of there and that seems to continue to come up in my sermons that I'm preaching like when I preached on the law a couple weeks ago and I've seen it come through in themes these last couple weeks and then really we're hitting on it again in my Tuesday morning men's Bible study. I have a men's Bible study that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6 30. We meet that early to keep out the riffraff. The only thing the only thing prohibiting you from being there is laziness. So come on and join us. We're not any nicer there either. This is as nice as it gets. But I see this theme in my life and I've seen it in what we're learning at Grace and I thought it worth highlighting this morning, which is simply the beautiful simplicity of abiding. We talked about this last week. We're conduits of grace. And we looked at John 15, where Jesus is speaking to the disciples, particularly four and five. And he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we talked about this idea of all I have to do is stay connected to Christ, and he's going to produce the fruit in my life that I need to produce. I don't have to think about that. I just focus on abiding in Christ. And I think that there is this beautiful simplicity to that. Because we can make Christianity really complicated, can't we? It can be really challenging and difficult. It can be intimidating to look at this Bible, to open it up, to come to service on a Sunday and the pastor says, turn to Malachi. You're like, I've never even heard of that name in my life. I don't know where that is, right? Just to learn just the names of the 66 books, to learn how to find them all, that there's 37 or 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, to learn all, what are all the sins? What are all the things I'm supposed to do? What are all the things I'm not supposed to do? Who are all the people? And how old was Paul? Did he live to be 900? Or is that some other guy? Like it can be a lot. And one of the things that I have a heart for is adults, people who have already gone through life and made a bunch of decisions. And in your 30s, 40s, 50s or later, you decide this is when I want to get serious about my faith and you start trying to learn Bible. And you don't have the background that I've been learning about this since I was old enough to talk. But it can feel like a steep bell curve when you're trying to learn faith and taking it seriously. So I love the beautiful simplicity of really what God asks us to do, which is to simply abide in him. Just simply, you just, just, just focus on Jesus. Just pursue Jesus. Just love others like Jesus loves you. Just do all that. The rest of this stuff, if you focus on abiding in Christ, the rest of this stuff, the rest of Christianity, the rest of life will take care of itself. Just focus on abiding in Christ. And this is, this is an attitude that we see throughout scripture. We're going to look at two other places today where it's pared down and it's made just this simple. One of my favorite pictures of this in the Bible is in the book of Hebrews. In the book of Hebrews, there's Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1, obviously follows. I don't know if you know this. You have to go to seminary to know this, but chapter 12 of Hebrews follows chapter 11 of Hebrews. And in chapter 11 of Hebrews, we have this really famous passage that's called the Hall of Faith, where the author of Hebrews lists out all of these heroes of the faith and the acts that they performed by faith. And then when we get into 12, and I'll read it in just a minute, but when we get into 12, we see it begin, So it's this idea that we're on the playing field of earth as those in heaven who have come before us are now watching us in real time, which I think is a really cool thought. And here's what the author of Hebrews says. He says, Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And it's language, I think, that we can identify with. It's language that inspires. We're kind of like, okay, I'm on the playing field. I'm supposed to run this race. I'm supposed to live my life. I'm supposed to do the things that God wants me to do. How do I do that? Well, I throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. I need to run in such a way that I can do what God wants me to do, that I can be who God wants me to be, and I need to get rid of all the things that don't help me run my race. And this, again, is an idea that is replete throughout Scripture. It shows up again and again and again. Paul tells us that we are to fight the good fight. He says that he fights the good fight. He tells us that in this race, we are to run as the one who's trying to get the prize, that we are supposed to cling to our faith. We are told to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. Jesus tells us that other people should see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. So all throughout Scripture is this simple admonition that we need to live a life worthy of the calling that we've received. We need to run the race. We need to be who God created us to be. We need to determine what are our good works and how do we walk in them. And you can rephrase all of that and we say we need to be good Christians. We need to grow in our faith. We need to move towards Jesus. And we can identify with this. This is, to me, inspiring. It's easy to understand. Yep, I'm running a race and I do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that's so easily entangled. So I got to stop doing those things so I can do the things that God wants me to do. And sometimes, I think more often than not, that's where we stop. I'm going to try really hard at running this race. I'm going to try really hard to be a good Christian. I'm going to try really hard to be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend, a good employee or employer. I'm going to try really hard to be a good citizen. And I'm going to do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we act like the next verse doesn't exist. How are we supposed to do that? By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Even in Hebrews, where it uses this language about running our race, doing better, being good Christians, being who God's created us to be, it tells us, it gives us the answer right there. How do I do that? How do I run my race well? By focusing my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. How do we produce much fruit? By abiding in Christ, by focusing on Jesus. And so I call it the beautiful simplicity of abiding because there's this thing that happens. When I decide that I want to be a better father or a better husband or a better pastor or a better human, there's a lot of growth that needs to happen in all of those areas, except for husband. I'm nailing that one. When I decide I want to be better at those things, I think our tendency is to go, okay, what do I need to do to be a better husband? And we identify things and we run and I'm going to do more of this and less of this. What do I need to do to be a better wife? I'm going to do more of this and less than this. What do I need to do to be a better mom? I'm going to do more of this and less of this. And we try to white knuckle our way to better, right? That's the American way. I want to be better at these things. I'm going to focus on those things. I'm going to come up with a plan, and I'm going to do it. And Christianity says, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that. Just focus on Jesus. Just focus on God. Just focus on abiding in Christ, and I'll take care of the rest of it. So here's how this works practically. I do have a lot of room to grow in being a husband. You know the most effective way for me to be a better husband to Jen? It's to pursue Jesus. It's to wake up tomorrow and say, Jesus, I want to honor you today as I seek to be Jen's husband. How do I honor you in that? How would you have me be a good husband today, Jesus? You want to be a better employee? You want to move up the ranks? You want your career to progress? You can spend a lot of time thinking about the best thing to do and the best person to please and the best way, the best jobs to go for or the best tasks to complete or the right people to make friends with or whatever it is you do to progress in your field. Or you can go to work every day, focus on Christ, and you can say, Jesus, how can I honor you today in my work? How can I honor you today in these meetings? How can I honor you today in these tasks? And then you honor Jesus. And you know what happens? Everything else works out. I was talking in my Bible study group about this idea. Just honor Jesus in what we do. Just pursue Jesus in what we do and let him handle the results. And they said, well, what does that mean practically? I said, for my sermons. My job is to be diligent on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday so that when I stand before you on Sunday, before God on Sunday, I know I've given my best effort. I've honored God in my preparation. I've honored Jesus in my prayer life as I approached sharing this with you guys. And I know that I've done the best that I could in the week that I was given with the time that I was allotted. And I'm honoring Jesus as I give this to you. If I can say that, what happens as a result of the sermon is completely out of my hands. I have nothing to do with that. I don't worry about that. I worry about where my heart is as I prepare, and I'll be the first to confess. Listen, I say that, and that sounds lovely, like how Nate, he's worked diligently on sermons, and he's prayed through them, and he's ready to present them. Yeah, most of the time, sometimes, y'all, I'm winging it, and I sit down, and the very first, y'all are singing, and y'all think things are good, and I sit down, and I'm like, God, I'm so sorry. I dishonored these people. That wasn't worth showering for. I can't believe that I did that to them. So sometimes I don't do it. But on the weeks that I do, then I preach the sermon, and I wash my hands of it. Now it's between you and the Spirit. And somebody in my Bible study said, well, wouldn't that be a great way to approach life? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it would. We should do that with everything. We should do that with how we lead people, with how we love people, with how we be good parents. It's the beautiful simplicity of abiding in Christ. We focus on him, and then he takes care of everything else. And I think that this is a radical message in a culture that wants to try so hard at everything, that wants to have a to-do list for everything, for all the things in life. I'm going to find a way to tackle it, and I'm going to white-knuckle my way to better. And really, the beautiful simplicity of abiding means that we try hard at pursuing Jesus. That's it. That's where we try hard. Christians, you want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where you should put your effort? Put it in pursuing Jesus. And waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. Put it into pursuing Christ and everything else will take care of itself. And there's a lot of ways to pursue Jesus, okay? We do it through worship. We do it, I believe, through godly community and spiritual conversations. We have transparency and vulnerability. We ask good questions. We share pieces of ourselves. We pursue Jesus through his service, through doing his work. Jesus says whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. So we pursue Jesus by helping those who can't help themselves. But I think the primary way that we pursue Jesus is through devotions. One of the primary ways we pursue Jesus is by waking up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. I think it's the fundamental way. I think one of the most frustrating things to me about trying to get in shape and fit into your old mediums. I've got one on underneath this that I have to wear a baggy shirt over it because if I don't, I'll just bring shame on my family. I can't wear this polo in front of other people in public. I used to be able to, there was a time, but when you go to get in shape, you can, you can exercise 30 minutes a day, right? And exercising to me is the easy part. That's, that's, that's the fun thing to do. That's fine. That's good. I can put in a podcast or a book or something like that. That's kind of the easy discipline to gain on. You know what the hard part is? Eating like a rabbit, man. That stinks. Eating salads. That's not fun. I don't like eating right. I just don't. I like eating wrong. Very wrong. But unless you do both, you'll never be in good shape. You won't be in good health. And you can exercise all you want, but until your diet changes, your body really doesn't. And you really don't get that healthy. You can exercise all you want and go to church and do all the things and go to Bible study and have the conversations and serve sometimes and give of yourself and tithe. You can do all the exercise you want, but until your diet changes, your spiritual health won't really either. I believe that our pursuit of Jesus begins here. And that when we do that, when we begin it here, then God handles everything else. This is actually affirmed in the book of Psalms. The very first Psalm, the one that Parker read earlier in the service, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. And then look what happens. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. David says, blessed is the man who doesn't waste his time with frivolous things, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. His delight is in God's word. And on that law, he meditates day and night. How can you meditate on it if you don't know it, if you haven't learned it, if you haven't poured yourself into it? He prays over it. He pursues Jesus in it. And because of that, he's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. And all that he does, he prospers. The man that David is describing in Psalm 1 did not set about to prosper. That's not the point. He set about to know Jesus. He set about to know his God, to know his law, to know his word. And the happy side effect of that was that God blesses him along his way. I want to be careful when I say that. God's blessings look different than what you think blessings might be. So I'm not preaching that if we get up every day and read God's word that we're going to have all the things that we want. That's not how that goes. But what I am saying is if we get up every day and we spend time in God's word and time in prayer, then we will become who God wants us to be. That's the blessing. And I believe that becoming the people that God has created us to be is the place of greatest peace and contentment and happiness that we can find in life. If you've ever had a season where you were moving, you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do, you know there's no greater peace or joy than that. I had lunch with somebody this week, catching up with them after a long time, and he shifted careers and got a new job. And I said, how's it going, man? And he said, God has affirmed over and over and over again that I am doing exactly what he would have me do, and I have never been happier. It's remarkable how that works. When we walk the path that God has laid out for us, lo and behold, that's where joy is found. I think Psalm 16 tells us something about there being a fullness of joy in the presence of God. And I feel like that's a joy and a peace worth having. So I would also mention to you that nothing worth having is gained by default. Nothing in this life that we have that we really value is gained by default. If you have a good marriage, like a good one, you worked hard at that, Joker. You didn't just fall into that. Unless you're like, if you've been married for like two years, you're like, my marriage is pretty good. We haven't had to work that hard. Okay, forget you. All right. You don't count. Talk to the rest of us in 10 years, rookies. If you have a good marriage, you worked hard at that. You've intentionally spent time together when the kids made it difficult. You've intentionally chosen each other when life tried to prevent it. You've had hard conversations. You've said hard things. You've heard hard things. But you're stronger for it and you have a good marriage and you worked at it. If you have kids who love you, if you have adult kids who love you and want to spend time with you, you worked hard at that. That was not easy. That did not happen by default. If you have a career that you like, that you're proud of, you worked hard at that. That didn't happen by default. If you have good, rich, deep friendships, you've prioritized and valued them over the years. You've made them important. You didn't just default into those. Why would we think that we would default into a good, healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus? We have to work at it. We have to make time for it. So do that. Prioritize it. Make it happen. Find a time when you can spend time in God's Word and spend time in prayer. If you don't know what to read, ask somebody. Start in Proverbs. If you don't know the Bible at all and you want to read it and you don't know what to read, start in Proverbs. You don't have to know anything about anything for Proverbs to make sense. Totally out of context, just start reading it. It's great. Read a gospel, read the book of Mark. It goes very fast and it points you with Jesus very well. Or just pick up and read something you've been curious about, but start doing it. Make it a habit. Be consistent in it. Trust me when I say that there's no greater habit that anyone can develop than that, and do it. Whatever you're currently doing first in the morning isn't as good as this. And if what you're doing first in the morning is sleeping an extra 30 minutes, it's definitely not as good as this. Just hit pause on that other stuff and engage with God first and then go about your day. I do it when I get into the office. I get into the office. I tend to be the first one in the office because I'm the hardest worker on staff. And I have a kid that starts school early and I have to drop her off every day. So I get here early. But the office is quiet and that's when I have my time. That's when I'm able to pray and read God's word and get ready to prayerfully approach my day. Pick a time when you can do it too. Make it happen. Prioritize it. Value it. Last week, I said that we needed to abide in Christ and we're going to talk about how to do that. And I said that when you came back this week, I was going to light some of your faces on fire and really convict you. So here's the convicting thing. What I'm about to say, I'm not saying to you if you're new. If this is the first time you've ever heard a sermon that's imploring you to have a devotional life, then I'm not saying this next thing to you. If it's the second time, maybe the first time you weren't paying attention, or I just did a bad job with it, whatever it was, I'm not talking to you either. But if you've heard this sermon before, I've preached it plenty. Maybe not from this angle, maybe not in this way, but I've preached have devotions. I've preached that a bunch. I've joked around. I'm going to do it one day. I'm just going to walk up here on stage and I'm going to go, hey, good morning, Grace. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate, one of the pastors here. You should read the Bible more. Let's pray. Because that's all you need because you know that I'm right. You know that we need to do this. So if that's you and you still don't have habit, as your pastor, as someone who cares about you, let me just ask you, how many more times will you need this sermon? How many more times? How many more times are you going to sit in this room or a room like this and hear this sermon and go, yeah, Monday, I need to. How many more? Can this one be it? Can this one do it for us? Because there's some people in this room who already do this. They've got a rich, vibrant devotional life, and they've been sitting in here, and they've just been cheering me on. Yes, do it. Please. It's the best. And I want all of you to cheer this sermon on every time you hear it from now on. Next time you hear this sermon, listen, I don't want it to convict you one little bit. I want you to sit in those seats feeling great because you know it's true. And now you're the cheering section because I'm never going to stop preaching this sermon. I'm going to preach it once or twice a year for the rest of my days as long as God gives me a stage to preach on to push people back into God's word and to push people back into prayer. But at Grace, as our partners, when I preach this sermon again, I want you to be the biggest cheerleaders. And I never want it to convict you again. Because I want you to hang in there and develop this habit. And I'll tell you this, okay? Just give you a little pastoral advice. Some of you, gosh, I hope, as a result of this, are going to wake up tomorrow, you're going to read your Bible. And it'll be something that you haven't done in a while. And that's great. You'll set your alarm. You'll make your coffee. You get your vibe all right, exactly where you want to be. This is good. This nice fall weather. This is great. I'm going to have the best quiet time. And you're going to open up your Bible to wherever you've decided to open up your Bible. And maybe, maybe God parts the heavens and the angels sing to you and Shekinah glory shines down directly on your head. Maybe. What's probably going to happen is you're going to get a little something out of it that's encouraging, that speaks to something in your life, or maybe nothing at all. You'll pray. If you're not used to praying, you'll pray for about two and a half minutes. You'll be like, I'm all out. Kind of run out of stuff to pray about. That's okay. And maybe it doesn't feel like the heavens parted and Shekinah glory shone down on your noggin. But I tell you what, if you get up tomorrow and you spend time in God's word and you spend time in prayer, I can promise you this, you'll have a different day than you would have had otherwise. You have a different mindset going into that day than you would have had otherwise. And if you do that several days in a row, I don't know when the heavens are gonna open and words are gonna leap off the page, but I can tell you this, if you do it several days in a row, you're gonna have a different week. And if you can manage by God's goodness and grace to hang in there and string together a couple of weeks like that, three, four weeks, you're going to have a different month. And if you start stringing together months, you're going to have a different life. And that's what we want for you at Grace. That's why we want you to be people of devotion. So let's pray that God gives us the strength of conviction to do that so that we know the only thing we need to try hard at is pursuing Jesus, and he'll take care of the rest. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your word, for the way that you've chosen to reveal yourself to us. I pray that you would give us a heart for it, that you would give us a passion for it, that we would love your word, that we would love this text. God, make it exciting to us as we dive into it. Let us start to piece things together and understand where people go and where they fit and how you're revealed in your word. Let it excite us about you. God, create in us such a hunger for your word that we wake up looking forward to it. Create in us such a hunger for your presence that we desire to pray every day. May we be refreshed in your presence. May we be refreshed by your word. And God, may we become increasingly people of devotion. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you very much. Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. There you go. Now they can see me on video. Isn't that so much better? If you are joining us online, thank you for doing that. And I would just say gently for those who are joining us online, if you're doing that consistently, there is nothing quite like worshiping together as a family. So if you can get here and worship with us, do that because it's a sweet, sweet time, and it's my favorite part of the week, every week when I get to worship with you guys. We are in the third part of our series called Traits of Grace, and these are kind of five distinctive characteristics that make grace, grace. I am a firm believer, and will wholeheartedly share it with whomever is curious that grace is not, we're not nailing it as a church. Okay. We haven't like figured out how to do church the right way and all the other churches are doing it wrong. Okay. They're, they're worse than us. You guys are the good Christians who've really figured out how to love Jesus well. And the other churches are apostate and we should pray for them. Like we don't believe that. We believe that there are plenty of churches in the city of Raleigh that are doing wonderful jobs, pushing people towards Jesus and making disciples. I would even say that there's got to be plenty of them who are doing better than us. But you guys are here this morning. So we're going to make the best of it together while you think about a better church to go to next week. But there's plenty of great churches doing plenty of great things, and so I think it's important for churches to figure out what is it that makes us us? What has God wired us to do? A few weeks ago, we talked about being kingdom builders, and I kind of left you guys with the question of what is your good work? Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And so we asked, what is your good work? And I think similarly, it's wise for churches to ask, what is our good work? Every church is supposed to make disciples, but how would God have us go about it? How has he uniquely wired and gathered and impassioned us to do it? And as we were having the discussion about what makes grace, grace last fall, we came up as a staff and then as elders with these five traits. So we've talked about the fact that partners at grace are kingdom builders. Then we talked last week about how partners at Grace are conduits of Grace. We stay connected to Jesus and we pour out all the love and all the goodness and all the grace that we receive from Jesus onto others. We are conduits of Grace. And so this week we arrive at the third trait that we feel like we are at Grace. And I realized this morning as I was reviewing and preparing that I didn't put this in your notes anywhere. So I don't know if this is going to be unofficial or something. I hope I haven't done something wrong and now this one doesn't count. But we are people of devotion. That's the third trait of grace. We are people of devotion. And when I say devotion, obviously that can mean multiple things, but it really means what it meant back in 1985. We are people who have devotions. You have heard me say many times, if you've been at grace for any period of time, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, a lot of you can finish this sentence, is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. That is the most important thing, the most important habit that any single one of us can develop at any point in our life. And I believe that to be true, and we hit on that to be true, and we remind you of that all the time, because I also try to remind you that I am not enough. You can't come listen to me talk for 30 minutes a week and know the breadth and the depth of the God that's waiting for you in this text. You can't listen to whatever I choose to pick out and talk about just this little tiny snippet within here and somehow hope to understand the whole book. That's just not how that works. So it takes more than 30 minutes a week. It takes more than just one small group a week, which we'd love to say is an hour a week talking about spiritual things, but really it's about 45 minutes a week talking about whatever the heck and then about 15 minutes of good spiritual conversation. If you're in a small group, you know what I'm talking about. So that's not enough. We've got to spend time in God's Word, and we've got to spend time in God's presence through prayer. So when we thought about what are we at Grace, what do we want partners to be at Grace? We want to be people of devotion. We want to be people who develop that habit. And as we think about it this morning, I don't know about you, but I feel that when God is speaking to us, he often speaks in stereo. When someone will ask me, hey, how do I hear God's voice? How do I know what he's saying to me? How do I discern God's will for my life? I often will say, one of the first things I'll tell him is, God speaks, when he speaks to me, he speaks in stereo. He tells me from this source and this source and this source and this source, and it just kind of continues to come up in my life. And one of the themes that has been coming up for me in my life before the summer, but in particular the summer, you guys gave me the great privilege and rest of not having to preach in the month of July to just kind of settle and work on some other things in the church and allow God to refresh me a little bit. And it was wonderful. And one of the things that I brought out of there and that seems to continue to come up in my sermons that I'm preaching like when I preached on the law a couple weeks ago and I've seen it come through in themes these last couple weeks and then really we're hitting on it again in my Tuesday morning men's Bible study. I have a men's Bible study that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6 30. We meet that early to keep out the riffraff. The only thing the only thing prohibiting you from being there is laziness. So come on and join us. We're not any nicer there either. This is as nice as it gets. But I see this theme in my life and I've seen it in what we're learning at Grace and I thought it worth highlighting this morning, which is simply the beautiful simplicity of abiding. We talked about this last week. We're conduits of grace. And we looked at John 15, where Jesus is speaking to the disciples, particularly four and five. And he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we talked about this idea of all I have to do is stay connected to Christ, and he's going to produce the fruit in my life that I need to produce. I don't have to think about that. I just focus on abiding in Christ. And I think that there is this beautiful simplicity to that. Because we can make Christianity really complicated, can't we? It can be really challenging and difficult. It can be intimidating to look at this Bible, to open it up, to come to service on a Sunday and the pastor says, turn to Malachi. You're like, I've never even heard of that name in my life. I don't know where that is, right? Just to learn just the names of the 66 books, to learn how to find them all, that there's 37 or 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, to learn all, what are all the sins? What are all the things I'm supposed to do? What are all the things I'm not supposed to do? Who are all the people? And how old was Paul? Did he live to be 900? Or is that some other guy? Like it can be a lot. And one of the things that I have a heart for is adults, people who have already gone through life and made a bunch of decisions. And in your 30s, 40s, 50s or later, you decide this is when I want to get serious about my faith and you start trying to learn Bible. And you don't have the background that I've been learning about this since I was old enough to talk. But it can feel like a steep bell curve when you're trying to learn faith and taking it seriously. So I love the beautiful simplicity of really what God asks us to do, which is to simply abide in him. Just simply, you just, just, just focus on Jesus. Just pursue Jesus. Just love others like Jesus loves you. Just do all that. The rest of this stuff, if you focus on abiding in Christ, the rest of this stuff, the rest of Christianity, the rest of life will take care of itself. Just focus on abiding in Christ. And this is, this is an attitude that we see throughout scripture. We're going to look at two other places today where it's pared down and it's made just this simple. One of my favorite pictures of this in the Bible is in the book of Hebrews. In the book of Hebrews, there's Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1, obviously follows. I don't know if you know this. You have to go to seminary to know this, but chapter 12 of Hebrews follows chapter 11 of Hebrews. And in chapter 11 of Hebrews, we have this really famous passage that's called the Hall of Faith, where the author of Hebrews lists out all of these heroes of the faith and the acts that they performed by faith. And then when we get into 12, and I'll read it in just a minute, but when we get into 12, we see it begin, So it's this idea that we're on the playing field of earth as those in heaven who have come before us are now watching us in real time, which I think is a really cool thought. And here's what the author of Hebrews says. He says, Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And it's language, I think, that we can identify with. It's language that inspires. We're kind of like, okay, I'm on the playing field. I'm supposed to run this race. I'm supposed to live my life. I'm supposed to do the things that God wants me to do. How do I do that? Well, I throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. I need to run in such a way that I can do what God wants me to do, that I can be who God wants me to be, and I need to get rid of all the things that don't help me run my race. And this, again, is an idea that is replete throughout Scripture. It shows up again and again and again. Paul tells us that we are to fight the good fight. He says that he fights the good fight. He tells us that in this race, we are to run as the one who's trying to get the prize, that we are supposed to cling to our faith. We are told to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. Jesus tells us that other people should see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. So all throughout Scripture is this simple admonition that we need to live a life worthy of the calling that we've received. We need to run the race. We need to be who God created us to be. We need to determine what are our good works and how do we walk in them. And you can rephrase all of that and we say we need to be good Christians. We need to grow in our faith. We need to move towards Jesus. And we can identify with this. This is, to me, inspiring. It's easy to understand. Yep, I'm running a race and I do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that's so easily entangled. So I got to stop doing those things so I can do the things that God wants me to do. And sometimes, I think more often than not, that's where we stop. I'm going to try really hard at running this race. I'm going to try really hard to be a good Christian. I'm going to try really hard to be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend, a good employee or employer. I'm going to try really hard to be a good citizen. And I'm going to do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we act like the next verse doesn't exist. How are we supposed to do that? By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Even in Hebrews, where it uses this language about running our race, doing better, being good Christians, being who God's created us to be, it tells us, it gives us the answer right there. How do I do that? How do I run my race well? By focusing my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. How do we produce much fruit? By abiding in Christ, by focusing on Jesus. And so I call it the beautiful simplicity of abiding because there's this thing that happens. When I decide that I want to be a better father or a better husband or a better pastor or a better human, there's a lot of growth that needs to happen in all of those areas, except for husband. I'm nailing that one. When I decide I want to be better at those things, I think our tendency is to go, okay, what do I need to do to be a better husband? And we identify things and we run and I'm going to do more of this and less of this. What do I need to do to be a better wife? I'm going to do more of this and less than this. What do I need to do to be a better mom? I'm going to do more of this and less of this. And we try to white knuckle our way to better, right? That's the American way. I want to be better at these things. I'm going to focus on those things. I'm going to come up with a plan, and I'm going to do it. And Christianity says, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that. Just focus on Jesus. Just focus on God. Just focus on abiding in Christ, and I'll take care of the rest of it. So here's how this works practically. I do have a lot of room to grow in being a husband. You know the most effective way for me to be a better husband to Jen? It's to pursue Jesus. It's to wake up tomorrow and say, Jesus, I want to honor you today as I seek to be Jen's husband. How do I honor you in that? How would you have me be a good husband today, Jesus? You want to be a better employee? You want to move up the ranks? You want your career to progress? You can spend a lot of time thinking about the best thing to do and the best person to please and the best way, the best jobs to go for or the best tasks to complete or the right people to make friends with or whatever it is you do to progress in your field. Or you can go to work every day, focus on Christ, and you can say, Jesus, how can I honor you today in my work? How can I honor you today in these meetings? How can I honor you today in these tasks? And then you honor Jesus. And you know what happens? Everything else works out. I was talking in my Bible study group about this idea. Just honor Jesus in what we do. Just pursue Jesus in what we do and let him handle the results. And they said, well, what does that mean practically? I said, for my sermons. My job is to be diligent on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday so that when I stand before you on Sunday, before God on Sunday, I know I've given my best effort. I've honored God in my preparation. I've honored Jesus in my prayer life as I approached sharing this with you guys. And I know that I've done the best that I could in the week that I was given with the time that I was allotted. And I'm honoring Jesus as I give this to you. If I can say that, what happens as a result of the sermon is completely out of my hands. I have nothing to do with that. I don't worry about that. I worry about where my heart is as I prepare, and I'll be the first to confess. Listen, I say that, and that sounds lovely, like how Nate, he's worked diligently on sermons, and he's prayed through them, and he's ready to present them. Yeah, most of the time, sometimes, y'all, I'm winging it, and I sit down, and the very first, y'all are singing, and y'all think things are good, and I sit down, and I'm like, God, I'm so sorry. I dishonored these people. That wasn't worth showering for. I can't believe that I did that to them. So sometimes I don't do it. But on the weeks that I do, then I preach the sermon, and I wash my hands of it. Now it's between you and the Spirit. And somebody in my Bible study said, well, wouldn't that be a great way to approach life? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it would. We should do that with everything. We should do that with how we lead people, with how we love people, with how we be good parents. It's the beautiful simplicity of abiding in Christ. We focus on him, and then he takes care of everything else. And I think that this is a radical message in a culture that wants to try so hard at everything, that wants to have a to-do list for everything, for all the things in life. I'm going to find a way to tackle it, and I'm going to white-knuckle my way to better. And really, the beautiful simplicity of abiding means that we try hard at pursuing Jesus. That's it. That's where we try hard. Christians, you want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where you should put your effort? Put it in pursuing Jesus. And waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. Put it into pursuing Christ and everything else will take care of itself. And there's a lot of ways to pursue Jesus, okay? We do it through worship. We do it, I believe, through godly community and spiritual conversations. We have transparency and vulnerability. We ask good questions. We share pieces of ourselves. We pursue Jesus through his service, through doing his work. Jesus says whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. So we pursue Jesus by helping those who can't help themselves. But I think the primary way that we pursue Jesus is through devotions. One of the primary ways we pursue Jesus is by waking up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. I think it's the fundamental way. I think one of the most frustrating things to me about trying to get in shape and fit into your old mediums. I've got one on underneath this that I have to wear a baggy shirt over it because if I don't, I'll just bring shame on my family. I can't wear this polo in front of other people in public. I used to be able to, there was a time, but when you go to get in shape, you can, you can exercise 30 minutes a day, right? And exercising to me is the easy part. That's, that's, that's the fun thing to do. That's fine. That's good. I can put in a podcast or a book or something like that. That's kind of the easy discipline to gain on. You know what the hard part is? Eating like a rabbit, man. That stinks. Eating salads. That's not fun. I don't like eating right. I just don't. I like eating wrong. Very wrong. But unless you do both, you'll never be in good shape. You won't be in good health. And you can exercise all you want, but until your diet changes, your body really doesn't. And you really don't get that healthy. You can exercise all you want and go to church and do all the things and go to Bible study and have the conversations and serve sometimes and give of yourself and tithe. You can do all the exercise you want, but until your diet changes, your spiritual health won't really either. I believe that our pursuit of Jesus begins here. And that when we do that, when we begin it here, then God handles everything else. This is actually affirmed in the book of Psalms. The very first Psalm, the one that Parker read earlier in the service, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. And then look what happens. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. David says, blessed is the man who doesn't waste his time with frivolous things, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. His delight is in God's word. And on that law, he meditates day and night. How can you meditate on it if you don't know it, if you haven't learned it, if you haven't poured yourself into it? He prays over it. He pursues Jesus in it. And because of that, he's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. And all that he does, he prospers. The man that David is describing in Psalm 1 did not set about to prosper. That's not the point. He set about to know Jesus. He set about to know his God, to know his law, to know his word. And the happy side effect of that was that God blesses him along his way. I want to be careful when I say that. God's blessings look different than what you think blessings might be. So I'm not preaching that if we get up every day and read God's word that we're going to have all the things that we want. That's not how that goes. But what I am saying is if we get up every day and we spend time in God's word and time in prayer, then we will become who God wants us to be. That's the blessing. And I believe that becoming the people that God has created us to be is the place of greatest peace and contentment and happiness that we can find in life. If you've ever had a season where you were moving, you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do, you know there's no greater peace or joy than that. I had lunch with somebody this week, catching up with them after a long time, and he shifted careers and got a new job. And I said, how's it going, man? And he said, God has affirmed over and over and over again that I am doing exactly what he would have me do, and I have never been happier. It's remarkable how that works. When we walk the path that God has laid out for us, lo and behold, that's where joy is found. I think Psalm 16 tells us something about there being a fullness of joy in the presence of God. And I feel like that's a joy and a peace worth having. So I would also mention to you that nothing worth having is gained by default. Nothing in this life that we have that we really value is gained by default. If you have a good marriage, like a good one, you worked hard at that, Joker. You didn't just fall into that. Unless you're like, if you've been married for like two years, you're like, my marriage is pretty good. We haven't had to work that hard. Okay, forget you. All right. You don't count. Talk to the rest of us in 10 years, rookies. If you have a good marriage, you worked hard at that. You've intentionally spent time together when the kids made it difficult. You've intentionally chosen each other when life tried to prevent it. You've had hard conversations. You've said hard things. You've heard hard things. But you're stronger for it and you have a good marriage and you worked at it. If you have kids who love you, if you have adult kids who love you and want to spend time with you, you worked hard at that. That was not easy. That did not happen by default. If you have a career that you like, that you're proud of, you worked hard at that. That didn't happen by default. If you have good, rich, deep friendships, you've prioritized and valued them over the years. You've made them important. You didn't just default into those. Why would we think that we would default into a good, healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus? We have to work at it. We have to make time for it. So do that. Prioritize it. Make it happen. Find a time when you can spend time in God's Word and spend time in prayer. If you don't know what to read, ask somebody. Start in Proverbs. If you don't know the Bible at all and you want to read it and you don't know what to read, start in Proverbs. You don't have to know anything about anything for Proverbs to make sense. Totally out of context, just start reading it. It's great. Read a gospel, read the book of Mark. It goes very fast and it points you with Jesus very well. Or just pick up and read something you've been curious about, but start doing it. Make it a habit. Be consistent in it. Trust me when I say that there's no greater habit that anyone can develop than that, and do it. Whatever you're currently doing first in the morning isn't as good as this. And if what you're doing first in the morning is sleeping an extra 30 minutes, it's definitely not as good as this. Just hit pause on that other stuff and engage with God first and then go about your day. I do it when I get into the office. I get into the office. I tend to be the first one in the office because I'm the hardest worker on staff. And I have a kid that starts school early and I have to drop her off every day. So I get here early. But the office is quiet and that's when I have my time. That's when I'm able to pray and read God's word and get ready to prayerfully approach my day. Pick a time when you can do it too. Make it happen. Prioritize it. Value it. Last week, I said that we needed to abide in Christ and we're going to talk about how to do that. And I said that when you came back this week, I was going to light some of your faces on fire and really convict you. So here's the convicting thing. What I'm about to say, I'm not saying to you if you're new. If this is the first time you've ever heard a sermon that's imploring you to have a devotional life, then I'm not saying this next thing to you. If it's the second time, maybe the first time you weren't paying attention, or I just did a bad job with it, whatever it was, I'm not talking to you either. But if you've heard this sermon before, I've preached it plenty. Maybe not from this angle, maybe not in this way, but I've preached have devotions. I've preached that a bunch. I've joked around. I'm going to do it one day. I'm just going to walk up here on stage and I'm going to go, hey, good morning, Grace. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate, one of the pastors here. You should read the Bible more. Let's pray. Because that's all you need because you know that I'm right. You know that we need to do this. So if that's you and you still don't have habit, as your pastor, as someone who cares about you, let me just ask you, how many more times will you need this sermon? How many more times? How many more times are you going to sit in this room or a room like this and hear this sermon and go, yeah, Monday, I need to. How many more? Can this one be it? Can this one do it for us? Because there's some people in this room who already do this. They've got a rich, vibrant devotional life, and they've been sitting in here, and they've just been cheering me on. Yes, do it. Please. It's the best. And I want all of you to cheer this sermon on every time you hear it from now on. Next time you hear this sermon, listen, I don't want it to convict you one little bit. I want you to sit in those seats feeling great because you know it's true. And now you're the cheering section because I'm never going to stop preaching this sermon. I'm going to preach it once or twice a year for the rest of my days as long as God gives me a stage to preach on to push people back into God's word and to push people back into prayer. But at Grace, as our partners, when I preach this sermon again, I want you to be the biggest cheerleaders. And I never want it to convict you again. Because I want you to hang in there and develop this habit. And I'll tell you this, okay? Just give you a little pastoral advice. Some of you, gosh, I hope, as a result of this, are going to wake up tomorrow, you're going to read your Bible. And it'll be something that you haven't done in a while. And that's great. You'll set your alarm. You'll make your coffee. You get your vibe all right, exactly where you want to be. This is good. This nice fall weather. This is great. I'm going to have the best quiet time. And you're going to open up your Bible to wherever you've decided to open up your Bible. And maybe, maybe God parts the heavens and the angels sing to you and Shekinah glory shines down directly on your head. Maybe. What's probably going to happen is you're going to get a little something out of it that's encouraging, that speaks to something in your life, or maybe nothing at all. You'll pray. If you're not used to praying, you'll pray for about two and a half minutes. You'll be like, I'm all out. Kind of run out of stuff to pray about. That's okay. And maybe it doesn't feel like the heavens parted and Shekinah glory shone down on your noggin. But I tell you what, if you get up tomorrow and you spend time in God's word and you spend time in prayer, I can promise you this, you'll have a different day than you would have had otherwise. You have a different mindset going into that day than you would have had otherwise. And if you do that several days in a row, I don't know when the heavens are gonna open and words are gonna leap off the page, but I can tell you this, if you do it several days in a row, you're gonna have a different week. And if you can manage by God's goodness and grace to hang in there and string together a couple of weeks like that, three, four weeks, you're going to have a different month. And if you start stringing together months, you're going to have a different life. And that's what we want for you at Grace. That's why we want you to be people of devotion. So let's pray that God gives us the strength of conviction to do that so that we know the only thing we need to try hard at is pursuing Jesus, and he'll take care of the rest. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your word, for the way that you've chosen to reveal yourself to us. I pray that you would give us a heart for it, that you would give us a passion for it, that we would love your word, that we would love this text. God, make it exciting to us as we dive into it. Let us start to piece things together and understand where people go and where they fit and how you're revealed in your word. Let it excite us about you. God, create in us such a hunger for your word that we wake up looking forward to it. Create in us such a hunger for your presence that we desire to pray every day. May we be refreshed in your presence. May we be refreshed by your word. And God, may we become increasingly people of devotion. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you very much. Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. There you go. Now they can see me on video. Isn't that so much better? If you are joining us online, thank you for doing that. And I would just say gently for those who are joining us online, if you're doing that consistently, there is nothing quite like worshiping together as a family. So if you can get here and worship with us, do that because it's a sweet, sweet time, and it's my favorite part of the week, every week when I get to worship with you guys. We are in the third part of our series called Traits of Grace, and these are kind of five distinctive characteristics that make grace, grace. I am a firm believer, and will wholeheartedly share it with whomever is curious that grace is not, we're not nailing it as a church. Okay. We haven't like figured out how to do church the right way and all the other churches are doing it wrong. Okay. They're, they're worse than us. You guys are the good Christians who've really figured out how to love Jesus well. And the other churches are apostate and we should pray for them. Like we don't believe that. We believe that there are plenty of churches in the city of Raleigh that are doing wonderful jobs, pushing people towards Jesus and making disciples. I would even say that there's got to be plenty of them who are doing better than us. But you guys are here this morning. So we're going to make the best of it together while you think about a better church to go to next week. But there's plenty of great churches doing plenty of great things, and so I think it's important for churches to figure out what is it that makes us us? What has God wired us to do? A few weeks ago, we talked about being kingdom builders, and I kind of left you guys with the question of what is your good work? Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And so we asked, what is your good work? And I think similarly, it's wise for churches to ask, what is our good work? Every church is supposed to make disciples, but how would God have us go about it? How has he uniquely wired and gathered and impassioned us to do it? And as we were having the discussion about what makes grace, grace last fall, we came up as a staff and then as elders with these five traits. So we've talked about the fact that partners at grace are kingdom builders. Then we talked last week about how partners at Grace are conduits of Grace. We stay connected to Jesus and we pour out all the love and all the goodness and all the grace that we receive from Jesus onto others. We are conduits of Grace. And so this week we arrive at the third trait that we feel like we are at Grace. And I realized this morning as I was reviewing and preparing that I didn't put this in your notes anywhere. So I don't know if this is going to be unofficial or something. I hope I haven't done something wrong and now this one doesn't count. But we are people of devotion. That's the third trait of grace. We are people of devotion. And when I say devotion, obviously that can mean multiple things, but it really means what it meant back in 1985. We are people who have devotions. You have heard me say many times, if you've been at grace for any period of time, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, a lot of you can finish this sentence, is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. That is the most important thing, the most important habit that any single one of us can develop at any point in our life. And I believe that to be true, and we hit on that to be true, and we remind you of that all the time, because I also try to remind you that I am not enough. You can't come listen to me talk for 30 minutes a week and know the breadth and the depth of the God that's waiting for you in this text. You can't listen to whatever I choose to pick out and talk about just this little tiny snippet within here and somehow hope to understand the whole book. That's just not how that works. So it takes more than 30 minutes a week. It takes more than just one small group a week, which we'd love to say is an hour a week talking about spiritual things, but really it's about 45 minutes a week talking about whatever the heck and then about 15 minutes of good spiritual conversation. If you're in a small group, you know what I'm talking about. So that's not enough. We've got to spend time in God's Word, and we've got to spend time in God's presence through prayer. So when we thought about what are we at Grace, what do we want partners to be at Grace? We want to be people of devotion. We want to be people who develop that habit. And as we think about it this morning, I don't know about you, but I feel that when God is speaking to us, he often speaks in stereo. When someone will ask me, hey, how do I hear God's voice? How do I know what he's saying to me? How do I discern God's will for my life? I often will say, one of the first things I'll tell him is, God speaks, when he speaks to me, he speaks in stereo. He tells me from this source and this source and this source and this source, and it just kind of continues to come up in my life. And one of the themes that has been coming up for me in my life before the summer, but in particular the summer, you guys gave me the great privilege and rest of not having to preach in the month of July to just kind of settle and work on some other things in the church and allow God to refresh me a little bit. And it was wonderful. And one of the things that I brought out of there and that seems to continue to come up in my sermons that I'm preaching like when I preached on the law a couple weeks ago and I've seen it come through in themes these last couple weeks and then really we're hitting on it again in my Tuesday morning men's Bible study. I have a men's Bible study that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6 30. We meet that early to keep out the riffraff. The only thing the only thing prohibiting you from being there is laziness. So come on and join us. We're not any nicer there either. This is as nice as it gets. But I see this theme in my life and I've seen it in what we're learning at Grace and I thought it worth highlighting this morning, which is simply the beautiful simplicity of abiding. We talked about this last week. We're conduits of grace. And we looked at John 15, where Jesus is speaking to the disciples, particularly four and five. And he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we talked about this idea of all I have to do is stay connected to Christ, and he's going to produce the fruit in my life that I need to produce. I don't have to think about that. I just focus on abiding in Christ. And I think that there is this beautiful simplicity to that. Because we can make Christianity really complicated, can't we? It can be really challenging and difficult. It can be intimidating to look at this Bible, to open it up, to come to service on a Sunday and the pastor says, turn to Malachi. You're like, I've never even heard of that name in my life. I don't know where that is, right? Just to learn just the names of the 66 books, to learn how to find them all, that there's 37 or 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, to learn all, what are all the sins? What are all the things I'm supposed to do? What are all the things I'm not supposed to do? Who are all the people? And how old was Paul? Did he live to be 900? Or is that some other guy? Like it can be a lot. And one of the things that I have a heart for is adults, people who have already gone through life and made a bunch of decisions. And in your 30s, 40s, 50s or later, you decide this is when I want to get serious about my faith and you start trying to learn Bible. And you don't have the background that I've been learning about this since I was old enough to talk. But it can feel like a steep bell curve when you're trying to learn faith and taking it seriously. So I love the beautiful simplicity of really what God asks us to do, which is to simply abide in him. Just simply, you just, just, just focus on Jesus. Just pursue Jesus. Just love others like Jesus loves you. Just do all that. The rest of this stuff, if you focus on abiding in Christ, the rest of this stuff, the rest of Christianity, the rest of life will take care of itself. Just focus on abiding in Christ. And this is, this is an attitude that we see throughout scripture. We're going to look at two other places today where it's pared down and it's made just this simple. One of my favorite pictures of this in the Bible is in the book of Hebrews. In the book of Hebrews, there's Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1, obviously follows. I don't know if you know this. You have to go to seminary to know this, but chapter 12 of Hebrews follows chapter 11 of Hebrews. And in chapter 11 of Hebrews, we have this really famous passage that's called the Hall of Faith, where the author of Hebrews lists out all of these heroes of the faith and the acts that they performed by faith. And then when we get into 12, and I'll read it in just a minute, but when we get into 12, we see it begin, So it's this idea that we're on the playing field of earth as those in heaven who have come before us are now watching us in real time, which I think is a really cool thought. And here's what the author of Hebrews says. He says, Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And it's language, I think, that we can identify with. It's language that inspires. We're kind of like, okay, I'm on the playing field. I'm supposed to run this race. I'm supposed to live my life. I'm supposed to do the things that God wants me to do. How do I do that? Well, I throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. I need to run in such a way that I can do what God wants me to do, that I can be who God wants me to be, and I need to get rid of all the things that don't help me run my race. And this, again, is an idea that is replete throughout Scripture. It shows up again and again and again. Paul tells us that we are to fight the good fight. He says that he fights the good fight. He tells us that in this race, we are to run as the one who's trying to get the prize, that we are supposed to cling to our faith. We are told to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. Jesus tells us that other people should see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. So all throughout Scripture is this simple admonition that we need to live a life worthy of the calling that we've received. We need to run the race. We need to be who God created us to be. We need to determine what are our good works and how do we walk in them. And you can rephrase all of that and we say we need to be good Christians. We need to grow in our faith. We need to move towards Jesus. And we can identify with this. This is, to me, inspiring. It's easy to understand. Yep, I'm running a race and I do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that's so easily entangled. So I got to stop doing those things so I can do the things that God wants me to do. And sometimes, I think more often than not, that's where we stop. I'm going to try really hard at running this race. I'm going to try really hard to be a good Christian. I'm going to try really hard to be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend, a good employee or employer. I'm going to try really hard to be a good citizen. And I'm going to do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we act like the next verse doesn't exist. How are we supposed to do that? By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Even in Hebrews, where it uses this language about running our race, doing better, being good Christians, being who God's created us to be, it tells us, it gives us the answer right there. How do I do that? How do I run my race well? By focusing my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. How do we produce much fruit? By abiding in Christ, by focusing on Jesus. And so I call it the beautiful simplicity of abiding because there's this thing that happens. When I decide that I want to be a better father or a better husband or a better pastor or a better human, there's a lot of growth that needs to happen in all of those areas, except for husband. I'm nailing that one. When I decide I want to be better at those things, I think our tendency is to go, okay, what do I need to do to be a better husband? And we identify things and we run and I'm going to do more of this and less of this. What do I need to do to be a better wife? I'm going to do more of this and less than this. What do I need to do to be a better mom? I'm going to do more of this and less of this. And we try to white knuckle our way to better, right? That's the American way. I want to be better at these things. I'm going to focus on those things. I'm going to come up with a plan, and I'm going to do it. And Christianity says, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that. Just focus on Jesus. Just focus on God. Just focus on abiding in Christ, and I'll take care of the rest of it. So here's how this works practically. I do have a lot of room to grow in being a husband. You know the most effective way for me to be a better husband to Jen? It's to pursue Jesus. It's to wake up tomorrow and say, Jesus, I want to honor you today as I seek to be Jen's husband. How do I honor you in that? How would you have me be a good husband today, Jesus? You want to be a better employee? You want to move up the ranks? You want your career to progress? You can spend a lot of time thinking about the best thing to do and the best person to please and the best way, the best jobs to go for or the best tasks to complete or the right people to make friends with or whatever it is you do to progress in your field. Or you can go to work every day, focus on Christ, and you can say, Jesus, how can I honor you today in my work? How can I honor you today in these meetings? How can I honor you today in these tasks? And then you honor Jesus. And you know what happens? Everything else works out. I was talking in my Bible study group about this idea. Just honor Jesus in what we do. Just pursue Jesus in what we do and let him handle the results. And they said, well, what does that mean practically? I said, for my sermons. My job is to be diligent on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday so that when I stand before you on Sunday, before God on Sunday, I know I've given my best effort. I've honored God in my preparation. I've honored Jesus in my prayer life as I approached sharing this with you guys. And I know that I've done the best that I could in the week that I was given with the time that I was allotted. And I'm honoring Jesus as I give this to you. If I can say that, what happens as a result of the sermon is completely out of my hands. I have nothing to do with that. I don't worry about that. I worry about where my heart is as I prepare, and I'll be the first to confess. Listen, I say that, and that sounds lovely, like how Nate, he's worked diligently on sermons, and he's prayed through them, and he's ready to present them. Yeah, most of the time, sometimes, y'all, I'm winging it, and I sit down, and the very first, y'all are singing, and y'all think things are good, and I sit down, and I'm like, God, I'm so sorry. I dishonored these people. That wasn't worth showering for. I can't believe that I did that to them. So sometimes I don't do it. But on the weeks that I do, then I preach the sermon, and I wash my hands of it. Now it's between you and the Spirit. And somebody in my Bible study said, well, wouldn't that be a great way to approach life? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it would. We should do that with everything. We should do that with how we lead people, with how we love people, with how we be good parents. It's the beautiful simplicity of abiding in Christ. We focus on him, and then he takes care of everything else. And I think that this is a radical message in a culture that wants to try so hard at everything, that wants to have a to-do list for everything, for all the things in life. I'm going to find a way to tackle it, and I'm going to white-knuckle my way to better. And really, the beautiful simplicity of abiding means that we try hard at pursuing Jesus. That's it. That's where we try hard. Christians, you want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where you should put your effort? Put it in pursuing Jesus. And waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. Put it into pursuing Christ and everything else will take care of itself. And there's a lot of ways to pursue Jesus, okay? We do it through worship. We do it, I believe, through godly community and spiritual conversations. We have transparency and vulnerability. We ask good questions. We share pieces of ourselves. We pursue Jesus through his service, through doing his work. Jesus says whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. So we pursue Jesus by helping those who can't help themselves. But I think the primary way that we pursue Jesus is through devotions. One of the primary ways we pursue Jesus is by waking up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. I think it's the fundamental way. I think one of the most frustrating things to me about trying to get in shape and fit into your old mediums. I've got one on underneath this that I have to wear a baggy shirt over it because if I don't, I'll just bring shame on my family. I can't wear this polo in front of other people in public. I used to be able to, there was a time, but when you go to get in shape, you can, you can exercise 30 minutes a day, right? And exercising to me is the easy part. That's, that's, that's the fun thing to do. That's fine. That's good. I can put in a podcast or a book or something like that. That's kind of the easy discipline to gain on. You know what the hard part is? Eating like a rabbit, man. That stinks. Eating salads. That's not fun. I don't like eating right. I just don't. I like eating wrong. Very wrong. But unless you do both, you'll never be in good shape. You won't be in good health. And you can exercise all you want, but until your diet changes, your body really doesn't. And you really don't get that healthy. You can exercise all you want and go to church and do all the things and go to Bible study and have the conversations and serve sometimes and give of yourself and tithe. You can do all the exercise you want, but until your diet changes, your spiritual health won't really either. I believe that our pursuit of Jesus begins here. And that when we do that, when we begin it here, then God handles everything else. This is actually affirmed in the book of Psalms. The very first Psalm, the one that Parker read earlier in the service, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. And then look what happens. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. David says, blessed is the man who doesn't waste his time with frivolous things, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. His delight is in God's word. And on that law, he meditates day and night. How can you meditate on it if you don't know it, if you haven't learned it, if you haven't poured yourself into it? He prays over it. He pursues Jesus in it. And because of that, he's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. And all that he does, he prospers. The man that David is describing in Psalm 1 did not set about to prosper. That's not the point. He set about to know Jesus. He set about to know his God, to know his law, to know his word. And the happy side effect of that was that God blesses him along his way. I want to be careful when I say that. God's blessings look different than what you think blessings might be. So I'm not preaching that if we get up every day and read God's word that we're going to have all the things that we want. That's not how that goes. But what I am saying is if we get up every day and we spend time in God's word and time in prayer, then we will become who God wants us to be. That's the blessing. And I believe that becoming the people that God has created us to be is the place of greatest peace and contentment and happiness that we can find in life. If you've ever had a season where you were moving, you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do, you know there's no greater peace or joy than that. I had lunch with somebody this week, catching up with them after a long time, and he shifted careers and got a new job. And I said, how's it going, man? And he said, God has affirmed over and over and over again that I am doing exactly what he would have me do, and I have never been happier. It's remarkable how that works. When we walk the path that God has laid out for us, lo and behold, that's where joy is found. I think Psalm 16 tells us something about there being a fullness of joy in the presence of God. And I feel like that's a joy and a peace worth having. So I would also mention to you that nothing worth having is gained by default. Nothing in this life that we have that we really value is gained by default. If you have a good marriage, like a good one, you worked hard at that, Joker. You didn't just fall into that. Unless you're like, if you've been married for like two years, you're like, my marriage is pretty good. We haven't had to work that hard. Okay, forget you. All right. You don't count. Talk to the rest of us in 10 years, rookies. If you have a good marriage, you worked hard at that. You've intentionally spent time together when the kids made it difficult. You've intentionally chosen each other when life tried to prevent it. You've had hard conversations. You've said hard things. You've heard hard things. But you're stronger for it and you have a good marriage and you worked at it. If you have kids who love you, if you have adult kids who love you and want to spend time with you, you worked hard at that. That was not easy. That did not happen by default. If you have a career that you like, that you're proud of, you worked hard at that. That didn't happen by default. If you have good, rich, deep friendships, you've prioritized and valued them over the years. You've made them important. You didn't just default into those. Why would we think that we would default into a good, healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus? We have to work at it. We have to make time for it. So do that. Prioritize it. Make it happen. Find a time when you can spend time in God's Word and spend time in prayer. If you don't know what to read, ask somebody. Start in Proverbs. If you don't know the Bible at all and you want to read it and you don't know what to read, start in Proverbs. You don't have to know anything about anything for Proverbs to make sense. Totally out of context, just start reading it. It's great. Read a gospel, read the book of Mark. It goes very fast and it points you with Jesus very well. Or just pick up and read something you've been curious about, but start doing it. Make it a habit. Be consistent in it. Trust me when I say that there's no greater habit that anyone can develop than that, and do it. Whatever you're currently doing first in the morning isn't as good as this. And if what you're doing first in the morning is sleeping an extra 30 minutes, it's definitely not as good as this. Just hit pause on that other stuff and engage with God first and then go about your day. I do it when I get into the office. I get into the office. I tend to be the first one in the office because I'm the hardest worker on staff. And I have a kid that starts school early and I have to drop her off every day. So I get here early. But the office is quiet and that's when I have my time. That's when I'm able to pray and read God's word and get ready to prayerfully approach my day. Pick a time when you can do it too. Make it happen. Prioritize it. Value it. Last week, I said that we needed to abide in Christ and we're going to talk about how to do that. And I said that when you came back this week, I was going to light some of your faces on fire and really convict you. So here's the convicting thing. What I'm about to say, I'm not saying to you if you're new. If this is the first time you've ever heard a sermon that's imploring you to have a devotional life, then I'm not saying this next thing to you. If it's the second time, maybe the first time you weren't paying attention, or I just did a bad job with it, whatever it was, I'm not talking to you either. But if you've heard this sermon before, I've preached it plenty. Maybe not from this angle, maybe not in this way, but I've preached have devotions. I've preached that a bunch. I've joked around. I'm going to do it one day. I'm just going to walk up here on stage and I'm going to go, hey, good morning, Grace. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate, one of the pastors here. You should read the Bible more. Let's pray. Because that's all you need because you know that I'm right. You know that we need to do this. So if that's you and you still don't have habit, as your pastor, as someone who cares about you, let me just ask you, how many more times will you need this sermon? How many more times? How many more times are you going to sit in this room or a room like this and hear this sermon and go, yeah, Monday, I need to. How many more? Can this one be it? Can this one do it for us? Because there's some people in this room who already do this. They've got a rich, vibrant devotional life, and they've been sitting in here, and they've just been cheering me on. Yes, do it. Please. It's the best. And I want all of you to cheer this sermon on every time you hear it from now on. Next time you hear this sermon, listen, I don't want it to convict you one little bit. I want you to sit in those seats feeling great because you know it's true. And now you're the cheering section because I'm never going to stop preaching this sermon. I'm going to preach it once or twice a year for the rest of my days as long as God gives me a stage to preach on to push people back into God's word and to push people back into prayer. But at Grace, as our partners, when I preach this sermon again, I want you to be the biggest cheerleaders. And I never want it to convict you again. Because I want you to hang in there and develop this habit. And I'll tell you this, okay? Just give you a little pastoral advice. Some of you, gosh, I hope, as a result of this, are going to wake up tomorrow, you're going to read your Bible. And it'll be something that you haven't done in a while. And that's great. You'll set your alarm. You'll make your coffee. You get your vibe all right, exactly where you want to be. This is good. This nice fall weather. This is great. I'm going to have the best quiet time. And you're going to open up your Bible to wherever you've decided to open up your Bible. And maybe, maybe God parts the heavens and the angels sing to you and Shekinah glory shines down directly on your head. Maybe. What's probably going to happen is you're going to get a little something out of it that's encouraging, that speaks to something in your life, or maybe nothing at all. You'll pray. If you're not used to praying, you'll pray for about two and a half minutes. You'll be like, I'm all out. Kind of run out of stuff to pray about. That's okay. And maybe it doesn't feel like the heavens parted and Shekinah glory shone down on your noggin. But I tell you what, if you get up tomorrow and you spend time in God's word and you spend time in prayer, I can promise you this, you'll have a different day than you would have had otherwise. You have a different mindset going into that day than you would have had otherwise. And if you do that several days in a row, I don't know when the heavens are gonna open and words are gonna leap off the page, but I can tell you this, if you do it several days in a row, you're gonna have a different week. And if you can manage by God's goodness and grace to hang in there and string together a couple of weeks like that, three, four weeks, you're going to have a different month. And if you start stringing together months, you're going to have a different life. And that's what we want for you at Grace. That's why we want you to be people of devotion. So let's pray that God gives us the strength of conviction to do that so that we know the only thing we need to try hard at is pursuing Jesus, and he'll take care of the rest. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your word, for the way that you've chosen to reveal yourself to us. I pray that you would give us a heart for it, that you would give us a passion for it, that we would love your word, that we would love this text. God, make it exciting to us as we dive into it. Let us start to piece things together and understand where people go and where they fit and how you're revealed in your word. Let it excite us about you. God, create in us such a hunger for your word that we wake up looking forward to it. Create in us such a hunger for your presence that we desire to pray every day. May we be refreshed in your presence. May we be refreshed by your word. And God, may we become increasingly people of devotion. In Jesus' name, amen.