All right, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here and making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're new this morning, I have great news for you. You've picked an excellent Sunday to begin attending Grace. I realized in this last week, we're constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better. And I realized in this last week that we have been using one-ply toilet paper in the bathrooms. I did not know this, but that is completely unacceptable. So I found out who was in charge of these purchases, and I said, we've got to do better, and they said, what should we do? And I said, go to the store and find the most expensive kind and get it. That's what we deserve at Grace. So if you're here for the first time, I got good news for you. This is a luxurious experience in the children's hallway. We did make that improvement. I'm not just making that up. This is the last part of our series in Isaiah called the Treasury of Isaiah, where we're kind of acknowledging it's 66 books. It's a ton of stuff that really would bog us down if we tried to go through the whole thing exhaustively. And so I've done my best. Jacob, don't go to the bathroom right now. It's too tempting, he says. I can't wait for him to come back in. I've already got a joke loaded. All right. That was quick. All right. Let's get it. Let's pray. Let's get it together. Okay. So we can't go through the whole book exhaustively, but we can pull out some of the more impactful scriptures and reflect on them as a body. And this was actually supposed to be a six-week series, but I wanted to extend it by a week so that I could talk about this verse in Isaiah with you. It's a short and simple verse that we'll get to in a minute, but I think it's such a hugely impactful concept, and I know of several folks in our body, in the church, who very much need the truth of this scripture today. But as we approach it, I want us to think of a memory that most of us probably have. Some of you may not have this memory for different reasons. This was something that Jen brought to my attention as I was kind of talking through this concept with her. Jen is my wife, for those that don't know. And so she was talking about when she was a little girl and they were taking a road trip and she's in the back of the car. And they did, you know, they were, she grew up in Birmingham, or Birmingham, that's how you're supposed to say it. And they would go down to Dothan for Thanksgiving. They would travel over to Memphis for Christmas. They did road trips a fair amount as children. They drove down to the Florida Panhandle every year. And so road trips were a thing. And sometimes on those road trips, you'll remember from when you were little and still now, it starts to rain, storms roll in. And sometimes it's what Bubba from Forrest Gump would call big old fat rain. It's coming down in sheets. You can't see anything. And when you're a child and you're in the back and you're peering over and you're looking, you can't see anything. You can barely see the car in front of you. And you don't know how your mom or your dad is still driving. In this case, it was her dad. And you start to get scared because it's coming down heavy and it's hard to see. People even have their hazards on, which just isn't a sign. I want to be as nice about this as I can. If you're driving in heavy rain and you put your hazards on, we're in the same rain you are. We know, okay? We know it's a treacherous condition. Just throwing that out there for you to consider, hazard people. All right. You're in the back. It's scary. And you're worried. It feels tense. It's the rain that's so loud that you can't hear and you can't talk anymore. You're just trying to weather the storm. And Jen remembers looking at her dad and seeing the placid, nonplussed expression on his face, and she was fine. He is at peace, so I am at peace. I'm looking at my dad. He's not worried about the storm. I'm not worried about the storm. And as a dad, those of you who have driven through those storms, you've done it plenty of times, you know. I've driven through storms before. I'm going to drive through storms in the future. This one's going to be fine. Even if it's the worst one, this one's going to be fine. And so his peace gave her peace, right? And what it got me to thinking about is what if we could go through life and the storms of life with the type of peace that your dad had when you were a little kid and the storms came and we're driving down the road. Well, God offers us this peace a few different places in scripture, but he talks about it first specifically in Isaiah. In this short, I think very powerful verse where Isaiah writes this about God. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. I really like that descriptor there, perfect. Not just any peace, but a perfect peace, a kind of unthreatened peace, a kind of restful peace. And when I think about that kind of peace, the way to understand it, I think about, because you guys know, I've told you before, I enjoy history. Last summer, I had the opportunity to listen to a biography on Julius Caesar. I try to always be reading a physical book and then listening to a book. I read the fun ones and I listen to the boring ones. It's the way that I get through them. So I'm listening to a biography on Julius Caesar. And they talk about within that biography this idea of Pax Romana, Roman peace. It was a thing that the Roman Empire offered to the conquered peoples. And it kind of worked like this. One of the places that Julius Caesar, he became famous in the Gallic Wars. So he went up into what we understand as modern day France and Belgium and Switzerland and that area. And there was different Gallic tribes. And the way that we think about nations and states is pretty new in the span of human history. Most everybody, particularly in Europe at that time, existed within tribes and clans. And those tribes and clans would bind together, sometimes under a successful warlord, sometimes just out of mutual desire for protection, and they would create these pacts. If you get attacked by another neighboring tribe or clan, then we will come in and we will protect you, and you offer us your protection as well. It was these agreed upon truces. We're not going to attack you, but if anyone attacks us, we'll attack them on our behalf. But these allegiances and alliances would change on a whim. Every five years, every decade, every year, there's different alliances and allegiances to keep up with. This one's attacking us, that one's attacking us. So even while you're in a peace, it's a fragile peace. It's a threatened peace. If you existed in those tribes in that day, even if it wasn't a spring when you were watching your husband or your brother or your son go off to war to defend the tribes, you were still on the lookout. You still knew that any day someone could bring word that the peace that you had has now been broken. It was a fragile peace. And so what the Roman Empire offered is to come in, and now they've conquered all the tribes. And you are now under their protection. So if someone attacks you, the weight and the force and the might of the Roman army is going to defend you. It's not just these inter-familial clashes anymore. Now they're messing with the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, once they conquered you, which sounds bad, one of the nice offshoots of that is you now have a protected peace. You now have a peace that there is no force strong enough to compromise. As long as you like pay your taxes and stuff. But Pax Romana was this kind of empire-wide protected, unthreatened peace. And I think that that's a profound idea for us. Because we understand what it is to exist in a fragile peace. If you have young children, you understand what fragile peace is because you send them to the playroom to give you two moments respite. And they're up there and they're fine. And then they start yelling. Someone's upset. And you go and you broker a peace. You stop playing with that. You give that back to them. You start using your head. You quit being a jerk. Everyone's fine. Okay? And then you leave. And you have five more minutes of a fragile peace until it's broken again by someone's scream. If you exist in a marriage, you know what a fragile peace is. I don't mind telling you because I can't say honestly they're infrequent, but I don't mind telling you that a couple Saturdays ago, Jen and I were enjoying a very fragile peace. Just for whatever reason, on that particular day, with other things going on in our lives, there was just something simmering under the surface all day long. Neither of us could do anything right. We were just kind of, we're at each other's throats, then we apologize and start forgetting, man, I don't even know why I'm mad. It doesn't even make any sense. And then five seconds later, someone pauses in a conversation too long after a question, and now let's get them. So it was a fragile peace. We know what fragile pieces are. And what God offers us is this protected peace, this perfect peace, this peace that is unthreatened and unmoved by forces both within and without our control. It's really this profound peace that allows us, as we go through the storms of life, to think, been through storms before we will go through storms again and this one will be fine even if it's the worst one and what's really profound about that piece is that God is the one driving we are in the back seat looking at the face of our Father who is unmoved by this storm too. This is the kind of peace that God offers his children. However, he doesn't offer it to everyone. We're going to look at who has access to this peace. But before we do, I have just a couple of reflections on what it means to have perfect peace. What is perfect peace and what are the implications for us? And if we think about it together, how can we better understand this idea of peacefulness? Well, the first thing that I would bring to your attention, the first thing that sprang to mind for me is that God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. It's not going to make any sense. Paul writes about this peace in Philippians, famous passage, Philippians 4, you have the peace. When you watch someone walk with this amount of peace and clarity and tranquility, it defies understanding and logic. I think of this great story in the Old Testament in the early chapters of 1 Samuel with the high priest Eli. He's the high priest of Israel, and he's just taken in Samuel to live in the temple who's going to dedicate his life to service to the Lord. And Eli has two sons. I believe their names are Hophni and Phinehas. And they're jerks. They're absolute jerks. They're using their political power for all of the wrong reasons. They're taking advantage of taxpayers, taking advantage of the poor. They're taking advantage of women. They're doing all the despicable things that we hate when people in those positions do them. And one night, God gives Samuel a dream. And the next morning, Eli insists that Samuel tell him what that dream is. And so Samuel finally tells Eli the worst possible news any father can receive. And he says, in my dream last night, God told me that your two sons are going to die soon and they will not be in the priesthood anymore. One of them is not the next high priest. And so in one comment, in one answer, Eli learns the worst thing that any father can possibly learn. You are going to lose your children and you are going to lose your legacy. There's nothing worse than that. And Eli's response, very next verse, doesn't miss a beat, doesn't go pray about it and come back with a prepared statement. Very next verse, Eli says, it is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him. That's a pretty remarkable piece. To receive the worst news any father can possibly receive and the response out of the gate, it is the Lord. do what seems good to him that is a peace that passes understanding that is a peace that can't be explained that is a peace that we would marvel at and it is a peace that we should be jealous of the other thing i would say about god's perfect peace, and I think that this is really important. God's peace provides rest for the soul. God's peace provides rest for our souls. There are those of you in here who came in tired this morning. You woke up exhausted. You slept eight hours and it wasn't enough. There are those of you who go to bed being kept up by the things you're worrying about. And when you wake up, your mind is racing just as fast. And when that issue gets settled, the worry monster that exists in your head finds another thing to attack and push into the forefronts of your thoughts so that you never get any rest from the anxiety that you feel and from the things about which you are worried. Some of us have carried burdens of relationships. Our marriage is cruddy. Our children are estranged or drifting. We've received a tough diagnosis. We're watching a loved one walk through a hard time and there's nothing that we can do about it. And we are exhausted. We are exhausted with worry. We're exhausted with worry about things that are outside our control. Which is why it's so important to understand that God's perfect peace gives our soul a place to rest, to stop and to shut it down and to be okay and to not worry about the next thing and to be realistic about what is within and without our control. God's perfect peace offers us rest. And for some of you, that's what I want for you this morning, is to move towards a place where you can finally slow down and rest and tell that worry monster to shut up. But God does not offer this peace indiscriminately. It is offered to everyone, but we have a part to play in the reception of this peace. If you look back at the verse, it says, you will keep in perfect peace who? Those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. God's peace is only for the steadfast and can only come through trust. God's peace is only for the steadfast, for those who persevere. Persevere in what? Persevere in their trust of the work of Jesus Christ. And we're going to talk more about that trust and exactly what we're placing it in and how that's helpful to us. But we have to understand that though this peace that God offers is offered to everyone equally, it is not offered without discrimination. There's a part that we have to play. And the part that we have to play is to trust God, is to place our faith in him. And when we do, when we truly trust, when we truly see ourselves as the little kids sitting in the back seat watching our heavenly father drive us through life, when that is our posture and we trust him and we can sit in the back and we don't have to worry about it, when that's our posture, he will give us perfect peace. And when that is your posture, the peace that you can have goes beyond understanding and is unfathomable, I believe, to the non-Christian mind. And I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. Someone that we've seen in our lives or in history go through a remarkably difficult time and yet maintain this consistent, faithful peace despite all the circumstances. And I was reminded of the story of a man named Horatio Safford. Horatio Safford lived in the late 1800s in Chicago, and he ended up writing It Is Well, the famous hymn that a lot of us know. And a lot of you may know the story or bits and pieces of the story surrounding the penning of It Is well. It's the most famous story about how a hymn was written. But I bet that you don't know all the parts. And for some of you, you still have no clue what I'm talking about. Horatio Safford was a Christian man who lived in Chicago in the late 1800s. He was a successful lawyer. He had five children, a boy and four girls, and a wife named Ann. And in the Chicago fire of 1871, Horatio lost a vast majority of his net worth. He lost his practice, the building where his practice was. He lost his home, and he had several properties and holdings throughout the city of Chicago. He lost those too. The fire ruined him. In the wake of the fire, his four-year-old son fell to scarlet fever. So now he's lost a child. Believing that his wife and he and his daughters needed a bit of a respite, they said, let's go to England and take a deep breath over there. As they were planning their trip to England, his plans changed. Something in the States was requiring him. And so he sent his wife Anne ahead with his four daughters and said, you guys go. I'll be there in about three weeks. On the way to England, the ship carrying his family sunk. All four daughters were lost. He received a cable upon Anne's arrival in England. I alone survived. Horatio gets that news. He boards a ship, and he goes to be with Anne. On the journey over, the captain of the ship was aware of the tragedy that had befallen Horatio, and he called, he sent for him, and he said, hey, we're at about the same spot that your family was when they sank. Just wanted you to know. And Horatio sat down in the midst of that tragedy, of being a modern-day Job, where in seemingly one fell swoop, he lost his possessions and he lost his family. And he sits down and he writes the hymn. At the time it was a poem. Years later someone put it to music and it became a hymn. He writes the poem. It is well. It's the famous hymn that we know. And with that context, when you know that he's writing this on a boat over where his drowned daughters rest, having lost a son and everything he owns, going to see a wife that is as crestfallen as him, he sits down and he, listen, he writes these words. This is the first verse of it as well. He writes this, when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Cindy, leave that up there, please. Look at that. Look at that and put yourself in his shoes and think about your ability to sit down and write, when peace like a river attendeth my way and when sorrows like sea billows roll. Oh, you mean the same sea billows that just claimed your daughters? The same sea that just cost you your family? That your God created? When you feel like you have every right to be so angry, and yet you choose to sit down and say, when peace like a river attends my way, and when sorrows like sea billows like the ones that claim my family's role, whatever my lot, you have taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. How does someone write that? How is that the response to trials and to tragedy and to the storms that threaten your peace? I can only tell you how by pointing you to the second verse because he explains it to us. Though Satan should buffet. Those trials should come. Let this blessed assurance control. I love this. That Christ has regarded my helpless estate. And has shed his own blood for my soul. How does he maintain perfect peace? Because his mind is steadfast in his trust in God. How does he maintain his perfect peace? Because he knows that Jesus died for him. And what he writes about that death of Christ is so important. And I think so profound. He says, when Satan should buffet, again, a reference to the sea, buffet like the waves on the ship when it sank. When Satan should buffet, when trials should come, the ones that he's been walking through for two years, let this blessed assurance control that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and shed his own blood for my soul. And I love that word that he chooses there. I love that word helpless. Because when we think about our helplessness before God, particularly as it relates to Jesus Christ, I think we tend to put it in the context of this myopic view of the gospel in which Jesus only died to take my soul up to heaven. And so when we think about our helplessness, we think about the helplessness, what it means to be helpless to get our soul to heaven. We think about what it means to be helpless to go from dead in sin to alive in Christ, from in this temporal body to in my eternal soul. We think about our helplessness to make that jump to a perfect eternity with God, and so we need God's help. We need Jesus' help to get us there. But what I want us to think about is that is far from the only way in which we are helpless. We are, every single one of us, every single person in this room can get a call today that changes your life forever. We are one vibration in our pocket away from a profoundly different existence. And let me tell you something. You are helpless against that phone call. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. We may act like a big, tough, civilized society with an important pharmaceutical complex and the most advanced medical equipment in the world. And we can act like we can fight cancer. But we are helpless with who gets it and when they do. Even the most fastidious of us are sometimes helpless against the onslaught of that awful disease and its acquiring. As parents, we are helpless when our kid is driving down the road. Do you understand? Our fortunes could be taken. Our families could be taken. There's so many different ways that life can buffet us. There's so many different trials that could come. And we exist in part because we're Americans and we're the most independent, individualized civilization that's ever existed. We exist as if we're driving down the road, facing the storms of life on our own with the wherewithal to get through them. But listen, you're helpless if a tornado comes along and sweeps you off the road. There is so much in life to which we are rendered helpless. And I don't think we go through life understanding that. We are not grown adults capable of handling the buffets of life. We are newborn babies that are vulnerable to this world and this universe in ways that we don't understand. And so when Christ regards our helpless estate, it's not just our soul's inability to get itself into heaven. It's our inability to protect ourselves from the seasons of life. And it's for that that he shed his blood. It's for that that he died. And that's something that Horatio knew. That it wasn't just the helplessness of his soul, but it was our complete lack of agency to prevent ourself from suffering in the first place. And it's this simple truth, I believe, that won the day for him and wins the day for us. When Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. It's the knowledge in the midst of our trials that when Jesus conquered sin and shame by dying on the cross and raising from the dead, when Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. Whatever this is for you, he conquered this too. There's this great passage that I refer to a lot, Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 4. I won't belabor the passage here, but there's a phrase there, there's a promise that the former things will have passed away. There will be no more weeping, no more crying, no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And I love to ruminate on what those former things are. Cancer, divorce, abuse, despair, orphans, loss, tragedy, awful phone calls, relational strife, being born to broken parents who hurt you because they're hurt. All that stuff is the former things that's passed away. And what we know is those former things, those things that will pass away, the things that exist in your life that are wearing you out and making you tired and making life so difficult right now, the things you go to sleep worrying about, the things you wake up worrying about. Whatever's waiting for you on the other end of that call one day. We can have perfect peace in those trials. Because we know that because Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered that too. We know that because he offers salvation to those who believe in his shedding of blood for them, that even when we lose them, and even when the trial claims them, that we will see them again in eternity. We know that this life is but a mist and a vapor compared to what awaits us on the other side of passing. We understand that. And so in a few minutes, in a few minutes, we're going to sing it as well together. We're going to stand and we're going to proclaim these words back to God. And so my prayer for you in preparation for this and even this morning as I've been praying about the service is that you'll be able to sing that with authenticity. That you'll be able to sing it as well. And if there is something in your life that is so hard that it's hard for you to muster the singing, that it's hard for you to muster the words, then listen to the people singing around you and let them sing on your behalf. And know, know that we can say that though peace like a river attends, when peace like a river attends our way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever our lot, God has enabled us to say, it is well, it is well with our soul. I want to finish by reading you this fourth verse. This fourth verse is not one that is often sung. But as I was reviewing the lyrics in reference to our my soul. I pray that God will whisper his peace to you this morning. Let's pray. Father, we need your perfect peace. We need your protected peace. Everyone in this room is walking through a storm of one sort or another. Everyone in this room will walk through more. And so God, when we do, I pray that we remember that you are driving and that we are resting. Help us find our rest in your perfect peace. Help us remember that whatever it is we're facing, that Jesus has conquered that too. And God, give us the courage to sing and to proclaim and to believe that even if it isn't well with us now, that it can be, and you will make it so. God, whisper your peace to us this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here and making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're new this morning, I have great news for you. You've picked an excellent Sunday to begin attending Grace. I realized in this last week, we're constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better. And I realized in this last week that we have been using one-ply toilet paper in the bathrooms. I did not know this, but that is completely unacceptable. So I found out who was in charge of these purchases, and I said, we've got to do better, and they said, what should we do? And I said, go to the store and find the most expensive kind and get it. That's what we deserve at Grace. So if you're here for the first time, I got good news for you. This is a luxurious experience in the children's hallway. We did make that improvement. I'm not just making that up. This is the last part of our series in Isaiah called the Treasury of Isaiah, where we're kind of acknowledging it's 66 books. It's a ton of stuff that really would bog us down if we tried to go through the whole thing exhaustively. And so I've done my best. Jacob, don't go to the bathroom right now. It's too tempting, he says. I can't wait for him to come back in. I've already got a joke loaded. All right. That was quick. All right. Let's get it. Let's pray. Let's get it together. Okay. So we can't go through the whole book exhaustively, but we can pull out some of the more impactful scriptures and reflect on them as a body. And this was actually supposed to be a six-week series, but I wanted to extend it by a week so that I could talk about this verse in Isaiah with you. It's a short and simple verse that we'll get to in a minute, but I think it's such a hugely impactful concept, and I know of several folks in our body, in the church, who very much need the truth of this scripture today. But as we approach it, I want us to think of a memory that most of us probably have. Some of you may not have this memory for different reasons. This was something that Jen brought to my attention as I was kind of talking through this concept with her. Jen is my wife, for those that don't know. And so she was talking about when she was a little girl and they were taking a road trip and she's in the back of the car. And they did, you know, they were, she grew up in Birmingham, or Birmingham, that's how you're supposed to say it. And they would go down to Dothan for Thanksgiving. They would travel over to Memphis for Christmas. They did road trips a fair amount as children. They drove down to the Florida Panhandle every year. And so road trips were a thing. And sometimes on those road trips, you'll remember from when you were little and still now, it starts to rain, storms roll in. And sometimes it's what Bubba from Forrest Gump would call big old fat rain. It's coming down in sheets. You can't see anything. And when you're a child and you're in the back and you're peering over and you're looking, you can't see anything. You can barely see the car in front of you. And you don't know how your mom or your dad is still driving. In this case, it was her dad. And you start to get scared because it's coming down heavy and it's hard to see. People even have their hazards on, which just isn't a sign. I want to be as nice about this as I can. If you're driving in heavy rain and you put your hazards on, we're in the same rain you are. We know, okay? We know it's a treacherous condition. Just throwing that out there for you to consider, hazard people. All right. You're in the back. It's scary. And you're worried. It feels tense. It's the rain that's so loud that you can't hear and you can't talk anymore. You're just trying to weather the storm. And Jen remembers looking at her dad and seeing the placid, nonplussed expression on his face, and she was fine. He is at peace, so I am at peace. I'm looking at my dad. He's not worried about the storm. I'm not worried about the storm. And as a dad, those of you who have driven through those storms, you've done it plenty of times, you know. I've driven through storms before. I'm going to drive through storms in the future. This one's going to be fine. Even if it's the worst one, this one's going to be fine. And so his peace gave her peace, right? And what it got me to thinking about is what if we could go through life and the storms of life with the type of peace that your dad had when you were a little kid and the storms came and we're driving down the road. Well, God offers us this peace a few different places in scripture, but he talks about it first specifically in Isaiah. In this short, I think very powerful verse where Isaiah writes this about God. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. I really like that descriptor there, perfect. Not just any peace, but a perfect peace, a kind of unthreatened peace, a kind of restful peace. And when I think about that kind of peace, the way to understand it, I think about, because you guys know, I've told you before, I enjoy history. Last summer, I had the opportunity to listen to a biography on Julius Caesar. I try to always be reading a physical book and then listening to a book. I read the fun ones and I listen to the boring ones. It's the way that I get through them. So I'm listening to a biography on Julius Caesar. And they talk about within that biography this idea of Pax Romana, Roman peace. It was a thing that the Roman Empire offered to the conquered peoples. And it kind of worked like this. One of the places that Julius Caesar, he became famous in the Gallic Wars. So he went up into what we understand as modern day France and Belgium and Switzerland and that area. And there was different Gallic tribes. And the way that we think about nations and states is pretty new in the span of human history. Most everybody, particularly in Europe at that time, existed within tribes and clans. And those tribes and clans would bind together, sometimes under a successful warlord, sometimes just out of mutual desire for protection, and they would create these pacts. If you get attacked by another neighboring tribe or clan, then we will come in and we will protect you, and you offer us your protection as well. It was these agreed upon truces. We're not going to attack you, but if anyone attacks us, we'll attack them on our behalf. But these allegiances and alliances would change on a whim. Every five years, every decade, every year, there's different alliances and allegiances to keep up with. This one's attacking us, that one's attacking us. So even while you're in a peace, it's a fragile peace. It's a threatened peace. If you existed in those tribes in that day, even if it wasn't a spring when you were watching your husband or your brother or your son go off to war to defend the tribes, you were still on the lookout. You still knew that any day someone could bring word that the peace that you had has now been broken. It was a fragile peace. And so what the Roman Empire offered is to come in, and now they've conquered all the tribes. And you are now under their protection. So if someone attacks you, the weight and the force and the might of the Roman army is going to defend you. It's not just these inter-familial clashes anymore. Now they're messing with the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, once they conquered you, which sounds bad, one of the nice offshoots of that is you now have a protected peace. You now have a peace that there is no force strong enough to compromise. As long as you like pay your taxes and stuff. But Pax Romana was this kind of empire-wide protected, unthreatened peace. And I think that that's a profound idea for us. Because we understand what it is to exist in a fragile peace. If you have young children, you understand what fragile peace is because you send them to the playroom to give you two moments respite. And they're up there and they're fine. And then they start yelling. Someone's upset. And you go and you broker a peace. You stop playing with that. You give that back to them. You start using your head. You quit being a jerk. Everyone's fine. Okay? And then you leave. And you have five more minutes of a fragile peace until it's broken again by someone's scream. If you exist in a marriage, you know what a fragile peace is. I don't mind telling you because I can't say honestly they're infrequent, but I don't mind telling you that a couple Saturdays ago, Jen and I were enjoying a very fragile peace. Just for whatever reason, on that particular day, with other things going on in our lives, there was just something simmering under the surface all day long. Neither of us could do anything right. We were just kind of, we're at each other's throats, then we apologize and start forgetting, man, I don't even know why I'm mad. It doesn't even make any sense. And then five seconds later, someone pauses in a conversation too long after a question, and now let's get them. So it was a fragile peace. We know what fragile pieces are. And what God offers us is this protected peace, this perfect peace, this peace that is unthreatened and unmoved by forces both within and without our control. It's really this profound peace that allows us, as we go through the storms of life, to think, been through storms before we will go through storms again and this one will be fine even if it's the worst one and what's really profound about that piece is that God is the one driving we are in the back seat looking at the face of our Father who is unmoved by this storm too. This is the kind of peace that God offers his children. However, he doesn't offer it to everyone. We're going to look at who has access to this peace. But before we do, I have just a couple of reflections on what it means to have perfect peace. What is perfect peace and what are the implications for us? And if we think about it together, how can we better understand this idea of peacefulness? Well, the first thing that I would bring to your attention, the first thing that sprang to mind for me is that God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. It's not going to make any sense. Paul writes about this peace in Philippians, famous passage, Philippians 4, you have the peace. When you watch someone walk with this amount of peace and clarity and tranquility, it defies understanding and logic. I think of this great story in the Old Testament in the early chapters of 1 Samuel with the high priest Eli. He's the high priest of Israel, and he's just taken in Samuel to live in the temple who's going to dedicate his life to service to the Lord. And Eli has two sons. I believe their names are Hophni and Phinehas. And they're jerks. They're absolute jerks. They're using their political power for all of the wrong reasons. They're taking advantage of taxpayers, taking advantage of the poor. They're taking advantage of women. They're doing all the despicable things that we hate when people in those positions do them. And one night, God gives Samuel a dream. And the next morning, Eli insists that Samuel tell him what that dream is. And so Samuel finally tells Eli the worst possible news any father can receive. And he says, in my dream last night, God told me that your two sons are going to die soon and they will not be in the priesthood anymore. One of them is not the next high priest. And so in one comment, in one answer, Eli learns the worst thing that any father can possibly learn. You are going to lose your children and you are going to lose your legacy. There's nothing worse than that. And Eli's response, very next verse, doesn't miss a beat, doesn't go pray about it and come back with a prepared statement. Very next verse, Eli says, it is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him. That's a pretty remarkable piece. To receive the worst news any father can possibly receive and the response out of the gate, it is the Lord. do what seems good to him that is a peace that passes understanding that is a peace that can't be explained that is a peace that we would marvel at and it is a peace that we should be jealous of the other thing i would say about god's perfect peace, and I think that this is really important. God's peace provides rest for the soul. God's peace provides rest for our souls. There are those of you in here who came in tired this morning. You woke up exhausted. You slept eight hours and it wasn't enough. There are those of you who go to bed being kept up by the things you're worrying about. And when you wake up, your mind is racing just as fast. And when that issue gets settled, the worry monster that exists in your head finds another thing to attack and push into the forefronts of your thoughts so that you never get any rest from the anxiety that you feel and from the things about which you are worried. Some of us have carried burdens of relationships. Our marriage is cruddy. Our children are estranged or drifting. We've received a tough diagnosis. We're watching a loved one walk through a hard time and there's nothing that we can do about it. And we are exhausted. We are exhausted with worry. We're exhausted with worry about things that are outside our control. Which is why it's so important to understand that God's perfect peace gives our soul a place to rest, to stop and to shut it down and to be okay and to not worry about the next thing and to be realistic about what is within and without our control. God's perfect peace offers us rest. And for some of you, that's what I want for you this morning, is to move towards a place where you can finally slow down and rest and tell that worry monster to shut up. But God does not offer this peace indiscriminately. It is offered to everyone, but we have a part to play in the reception of this peace. If you look back at the verse, it says, you will keep in perfect peace who? Those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. God's peace is only for the steadfast and can only come through trust. God's peace is only for the steadfast, for those who persevere. Persevere in what? Persevere in their trust of the work of Jesus Christ. And we're going to talk more about that trust and exactly what we're placing it in and how that's helpful to us. But we have to understand that though this peace that God offers is offered to everyone equally, it is not offered without discrimination. There's a part that we have to play. And the part that we have to play is to trust God, is to place our faith in him. And when we do, when we truly trust, when we truly see ourselves as the little kids sitting in the back seat watching our heavenly father drive us through life, when that is our posture and we trust him and we can sit in the back and we don't have to worry about it, when that's our posture, he will give us perfect peace. And when that is your posture, the peace that you can have goes beyond understanding and is unfathomable, I believe, to the non-Christian mind. And I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. Someone that we've seen in our lives or in history go through a remarkably difficult time and yet maintain this consistent, faithful peace despite all the circumstances. And I was reminded of the story of a man named Horatio Safford. Horatio Safford lived in the late 1800s in Chicago, and he ended up writing It Is Well, the famous hymn that a lot of us know. And a lot of you may know the story or bits and pieces of the story surrounding the penning of It Is well. It's the most famous story about how a hymn was written. But I bet that you don't know all the parts. And for some of you, you still have no clue what I'm talking about. Horatio Safford was a Christian man who lived in Chicago in the late 1800s. He was a successful lawyer. He had five children, a boy and four girls, and a wife named Ann. And in the Chicago fire of 1871, Horatio lost a vast majority of his net worth. He lost his practice, the building where his practice was. He lost his home, and he had several properties and holdings throughout the city of Chicago. He lost those too. The fire ruined him. In the wake of the fire, his four-year-old son fell to scarlet fever. So now he's lost a child. Believing that his wife and he and his daughters needed a bit of a respite, they said, let's go to England and take a deep breath over there. As they were planning their trip to England, his plans changed. Something in the States was requiring him. And so he sent his wife Anne ahead with his four daughters and said, you guys go. I'll be there in about three weeks. On the way to England, the ship carrying his family sunk. All four daughters were lost. He received a cable upon Anne's arrival in England. I alone survived. Horatio gets that news. He boards a ship, and he goes to be with Anne. On the journey over, the captain of the ship was aware of the tragedy that had befallen Horatio, and he called, he sent for him, and he said, hey, we're at about the same spot that your family was when they sank. Just wanted you to know. And Horatio sat down in the midst of that tragedy, of being a modern-day Job, where in seemingly one fell swoop, he lost his possessions and he lost his family. And he sits down and he writes the hymn. At the time it was a poem. Years later someone put it to music and it became a hymn. He writes the poem. It is well. It's the famous hymn that we know. And with that context, when you know that he's writing this on a boat over where his drowned daughters rest, having lost a son and everything he owns, going to see a wife that is as crestfallen as him, he sits down and he, listen, he writes these words. This is the first verse of it as well. He writes this, when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Cindy, leave that up there, please. Look at that. Look at that and put yourself in his shoes and think about your ability to sit down and write, when peace like a river attendeth my way and when sorrows like sea billows roll. Oh, you mean the same sea billows that just claimed your daughters? The same sea that just cost you your family? That your God created? When you feel like you have every right to be so angry, and yet you choose to sit down and say, when peace like a river attends my way, and when sorrows like sea billows like the ones that claim my family's role, whatever my lot, you have taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. How does someone write that? How is that the response to trials and to tragedy and to the storms that threaten your peace? I can only tell you how by pointing you to the second verse because he explains it to us. Though Satan should buffet. Those trials should come. Let this blessed assurance control. I love this. That Christ has regarded my helpless estate. And has shed his own blood for my soul. How does he maintain perfect peace? Because his mind is steadfast in his trust in God. How does he maintain his perfect peace? Because he knows that Jesus died for him. And what he writes about that death of Christ is so important. And I think so profound. He says, when Satan should buffet, again, a reference to the sea, buffet like the waves on the ship when it sank. When Satan should buffet, when trials should come, the ones that he's been walking through for two years, let this blessed assurance control that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and shed his own blood for my soul. And I love that word that he chooses there. I love that word helpless. Because when we think about our helplessness before God, particularly as it relates to Jesus Christ, I think we tend to put it in the context of this myopic view of the gospel in which Jesus only died to take my soul up to heaven. And so when we think about our helplessness, we think about the helplessness, what it means to be helpless to get our soul to heaven. We think about what it means to be helpless to go from dead in sin to alive in Christ, from in this temporal body to in my eternal soul. We think about our helplessness to make that jump to a perfect eternity with God, and so we need God's help. We need Jesus' help to get us there. But what I want us to think about is that is far from the only way in which we are helpless. We are, every single one of us, every single person in this room can get a call today that changes your life forever. We are one vibration in our pocket away from a profoundly different existence. And let me tell you something. You are helpless against that phone call. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. We may act like a big, tough, civilized society with an important pharmaceutical complex and the most advanced medical equipment in the world. And we can act like we can fight cancer. But we are helpless with who gets it and when they do. Even the most fastidious of us are sometimes helpless against the onslaught of that awful disease and its acquiring. As parents, we are helpless when our kid is driving down the road. Do you understand? Our fortunes could be taken. Our families could be taken. There's so many different ways that life can buffet us. There's so many different trials that could come. And we exist in part because we're Americans and we're the most independent, individualized civilization that's ever existed. We exist as if we're driving down the road, facing the storms of life on our own with the wherewithal to get through them. But listen, you're helpless if a tornado comes along and sweeps you off the road. There is so much in life to which we are rendered helpless. And I don't think we go through life understanding that. We are not grown adults capable of handling the buffets of life. We are newborn babies that are vulnerable to this world and this universe in ways that we don't understand. And so when Christ regards our helpless estate, it's not just our soul's inability to get itself into heaven. It's our inability to protect ourselves from the seasons of life. And it's for that that he shed his blood. It's for that that he died. And that's something that Horatio knew. That it wasn't just the helplessness of his soul, but it was our complete lack of agency to prevent ourself from suffering in the first place. And it's this simple truth, I believe, that won the day for him and wins the day for us. When Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. It's the knowledge in the midst of our trials that when Jesus conquered sin and shame by dying on the cross and raising from the dead, when Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. Whatever this is for you, he conquered this too. There's this great passage that I refer to a lot, Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 4. I won't belabor the passage here, but there's a phrase there, there's a promise that the former things will have passed away. There will be no more weeping, no more crying, no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And I love to ruminate on what those former things are. Cancer, divorce, abuse, despair, orphans, loss, tragedy, awful phone calls, relational strife, being born to broken parents who hurt you because they're hurt. All that stuff is the former things that's passed away. And what we know is those former things, those things that will pass away, the things that exist in your life that are wearing you out and making you tired and making life so difficult right now, the things you go to sleep worrying about, the things you wake up worrying about. Whatever's waiting for you on the other end of that call one day. We can have perfect peace in those trials. Because we know that because Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered that too. We know that because he offers salvation to those who believe in his shedding of blood for them, that even when we lose them, and even when the trial claims them, that we will see them again in eternity. We know that this life is but a mist and a vapor compared to what awaits us on the other side of passing. We understand that. And so in a few minutes, in a few minutes, we're going to sing it as well together. We're going to stand and we're going to proclaim these words back to God. And so my prayer for you in preparation for this and even this morning as I've been praying about the service is that you'll be able to sing that with authenticity. That you'll be able to sing it as well. And if there is something in your life that is so hard that it's hard for you to muster the singing, that it's hard for you to muster the words, then listen to the people singing around you and let them sing on your behalf. And know, know that we can say that though peace like a river attends, when peace like a river attends our way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever our lot, God has enabled us to say, it is well, it is well with our soul. I want to finish by reading you this fourth verse. This fourth verse is not one that is often sung. But as I was reviewing the lyrics in reference to our my soul. I pray that God will whisper his peace to you this morning. Let's pray. Father, we need your perfect peace. We need your protected peace. Everyone in this room is walking through a storm of one sort or another. Everyone in this room will walk through more. And so God, when we do, I pray that we remember that you are driving and that we are resting. Help us find our rest in your perfect peace. Help us remember that whatever it is we're facing, that Jesus has conquered that too. And God, give us the courage to sing and to proclaim and to believe that even if it isn't well with us now, that it can be, and you will make it so. God, whisper your peace to us this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here and making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're new this morning, I have great news for you. You've picked an excellent Sunday to begin attending Grace. I realized in this last week, we're constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better. And I realized in this last week that we have been using one-ply toilet paper in the bathrooms. I did not know this, but that is completely unacceptable. So I found out who was in charge of these purchases, and I said, we've got to do better, and they said, what should we do? And I said, go to the store and find the most expensive kind and get it. That's what we deserve at Grace. So if you're here for the first time, I got good news for you. This is a luxurious experience in the children's hallway. We did make that improvement. I'm not just making that up. This is the last part of our series in Isaiah called the Treasury of Isaiah, where we're kind of acknowledging it's 66 books. It's a ton of stuff that really would bog us down if we tried to go through the whole thing exhaustively. And so I've done my best. Jacob, don't go to the bathroom right now. It's too tempting, he says. I can't wait for him to come back in. I've already got a joke loaded. All right. That was quick. All right. Let's get it. Let's pray. Let's get it together. Okay. So we can't go through the whole book exhaustively, but we can pull out some of the more impactful scriptures and reflect on them as a body. And this was actually supposed to be a six-week series, but I wanted to extend it by a week so that I could talk about this verse in Isaiah with you. It's a short and simple verse that we'll get to in a minute, but I think it's such a hugely impactful concept, and I know of several folks in our body, in the church, who very much need the truth of this scripture today. But as we approach it, I want us to think of a memory that most of us probably have. Some of you may not have this memory for different reasons. This was something that Jen brought to my attention as I was kind of talking through this concept with her. Jen is my wife, for those that don't know. And so she was talking about when she was a little girl and they were taking a road trip and she's in the back of the car. And they did, you know, they were, she grew up in Birmingham, or Birmingham, that's how you're supposed to say it. And they would go down to Dothan for Thanksgiving. They would travel over to Memphis for Christmas. They did road trips a fair amount as children. They drove down to the Florida Panhandle every year. And so road trips were a thing. And sometimes on those road trips, you'll remember from when you were little and still now, it starts to rain, storms roll in. And sometimes it's what Bubba from Forrest Gump would call big old fat rain. It's coming down in sheets. You can't see anything. And when you're a child and you're in the back and you're peering over and you're looking, you can't see anything. You can barely see the car in front of you. And you don't know how your mom or your dad is still driving. In this case, it was her dad. And you start to get scared because it's coming down heavy and it's hard to see. People even have their hazards on, which just isn't a sign. I want to be as nice about this as I can. If you're driving in heavy rain and you put your hazards on, we're in the same rain you are. We know, okay? We know it's a treacherous condition. Just throwing that out there for you to consider, hazard people. All right. You're in the back. It's scary. And you're worried. It feels tense. It's the rain that's so loud that you can't hear and you can't talk anymore. You're just trying to weather the storm. And Jen remembers looking at her dad and seeing the placid, nonplussed expression on his face, and she was fine. He is at peace, so I am at peace. I'm looking at my dad. He's not worried about the storm. I'm not worried about the storm. And as a dad, those of you who have driven through those storms, you've done it plenty of times, you know. I've driven through storms before. I'm going to drive through storms in the future. This one's going to be fine. Even if it's the worst one, this one's going to be fine. And so his peace gave her peace, right? And what it got me to thinking about is what if we could go through life and the storms of life with the type of peace that your dad had when you were a little kid and the storms came and we're driving down the road. Well, God offers us this peace a few different places in scripture, but he talks about it first specifically in Isaiah. In this short, I think very powerful verse where Isaiah writes this about God. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. I really like that descriptor there, perfect. Not just any peace, but a perfect peace, a kind of unthreatened peace, a kind of restful peace. And when I think about that kind of peace, the way to understand it, I think about, because you guys know, I've told you before, I enjoy history. Last summer, I had the opportunity to listen to a biography on Julius Caesar. I try to always be reading a physical book and then listening to a book. I read the fun ones and I listen to the boring ones. It's the way that I get through them. So I'm listening to a biography on Julius Caesar. And they talk about within that biography this idea of Pax Romana, Roman peace. It was a thing that the Roman Empire offered to the conquered peoples. And it kind of worked like this. One of the places that Julius Caesar, he became famous in the Gallic Wars. So he went up into what we understand as modern day France and Belgium and Switzerland and that area. And there was different Gallic tribes. And the way that we think about nations and states is pretty new in the span of human history. Most everybody, particularly in Europe at that time, existed within tribes and clans. And those tribes and clans would bind together, sometimes under a successful warlord, sometimes just out of mutual desire for protection, and they would create these pacts. If you get attacked by another neighboring tribe or clan, then we will come in and we will protect you, and you offer us your protection as well. It was these agreed upon truces. We're not going to attack you, but if anyone attacks us, we'll attack them on our behalf. But these allegiances and alliances would change on a whim. Every five years, every decade, every year, there's different alliances and allegiances to keep up with. This one's attacking us, that one's attacking us. So even while you're in a peace, it's a fragile peace. It's a threatened peace. If you existed in those tribes in that day, even if it wasn't a spring when you were watching your husband or your brother or your son go off to war to defend the tribes, you were still on the lookout. You still knew that any day someone could bring word that the peace that you had has now been broken. It was a fragile peace. And so what the Roman Empire offered is to come in, and now they've conquered all the tribes. And you are now under their protection. So if someone attacks you, the weight and the force and the might of the Roman army is going to defend you. It's not just these inter-familial clashes anymore. Now they're messing with the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, once they conquered you, which sounds bad, one of the nice offshoots of that is you now have a protected peace. You now have a peace that there is no force strong enough to compromise. As long as you like pay your taxes and stuff. But Pax Romana was this kind of empire-wide protected, unthreatened peace. And I think that that's a profound idea for us. Because we understand what it is to exist in a fragile peace. If you have young children, you understand what fragile peace is because you send them to the playroom to give you two moments respite. And they're up there and they're fine. And then they start yelling. Someone's upset. And you go and you broker a peace. You stop playing with that. You give that back to them. You start using your head. You quit being a jerk. Everyone's fine. Okay? And then you leave. And you have five more minutes of a fragile peace until it's broken again by someone's scream. If you exist in a marriage, you know what a fragile peace is. I don't mind telling you because I can't say honestly they're infrequent, but I don't mind telling you that a couple Saturdays ago, Jen and I were enjoying a very fragile peace. Just for whatever reason, on that particular day, with other things going on in our lives, there was just something simmering under the surface all day long. Neither of us could do anything right. We were just kind of, we're at each other's throats, then we apologize and start forgetting, man, I don't even know why I'm mad. It doesn't even make any sense. And then five seconds later, someone pauses in a conversation too long after a question, and now let's get them. So it was a fragile peace. We know what fragile pieces are. And what God offers us is this protected peace, this perfect peace, this peace that is unthreatened and unmoved by forces both within and without our control. It's really this profound peace that allows us, as we go through the storms of life, to think, been through storms before we will go through storms again and this one will be fine even if it's the worst one and what's really profound about that piece is that God is the one driving we are in the back seat looking at the face of our Father who is unmoved by this storm too. This is the kind of peace that God offers his children. However, he doesn't offer it to everyone. We're going to look at who has access to this peace. But before we do, I have just a couple of reflections on what it means to have perfect peace. What is perfect peace and what are the implications for us? And if we think about it together, how can we better understand this idea of peacefulness? Well, the first thing that I would bring to your attention, the first thing that sprang to mind for me is that God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. It's not going to make any sense. Paul writes about this peace in Philippians, famous passage, Philippians 4, you have the peace. When you watch someone walk with this amount of peace and clarity and tranquility, it defies understanding and logic. I think of this great story in the Old Testament in the early chapters of 1 Samuel with the high priest Eli. He's the high priest of Israel, and he's just taken in Samuel to live in the temple who's going to dedicate his life to service to the Lord. And Eli has two sons. I believe their names are Hophni and Phinehas. And they're jerks. They're absolute jerks. They're using their political power for all of the wrong reasons. They're taking advantage of taxpayers, taking advantage of the poor. They're taking advantage of women. They're doing all the despicable things that we hate when people in those positions do them. And one night, God gives Samuel a dream. And the next morning, Eli insists that Samuel tell him what that dream is. And so Samuel finally tells Eli the worst possible news any father can receive. And he says, in my dream last night, God told me that your two sons are going to die soon and they will not be in the priesthood anymore. One of them is not the next high priest. And so in one comment, in one answer, Eli learns the worst thing that any father can possibly learn. You are going to lose your children and you are going to lose your legacy. There's nothing worse than that. And Eli's response, very next verse, doesn't miss a beat, doesn't go pray about it and come back with a prepared statement. Very next verse, Eli says, it is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him. That's a pretty remarkable piece. To receive the worst news any father can possibly receive and the response out of the gate, it is the Lord. do what seems good to him that is a peace that passes understanding that is a peace that can't be explained that is a peace that we would marvel at and it is a peace that we should be jealous of the other thing i would say about god's perfect peace, and I think that this is really important. God's peace provides rest for the soul. God's peace provides rest for our souls. There are those of you in here who came in tired this morning. You woke up exhausted. You slept eight hours and it wasn't enough. There are those of you who go to bed being kept up by the things you're worrying about. And when you wake up, your mind is racing just as fast. And when that issue gets settled, the worry monster that exists in your head finds another thing to attack and push into the forefronts of your thoughts so that you never get any rest from the anxiety that you feel and from the things about which you are worried. Some of us have carried burdens of relationships. Our marriage is cruddy. Our children are estranged or drifting. We've received a tough diagnosis. We're watching a loved one walk through a hard time and there's nothing that we can do about it. And we are exhausted. We are exhausted with worry. We're exhausted with worry about things that are outside our control. Which is why it's so important to understand that God's perfect peace gives our soul a place to rest, to stop and to shut it down and to be okay and to not worry about the next thing and to be realistic about what is within and without our control. God's perfect peace offers us rest. And for some of you, that's what I want for you this morning, is to move towards a place where you can finally slow down and rest and tell that worry monster to shut up. But God does not offer this peace indiscriminately. It is offered to everyone, but we have a part to play in the reception of this peace. If you look back at the verse, it says, you will keep in perfect peace who? Those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. God's peace is only for the steadfast and can only come through trust. God's peace is only for the steadfast, for those who persevere. Persevere in what? Persevere in their trust of the work of Jesus Christ. And we're going to talk more about that trust and exactly what we're placing it in and how that's helpful to us. But we have to understand that though this peace that God offers is offered to everyone equally, it is not offered without discrimination. There's a part that we have to play. And the part that we have to play is to trust God, is to place our faith in him. And when we do, when we truly trust, when we truly see ourselves as the little kids sitting in the back seat watching our heavenly father drive us through life, when that is our posture and we trust him and we can sit in the back and we don't have to worry about it, when that's our posture, he will give us perfect peace. And when that is your posture, the peace that you can have goes beyond understanding and is unfathomable, I believe, to the non-Christian mind. And I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. Someone that we've seen in our lives or in history go through a remarkably difficult time and yet maintain this consistent, faithful peace despite all the circumstances. And I was reminded of the story of a man named Horatio Safford. Horatio Safford lived in the late 1800s in Chicago, and he ended up writing It Is Well, the famous hymn that a lot of us know. And a lot of you may know the story or bits and pieces of the story surrounding the penning of It Is well. It's the most famous story about how a hymn was written. But I bet that you don't know all the parts. And for some of you, you still have no clue what I'm talking about. Horatio Safford was a Christian man who lived in Chicago in the late 1800s. He was a successful lawyer. He had five children, a boy and four girls, and a wife named Ann. And in the Chicago fire of 1871, Horatio lost a vast majority of his net worth. He lost his practice, the building where his practice was. He lost his home, and he had several properties and holdings throughout the city of Chicago. He lost those too. The fire ruined him. In the wake of the fire, his four-year-old son fell to scarlet fever. So now he's lost a child. Believing that his wife and he and his daughters needed a bit of a respite, they said, let's go to England and take a deep breath over there. As they were planning their trip to England, his plans changed. Something in the States was requiring him. And so he sent his wife Anne ahead with his four daughters and said, you guys go. I'll be there in about three weeks. On the way to England, the ship carrying his family sunk. All four daughters were lost. He received a cable upon Anne's arrival in England. I alone survived. Horatio gets that news. He boards a ship, and he goes to be with Anne. On the journey over, the captain of the ship was aware of the tragedy that had befallen Horatio, and he called, he sent for him, and he said, hey, we're at about the same spot that your family was when they sank. Just wanted you to know. And Horatio sat down in the midst of that tragedy, of being a modern-day Job, where in seemingly one fell swoop, he lost his possessions and he lost his family. And he sits down and he writes the hymn. At the time it was a poem. Years later someone put it to music and it became a hymn. He writes the poem. It is well. It's the famous hymn that we know. And with that context, when you know that he's writing this on a boat over where his drowned daughters rest, having lost a son and everything he owns, going to see a wife that is as crestfallen as him, he sits down and he, listen, he writes these words. This is the first verse of it as well. He writes this, when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Cindy, leave that up there, please. Look at that. Look at that and put yourself in his shoes and think about your ability to sit down and write, when peace like a river attendeth my way and when sorrows like sea billows roll. Oh, you mean the same sea billows that just claimed your daughters? The same sea that just cost you your family? That your God created? When you feel like you have every right to be so angry, and yet you choose to sit down and say, when peace like a river attends my way, and when sorrows like sea billows like the ones that claim my family's role, whatever my lot, you have taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. How does someone write that? How is that the response to trials and to tragedy and to the storms that threaten your peace? I can only tell you how by pointing you to the second verse because he explains it to us. Though Satan should buffet. Those trials should come. Let this blessed assurance control. I love this. That Christ has regarded my helpless estate. And has shed his own blood for my soul. How does he maintain perfect peace? Because his mind is steadfast in his trust in God. How does he maintain his perfect peace? Because he knows that Jesus died for him. And what he writes about that death of Christ is so important. And I think so profound. He says, when Satan should buffet, again, a reference to the sea, buffet like the waves on the ship when it sank. When Satan should buffet, when trials should come, the ones that he's been walking through for two years, let this blessed assurance control that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and shed his own blood for my soul. And I love that word that he chooses there. I love that word helpless. Because when we think about our helplessness before God, particularly as it relates to Jesus Christ, I think we tend to put it in the context of this myopic view of the gospel in which Jesus only died to take my soul up to heaven. And so when we think about our helplessness, we think about the helplessness, what it means to be helpless to get our soul to heaven. We think about what it means to be helpless to go from dead in sin to alive in Christ, from in this temporal body to in my eternal soul. We think about our helplessness to make that jump to a perfect eternity with God, and so we need God's help. We need Jesus' help to get us there. But what I want us to think about is that is far from the only way in which we are helpless. We are, every single one of us, every single person in this room can get a call today that changes your life forever. We are one vibration in our pocket away from a profoundly different existence. And let me tell you something. You are helpless against that phone call. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. We may act like a big, tough, civilized society with an important pharmaceutical complex and the most advanced medical equipment in the world. And we can act like we can fight cancer. But we are helpless with who gets it and when they do. Even the most fastidious of us are sometimes helpless against the onslaught of that awful disease and its acquiring. As parents, we are helpless when our kid is driving down the road. Do you understand? Our fortunes could be taken. Our families could be taken. There's so many different ways that life can buffet us. There's so many different trials that could come. And we exist in part because we're Americans and we're the most independent, individualized civilization that's ever existed. We exist as if we're driving down the road, facing the storms of life on our own with the wherewithal to get through them. But listen, you're helpless if a tornado comes along and sweeps you off the road. There is so much in life to which we are rendered helpless. And I don't think we go through life understanding that. We are not grown adults capable of handling the buffets of life. We are newborn babies that are vulnerable to this world and this universe in ways that we don't understand. And so when Christ regards our helpless estate, it's not just our soul's inability to get itself into heaven. It's our inability to protect ourselves from the seasons of life. And it's for that that he shed his blood. It's for that that he died. And that's something that Horatio knew. That it wasn't just the helplessness of his soul, but it was our complete lack of agency to prevent ourself from suffering in the first place. And it's this simple truth, I believe, that won the day for him and wins the day for us. When Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. It's the knowledge in the midst of our trials that when Jesus conquered sin and shame by dying on the cross and raising from the dead, when Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. Whatever this is for you, he conquered this too. There's this great passage that I refer to a lot, Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 4. I won't belabor the passage here, but there's a phrase there, there's a promise that the former things will have passed away. There will be no more weeping, no more crying, no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And I love to ruminate on what those former things are. Cancer, divorce, abuse, despair, orphans, loss, tragedy, awful phone calls, relational strife, being born to broken parents who hurt you because they're hurt. All that stuff is the former things that's passed away. And what we know is those former things, those things that will pass away, the things that exist in your life that are wearing you out and making you tired and making life so difficult right now, the things you go to sleep worrying about, the things you wake up worrying about. Whatever's waiting for you on the other end of that call one day. We can have perfect peace in those trials. Because we know that because Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered that too. We know that because he offers salvation to those who believe in his shedding of blood for them, that even when we lose them, and even when the trial claims them, that we will see them again in eternity. We know that this life is but a mist and a vapor compared to what awaits us on the other side of passing. We understand that. And so in a few minutes, in a few minutes, we're going to sing it as well together. We're going to stand and we're going to proclaim these words back to God. And so my prayer for you in preparation for this and even this morning as I've been praying about the service is that you'll be able to sing that with authenticity. That you'll be able to sing it as well. And if there is something in your life that is so hard that it's hard for you to muster the singing, that it's hard for you to muster the words, then listen to the people singing around you and let them sing on your behalf. And know, know that we can say that though peace like a river attends, when peace like a river attends our way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever our lot, God has enabled us to say, it is well, it is well with our soul. I want to finish by reading you this fourth verse. This fourth verse is not one that is often sung. But as I was reviewing the lyrics in reference to our my soul. I pray that God will whisper his peace to you this morning. Let's pray. Father, we need your perfect peace. We need your protected peace. Everyone in this room is walking through a storm of one sort or another. Everyone in this room will walk through more. And so God, when we do, I pray that we remember that you are driving and that we are resting. Help us find our rest in your perfect peace. Help us remember that whatever it is we're facing, that Jesus has conquered that too. And God, give us the courage to sing and to proclaim and to believe that even if it isn't well with us now, that it can be, and you will make it so. God, whisper your peace to us this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here and making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're new this morning, I have great news for you. You've picked an excellent Sunday to begin attending Grace. I realized in this last week, we're constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better. And I realized in this last week that we have been using one-ply toilet paper in the bathrooms. I did not know this, but that is completely unacceptable. So I found out who was in charge of these purchases, and I said, we've got to do better, and they said, what should we do? And I said, go to the store and find the most expensive kind and get it. That's what we deserve at Grace. So if you're here for the first time, I got good news for you. This is a luxurious experience in the children's hallway. We did make that improvement. I'm not just making that up. This is the last part of our series in Isaiah called the Treasury of Isaiah, where we're kind of acknowledging it's 66 books. It's a ton of stuff that really would bog us down if we tried to go through the whole thing exhaustively. And so I've done my best. Jacob, don't go to the bathroom right now. It's too tempting, he says. I can't wait for him to come back in. I've already got a joke loaded. All right. That was quick. All right. Let's get it. Let's pray. Let's get it together. Okay. So we can't go through the whole book exhaustively, but we can pull out some of the more impactful scriptures and reflect on them as a body. And this was actually supposed to be a six-week series, but I wanted to extend it by a week so that I could talk about this verse in Isaiah with you. It's a short and simple verse that we'll get to in a minute, but I think it's such a hugely impactful concept, and I know of several folks in our body, in the church, who very much need the truth of this scripture today. But as we approach it, I want us to think of a memory that most of us probably have. Some of you may not have this memory for different reasons. This was something that Jen brought to my attention as I was kind of talking through this concept with her. Jen is my wife, for those that don't know. And so she was talking about when she was a little girl and they were taking a road trip and she's in the back of the car. And they did, you know, they were, she grew up in Birmingham, or Birmingham, that's how you're supposed to say it. And they would go down to Dothan for Thanksgiving. They would travel over to Memphis for Christmas. They did road trips a fair amount as children. They drove down to the Florida Panhandle every year. And so road trips were a thing. And sometimes on those road trips, you'll remember from when you were little and still now, it starts to rain, storms roll in. And sometimes it's what Bubba from Forrest Gump would call big old fat rain. It's coming down in sheets. You can't see anything. And when you're a child and you're in the back and you're peering over and you're looking, you can't see anything. You can barely see the car in front of you. And you don't know how your mom or your dad is still driving. In this case, it was her dad. And you start to get scared because it's coming down heavy and it's hard to see. People even have their hazards on, which just isn't a sign. I want to be as nice about this as I can. If you're driving in heavy rain and you put your hazards on, we're in the same rain you are. We know, okay? We know it's a treacherous condition. Just throwing that out there for you to consider, hazard people. All right. You're in the back. It's scary. And you're worried. It feels tense. It's the rain that's so loud that you can't hear and you can't talk anymore. You're just trying to weather the storm. And Jen remembers looking at her dad and seeing the placid, nonplussed expression on his face, and she was fine. He is at peace, so I am at peace. I'm looking at my dad. He's not worried about the storm. I'm not worried about the storm. And as a dad, those of you who have driven through those storms, you've done it plenty of times, you know. I've driven through storms before. I'm going to drive through storms in the future. This one's going to be fine. Even if it's the worst one, this one's going to be fine. And so his peace gave her peace, right? And what it got me to thinking about is what if we could go through life and the storms of life with the type of peace that your dad had when you were a little kid and the storms came and we're driving down the road. Well, God offers us this peace a few different places in scripture, but he talks about it first specifically in Isaiah. In this short, I think very powerful verse where Isaiah writes this about God. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. I really like that descriptor there, perfect. Not just any peace, but a perfect peace, a kind of unthreatened peace, a kind of restful peace. And when I think about that kind of peace, the way to understand it, I think about, because you guys know, I've told you before, I enjoy history. Last summer, I had the opportunity to listen to a biography on Julius Caesar. I try to always be reading a physical book and then listening to a book. I read the fun ones and I listen to the boring ones. It's the way that I get through them. So I'm listening to a biography on Julius Caesar. And they talk about within that biography this idea of Pax Romana, Roman peace. It was a thing that the Roman Empire offered to the conquered peoples. And it kind of worked like this. One of the places that Julius Caesar, he became famous in the Gallic Wars. So he went up into what we understand as modern day France and Belgium and Switzerland and that area. And there was different Gallic tribes. And the way that we think about nations and states is pretty new in the span of human history. Most everybody, particularly in Europe at that time, existed within tribes and clans. And those tribes and clans would bind together, sometimes under a successful warlord, sometimes just out of mutual desire for protection, and they would create these pacts. If you get attacked by another neighboring tribe or clan, then we will come in and we will protect you, and you offer us your protection as well. It was these agreed upon truces. We're not going to attack you, but if anyone attacks us, we'll attack them on our behalf. But these allegiances and alliances would change on a whim. Every five years, every decade, every year, there's different alliances and allegiances to keep up with. This one's attacking us, that one's attacking us. So even while you're in a peace, it's a fragile peace. It's a threatened peace. If you existed in those tribes in that day, even if it wasn't a spring when you were watching your husband or your brother or your son go off to war to defend the tribes, you were still on the lookout. You still knew that any day someone could bring word that the peace that you had has now been broken. It was a fragile peace. And so what the Roman Empire offered is to come in, and now they've conquered all the tribes. And you are now under their protection. So if someone attacks you, the weight and the force and the might of the Roman army is going to defend you. It's not just these inter-familial clashes anymore. Now they're messing with the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, once they conquered you, which sounds bad, one of the nice offshoots of that is you now have a protected peace. You now have a peace that there is no force strong enough to compromise. As long as you like pay your taxes and stuff. But Pax Romana was this kind of empire-wide protected, unthreatened peace. And I think that that's a profound idea for us. Because we understand what it is to exist in a fragile peace. If you have young children, you understand what fragile peace is because you send them to the playroom to give you two moments respite. And they're up there and they're fine. And then they start yelling. Someone's upset. And you go and you broker a peace. You stop playing with that. You give that back to them. You start using your head. You quit being a jerk. Everyone's fine. Okay? And then you leave. And you have five more minutes of a fragile peace until it's broken again by someone's scream. If you exist in a marriage, you know what a fragile peace is. I don't mind telling you because I can't say honestly they're infrequent, but I don't mind telling you that a couple Saturdays ago, Jen and I were enjoying a very fragile peace. Just for whatever reason, on that particular day, with other things going on in our lives, there was just something simmering under the surface all day long. Neither of us could do anything right. We were just kind of, we're at each other's throats, then we apologize and start forgetting, man, I don't even know why I'm mad. It doesn't even make any sense. And then five seconds later, someone pauses in a conversation too long after a question, and now let's get them. So it was a fragile peace. We know what fragile pieces are. And what God offers us is this protected peace, this perfect peace, this peace that is unthreatened and unmoved by forces both within and without our control. It's really this profound peace that allows us, as we go through the storms of life, to think, been through storms before we will go through storms again and this one will be fine even if it's the worst one and what's really profound about that piece is that God is the one driving we are in the back seat looking at the face of our Father who is unmoved by this storm too. This is the kind of peace that God offers his children. However, he doesn't offer it to everyone. We're going to look at who has access to this peace. But before we do, I have just a couple of reflections on what it means to have perfect peace. What is perfect peace and what are the implications for us? And if we think about it together, how can we better understand this idea of peacefulness? Well, the first thing that I would bring to your attention, the first thing that sprang to mind for me is that God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. It's not going to make any sense. Paul writes about this peace in Philippians, famous passage, Philippians 4, you have the peace. When you watch someone walk with this amount of peace and clarity and tranquility, it defies understanding and logic. I think of this great story in the Old Testament in the early chapters of 1 Samuel with the high priest Eli. He's the high priest of Israel, and he's just taken in Samuel to live in the temple who's going to dedicate his life to service to the Lord. And Eli has two sons. I believe their names are Hophni and Phinehas. And they're jerks. They're absolute jerks. They're using their political power for all of the wrong reasons. They're taking advantage of taxpayers, taking advantage of the poor. They're taking advantage of women. They're doing all the despicable things that we hate when people in those positions do them. And one night, God gives Samuel a dream. And the next morning, Eli insists that Samuel tell him what that dream is. And so Samuel finally tells Eli the worst possible news any father can receive. And he says, in my dream last night, God told me that your two sons are going to die soon and they will not be in the priesthood anymore. One of them is not the next high priest. And so in one comment, in one answer, Eli learns the worst thing that any father can possibly learn. You are going to lose your children and you are going to lose your legacy. There's nothing worse than that. And Eli's response, very next verse, doesn't miss a beat, doesn't go pray about it and come back with a prepared statement. Very next verse, Eli says, it is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him. That's a pretty remarkable piece. To receive the worst news any father can possibly receive and the response out of the gate, it is the Lord. do what seems good to him that is a peace that passes understanding that is a peace that can't be explained that is a peace that we would marvel at and it is a peace that we should be jealous of the other thing i would say about god's perfect peace, and I think that this is really important. God's peace provides rest for the soul. God's peace provides rest for our souls. There are those of you in here who came in tired this morning. You woke up exhausted. You slept eight hours and it wasn't enough. There are those of you who go to bed being kept up by the things you're worrying about. And when you wake up, your mind is racing just as fast. And when that issue gets settled, the worry monster that exists in your head finds another thing to attack and push into the forefronts of your thoughts so that you never get any rest from the anxiety that you feel and from the things about which you are worried. Some of us have carried burdens of relationships. Our marriage is cruddy. Our children are estranged or drifting. We've received a tough diagnosis. We're watching a loved one walk through a hard time and there's nothing that we can do about it. And we are exhausted. We are exhausted with worry. We're exhausted with worry about things that are outside our control. Which is why it's so important to understand that God's perfect peace gives our soul a place to rest, to stop and to shut it down and to be okay and to not worry about the next thing and to be realistic about what is within and without our control. God's perfect peace offers us rest. And for some of you, that's what I want for you this morning, is to move towards a place where you can finally slow down and rest and tell that worry monster to shut up. But God does not offer this peace indiscriminately. It is offered to everyone, but we have a part to play in the reception of this peace. If you look back at the verse, it says, you will keep in perfect peace who? Those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. God's peace is only for the steadfast and can only come through trust. God's peace is only for the steadfast, for those who persevere. Persevere in what? Persevere in their trust of the work of Jesus Christ. And we're going to talk more about that trust and exactly what we're placing it in and how that's helpful to us. But we have to understand that though this peace that God offers is offered to everyone equally, it is not offered without discrimination. There's a part that we have to play. And the part that we have to play is to trust God, is to place our faith in him. And when we do, when we truly trust, when we truly see ourselves as the little kids sitting in the back seat watching our heavenly father drive us through life, when that is our posture and we trust him and we can sit in the back and we don't have to worry about it, when that's our posture, he will give us perfect peace. And when that is your posture, the peace that you can have goes beyond understanding and is unfathomable, I believe, to the non-Christian mind. And I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. Someone that we've seen in our lives or in history go through a remarkably difficult time and yet maintain this consistent, faithful peace despite all the circumstances. And I was reminded of the story of a man named Horatio Safford. Horatio Safford lived in the late 1800s in Chicago, and he ended up writing It Is Well, the famous hymn that a lot of us know. And a lot of you may know the story or bits and pieces of the story surrounding the penning of It Is well. It's the most famous story about how a hymn was written. But I bet that you don't know all the parts. And for some of you, you still have no clue what I'm talking about. Horatio Safford was a Christian man who lived in Chicago in the late 1800s. He was a successful lawyer. He had five children, a boy and four girls, and a wife named Ann. And in the Chicago fire of 1871, Horatio lost a vast majority of his net worth. He lost his practice, the building where his practice was. He lost his home, and he had several properties and holdings throughout the city of Chicago. He lost those too. The fire ruined him. In the wake of the fire, his four-year-old son fell to scarlet fever. So now he's lost a child. Believing that his wife and he and his daughters needed a bit of a respite, they said, let's go to England and take a deep breath over there. As they were planning their trip to England, his plans changed. Something in the States was requiring him. And so he sent his wife Anne ahead with his four daughters and said, you guys go. I'll be there in about three weeks. On the way to England, the ship carrying his family sunk. All four daughters were lost. He received a cable upon Anne's arrival in England. I alone survived. Horatio gets that news. He boards a ship, and he goes to be with Anne. On the journey over, the captain of the ship was aware of the tragedy that had befallen Horatio, and he called, he sent for him, and he said, hey, we're at about the same spot that your family was when they sank. Just wanted you to know. And Horatio sat down in the midst of that tragedy, of being a modern-day Job, where in seemingly one fell swoop, he lost his possessions and he lost his family. And he sits down and he writes the hymn. At the time it was a poem. Years later someone put it to music and it became a hymn. He writes the poem. It is well. It's the famous hymn that we know. And with that context, when you know that he's writing this on a boat over where his drowned daughters rest, having lost a son and everything he owns, going to see a wife that is as crestfallen as him, he sits down and he, listen, he writes these words. This is the first verse of it as well. He writes this, when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Cindy, leave that up there, please. Look at that. Look at that and put yourself in his shoes and think about your ability to sit down and write, when peace like a river attendeth my way and when sorrows like sea billows roll. Oh, you mean the same sea billows that just claimed your daughters? The same sea that just cost you your family? That your God created? When you feel like you have every right to be so angry, and yet you choose to sit down and say, when peace like a river attends my way, and when sorrows like sea billows like the ones that claim my family's role, whatever my lot, you have taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. How does someone write that? How is that the response to trials and to tragedy and to the storms that threaten your peace? I can only tell you how by pointing you to the second verse because he explains it to us. Though Satan should buffet. Those trials should come. Let this blessed assurance control. I love this. That Christ has regarded my helpless estate. And has shed his own blood for my soul. How does he maintain perfect peace? Because his mind is steadfast in his trust in God. How does he maintain his perfect peace? Because he knows that Jesus died for him. And what he writes about that death of Christ is so important. And I think so profound. He says, when Satan should buffet, again, a reference to the sea, buffet like the waves on the ship when it sank. When Satan should buffet, when trials should come, the ones that he's been walking through for two years, let this blessed assurance control that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and shed his own blood for my soul. And I love that word that he chooses there. I love that word helpless. Because when we think about our helplessness before God, particularly as it relates to Jesus Christ, I think we tend to put it in the context of this myopic view of the gospel in which Jesus only died to take my soul up to heaven. And so when we think about our helplessness, we think about the helplessness, what it means to be helpless to get our soul to heaven. We think about what it means to be helpless to go from dead in sin to alive in Christ, from in this temporal body to in my eternal soul. We think about our helplessness to make that jump to a perfect eternity with God, and so we need God's help. We need Jesus' help to get us there. But what I want us to think about is that is far from the only way in which we are helpless. We are, every single one of us, every single person in this room can get a call today that changes your life forever. We are one vibration in our pocket away from a profoundly different existence. And let me tell you something. You are helpless against that phone call. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. We may act like a big, tough, civilized society with an important pharmaceutical complex and the most advanced medical equipment in the world. And we can act like we can fight cancer. But we are helpless with who gets it and when they do. Even the most fastidious of us are sometimes helpless against the onslaught of that awful disease and its acquiring. As parents, we are helpless when our kid is driving down the road. Do you understand? Our fortunes could be taken. Our families could be taken. There's so many different ways that life can buffet us. There's so many different trials that could come. And we exist in part because we're Americans and we're the most independent, individualized civilization that's ever existed. We exist as if we're driving down the road, facing the storms of life on our own with the wherewithal to get through them. But listen, you're helpless if a tornado comes along and sweeps you off the road. There is so much in life to which we are rendered helpless. And I don't think we go through life understanding that. We are not grown adults capable of handling the buffets of life. We are newborn babies that are vulnerable to this world and this universe in ways that we don't understand. And so when Christ regards our helpless estate, it's not just our soul's inability to get itself into heaven. It's our inability to protect ourselves from the seasons of life. And it's for that that he shed his blood. It's for that that he died. And that's something that Horatio knew. That it wasn't just the helplessness of his soul, but it was our complete lack of agency to prevent ourself from suffering in the first place. And it's this simple truth, I believe, that won the day for him and wins the day for us. When Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. It's the knowledge in the midst of our trials that when Jesus conquered sin and shame by dying on the cross and raising from the dead, when Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. Whatever this is for you, he conquered this too. There's this great passage that I refer to a lot, Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 4. I won't belabor the passage here, but there's a phrase there, there's a promise that the former things will have passed away. There will be no more weeping, no more crying, no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And I love to ruminate on what those former things are. Cancer, divorce, abuse, despair, orphans, loss, tragedy, awful phone calls, relational strife, being born to broken parents who hurt you because they're hurt. All that stuff is the former things that's passed away. And what we know is those former things, those things that will pass away, the things that exist in your life that are wearing you out and making you tired and making life so difficult right now, the things you go to sleep worrying about, the things you wake up worrying about. Whatever's waiting for you on the other end of that call one day. We can have perfect peace in those trials. Because we know that because Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered that too. We know that because he offers salvation to those who believe in his shedding of blood for them, that even when we lose them, and even when the trial claims them, that we will see them again in eternity. We know that this life is but a mist and a vapor compared to what awaits us on the other side of passing. We understand that. And so in a few minutes, in a few minutes, we're going to sing it as well together. We're going to stand and we're going to proclaim these words back to God. And so my prayer for you in preparation for this and even this morning as I've been praying about the service is that you'll be able to sing that with authenticity. That you'll be able to sing it as well. And if there is something in your life that is so hard that it's hard for you to muster the singing, that it's hard for you to muster the words, then listen to the people singing around you and let them sing on your behalf. And know, know that we can say that though peace like a river attends, when peace like a river attends our way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever our lot, God has enabled us to say, it is well, it is well with our soul. I want to finish by reading you this fourth verse. This fourth verse is not one that is often sung. But as I was reviewing the lyrics in reference to our my soul. I pray that God will whisper his peace to you this morning. Let's pray. Father, we need your perfect peace. We need your protected peace. Everyone in this room is walking through a storm of one sort or another. Everyone in this room will walk through more. And so God, when we do, I pray that we remember that you are driving and that we are resting. Help us find our rest in your perfect peace. Help us remember that whatever it is we're facing, that Jesus has conquered that too. And God, give us the courage to sing and to proclaim and to believe that even if it isn't well with us now, that it can be, and you will make it so. God, whisper your peace to us this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see everybody. And it sounds like to me that only the singers come during the summertime. You guys were singing great. And that was really always love it when the church sings together like that. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby. After the service, you have dropped in. If this is your first time, you've dropped into the middle of a series called Idols that's loosely based on a book by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods. If you haven't picked up a copy of that, we are out, but they are competitively priced on Amazon and will be brought right to your door for ease of purchase. So I would encourage you to grab one of those and kind of read through that as we finish up the series. This is week four. Next week is the last week. Week five, we're going to talk about comfort next week, which I'm very excited to talk about that because I think it's something that every American alive needs to hear. And I think it's going to be an important one next week. This week, we're looking at the source idol of control. And when I say source idol, one of the more interesting ideas that Tim Keller puts forward in his book is the idea that we have surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are the ones that are visible to us and people outside of us, a desire for money, a desire for friends, a desire for a perfect family, for appearances, things like that that are a little bit more visible. Source idols are things that exist in our heart beneath the surface that fuel our desire for those surface idols. And he identifies four. Power, which I preached about two weeks ago. That's the one that I primarily deal with. And then approval, preached about last week that's what he deals with a lot that is not one that that's probably the one I worry about the least and then control this week and comfort next week so as we approach this idea of control in our life I want us to understand what it is and what it means if we struggle with this source idol. And again, an idol is anything that becomes more important to us in our life than Jesus. It's something that we begin to prioritize over Jesus and we pour out our faith and our worship to that thing instead of to our Creator. About four or five years ago, I was in my therapist's office. I was seeing a counselor at the time just doing general maintenance, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's probably time for me to get back in there and let them tinker around a little bit. But one day I got there and whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, what a cliche, but whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, he would always ask me what's been going on, what's happened since I last saw you. That was always the first question, so I knew that was the question. So in the car, in my head, I'm thinking, how am I going to answer him? I can tell him about this thing and this thing and this thing. I think that'll be enough. Well, I'll start the bidding there, and we'll see where it goes. So I go in, I sit down and he asked me the question, how's it been going for you? What's been happening? And so I told him my three things, five or eight minutes. I don't know. And I get done with it. And he just looks at me and he kind of cocks his head and he goes, why'd you tell me those things? And the smart aleck in me is like, because you're a counselor, because this is the deal? Because that's what I'm supposed to do? What do you want me to do? But I said, well, I knew that you were going to ask me what happened, and that's what happened. So I told you those things. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but he pushed back on me and he goes do you do you ever enter a conversation without knowing what you're going to talk about and what the other person is probably going to talk about and I said not if I can help it I always plan ahead whenever I have a conversation or meeting coming up I always think through all the different ways it could go and how I want to respond because I don't want to be caught off guard in the moment. And he said, how many times are you in a situation that's taken you by surprise and you didn't expect to be there? I said, very rarely. And he goes, yeah, I think maybe you've got an issue with control. Because you have a hard time not being the one driving the bus, don't you? And I was like, you have a hard time not being the one. And I kind of thought about it, and I said, my gosh, is it possible that this need for control is so ingrained into me that the reason I told you those stories is so that I could control where the conversation went and we would talk about things I was willing to open up about and I could steer away from the areas that I wasn't willing to talk about. He said some effect of, and circle gets the square. Good job, buddy. And so this need for control that some of us all have to varying degrees can be so sneaky. Sometimes we don't even recognize it in ourselves until someone points it out in us. So let me point it out in you. Some people deal with this so much that it shows up in every aspect of their life. For me, it's relational, it's conversational. I don't want to look dumb. If someone has something negative to say, I want to be gracious and not be caught off guard, whatever it is. But for some of us, we're so regimented and ordered that we have our life together in every aspect of it. We have our routine. We wake up at a certain time. We go to bed at a certain time. Our kids do certain things on certain days. If you have a laundry day, you're gaining on it. If you make your bed, you're gaining on it. Like there are things that we do. We have a workout routine that we do. We have the way that we eat. We have the places that we go. We have our budget. We have our work schedule. We are very regimented. And a lot of that can come from this innate need to be in control of everything. I think about the all-star mom in the PTA, the one who runs a better house than you, who drives a cleaner car than you, and who makes cupcakes better than you, that mom. And her kids are always dressed better than your kids. This is this need for control. And if you're not yet sure if this is you, if this might be something that you do in your life where everything needs to be ordered, and if it's not ordered, your whole life is in shambles. I heard in the last year of this phrase that I had not heard before. I'm in the last year of the Gen Xers. I think the millennials coined this phrase. You boomers, unless you have millennial children, you probably have not heard this, but maybe you can identify it. It's a term called the Sunday Scaries. Anybody ever heard that term? You don't have to raise your hand and out yourself, but the Sunday Scaries. Okay. Now for me, I have the Saturday Scaries because about three times every Saturday, I kind of jolt myself into consciousness and ask if I know what I'm preaching about in the morning. So that's, that's what I have for me. Sunday scaries are when you take Sunday night to get ready for your week. And on Sunday afternoons and evenings, you begin to feel tremendous anxiety because the meals aren't prepped and the clothes aren't washed and the schedule isn't done and the things aren't laid out and the laundry isn't all the way ready and you start to worry, if I don't, I've got this limited amount of time, if I don't start my week right, everything's going to be off, it's going to be the worst and so you get the Sunday scaries and you experience stress on Sunday night. If that's you, friends, this might be for you. And when we do this, when we make control our idol, when we order our lives so that we manage every detail of it. And listen, I want to say this before I talk about the downside of it. Those of us who do live regimented lives and who are in control of many of the aspects of them, that ability comes from a place of diligence and discipline. That's a good thing. That's a muscle God has blessed you with that he has not blessed others with, but we can take it too far. And we can allow that to become what we serve. And we can allow control over the things in our life to become more important than the other things in our life and to become more important than Jesus himself. And here's what happens when we allow this sneaky idol to take hold in our lives. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful of the control we try to exert over them. I'll never forget, it's legendary in my group of buddies. I've got a good group of friends, eight guys, and we go on a trip about every other year. And one year we were in another city and one of my buddies named Dan just decided that he was the group mom on this trip. And I don't really know why he decided that, but he was bothering us the whole time. Don't do that. Don't go here. Where are you guys going? What are you guys talking about? Come over here. Be part of the group. Put your phone down. Let's go. Like just bossing us around the whole time. And we got mad at him. He spent the whole trip anxious. He didn't have as good a time as he could. And we, we spent the trip frustrated with Dan to the point where whenever he starts it now, we just call him mom and tell him to shut up. When we try to control everything in our life, we make ourselves anxious and we make the people around us resentful. We make ourselves anxious because we're trying to control everything. Everything's got to go according to plan. And now that we've structured this life, we have to protect this life with all the decisions that we're making and see all the threats, real and imagined, to this perfect order that we might have. And then the people around us grow to resent us because we're trying to exert unnecessary control over them as well. And it's really not a good path to be on. And the best example I can find in the Bible of someone who may have struggled with this idol of control and made herself anxious and everyone around her resentful is Sarah in the event with Hagar. Now, I'm going to read a portion of this, Genesis 16, 1 through 6, to kind of tell the story of Sarah and Hagar and Abraham. A couple bits of context. First of all, I know that at this point in the story, technically, her name is Sarai and his name is Abram, okay? For me, it feels like saying the nation Columbia with a Spanish accent all of a sudden after I've been talking in southern English for 30 minutes. So I'm not just going to break out into Hebrew. Okay, so they're going to be Sarah and Abraham, and you're going to bear that cross with me. And then what's happening in the story is in Genesis chapter 12, God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was in the Sumerian dynasty. He says, I want you to grab your family. I want you to move to this place I'm going to show you that became Canaan, the promised land in modern day Israel. And when he got there in Genesis 12, God made him three promises. He spoke to Abraham and he said, hey, this land is going to be your land and your descendants' land forever. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. He made those three promises to Abraham. Can I tell you, the rest of the Bible hinges on those promises. If we don't understand those promises, we can't understand the rest of Scripture. But all of those promises require a descendant to come true. Sarah and Abraham were getting on up there in age, maybe in their 80s. And Sarah had still not born Abraham a child. She was barren or he was impotent. And she begins to get concerned enough about this that she takes matters into her own hands. She arrests control away from God's sovereign plan. And this is what happens in Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 through 6. We're going to read it together. I don't see any problems so far. Okay, a little recap here. I, for one, am shocked that the story went that way. After she said, hey, here's what you should do. I have an Egyptian slave. You should sleep with her. She'll carry a baby, and then we'll raise that as our own child. I don't know what Abraham's moral compass was at this point in his story, what laws of God he had been equated with and not. I don't know how aware he was of the myriad egregious sins happening in this one instance. But this goes exactly how you'd think it would go. After a wife, likely much older than her slave, says, why don't you sleep with my slave and you all have a child together? And then what happens? She gets anxious. She gets resentful. She sees that Hagar is haughty towards her. And then she begins to resent Abraham, blames it on him. This is your fault. Excuse me. I'm sure it was your idea. And then runs Hagar off. By taking control in this situation, she made herself anxious about everyone around her, and she made everyone around her resentful of who she was. You can see it in Abram's response in verse 6. He says, listen, she's yours. You deal with it. Don't come to me with those problems. He's tired of dealing with it. And as I was thinking about the sin of Sarah, and as I was thinking about what it's like when we take control of our own life, when we kind of take the wheel from God and we say, I've got it from here, you can ride passenger, I'm going to be in control and orchestrate everything. That what we're really doing when we take control is this. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. We just get in the way. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. What did Sarah do? She got in his way. He had a story that he was writing with Isaac. He knew exactly when he would, God knew exactly when he was going to allow Abraham to make Sarah pregnant. He knew exactly how the rest of the story was going to go. Ishmael doesn't need to exist. That root of Ishmael doesn't need to exist. If Sarah would have just been patient and waited on God and his timing, if she had just been patient and waited on God to write the story that he intended, if she waited on his sovereignty and his will, but she got tired of waiting, she thought it should be happening differently than this, so she took control. And as a result of that control, we have this split in the line of Abraham that has echoed down through the centuries that we're still dealing with today, over which we are still warring right now in Abraham's promised land because Sarah took control when she wasn't supposed to. She got in the way of the story that God was wanting to write. And the more I thought about that, what it's like to be getting in God's way when he's trying to direct our life the way he wants it to go, I thought about this. Now, you can raise your hand for this one. Who in here loves themselves a good cooking show? I love a good cooking show. Just me and Jeff and Karen. Perfect. Nobody else likes cooking shows. You're liars. I love a good cooking show. At our house, the things that are on the TV are house hunters, cooking shows, and sports. That's it. By the way, my three-year-old son, John, calls all sports golf. Yesterday I was watching soccer, and he said, Daddy, you watch golf. And in our house, we have a rule. When a kid is making a dumb mistake like that, we do not correct them because it's adorable, and we want them to do it as long as possible. Like the days gone by when, to Lily, anything that had occurred before today was last-her-day. Could have been last year. Could have been last week. Could have been a couple hours ago. It happened last-her-day, and it was great. At some point, she figured it out, and now we don't like her as much. But I love a good cooking show. And my favorite chef, no one will be surprised by this if you know me, is Gordon Ramsay. I really like Gordon Ramsay. I like watching him cook. I like watching him interact. I think he's really great. And so I watch most of what he puts out. And I was thinking about this, getting in God's way. And I think this fits. Let's pretend that at an auction, at a charity auction from Ubuntu, which would be a great prize, I won a night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. First of all, I was given a significant raise. Second of all, I've spent it all on this night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. And the night comes around. I'm so excited. I would be thrilled to do this. It would really, really be fun. I do like to cook. And so let's say that night finally rolls around and I go to his kitchen and I walk in and all the ingredients are out on the counter. And he hasn't told me what he's going to make, but all the ingredients are there. And what I don't know is he's planning to make a beef Wellington. That's one of his signature dishes. I've only had one beef Wellington in my life. I loved it. I would kill to have one that was cooked by him for me. That would be amazing. But the deal is, I look at the ingredients and he's going to teach me how to do it. So he's going to walk me through it step by step. First, you want to sear the loin. Get that, get the skillet nice and hot, sear it. Then you rub the mustard on it. Now dice up some mushrooms. And I don't know where we're going or what we're doing. I'm just following him step by step doing what I'm supposed to do. And his goal is to show me how to make a beef wellington that we've done together. Great. Except stupid me sees the ingredients, sees the steak, sees some green beans, and I go, you know what, Gordon? Actually, I've got this. It's your night to cook with Nate. What I'd like you to do is just go sit behind the bar on the other side. Let's just chat it up. I'd like to hear some of your stories. I'm going to make you steak and green beans. And I take those ingredients, and I get in his way, and I go make overdone steak with soggy green beans, and I slide it across the table to him. Having no idea what I just missed out on. Because I insisted on taking control and making what I thought I should make with those ingredients. I think that when we insist on turning all the dials in our life ourselves, taking control of every aspect of our life. That what we do is very similar to being in the kitchen with a master chef and telling him we've got this. We see the ingredients available to us and we make the thing we think we're supposed to make. Having no idea that he had so much better plans for those ingredients than what we turned out. And as I was talking about this sermon and this idea with my wife, Jen, who has a different relationship with this source idol than I do, she pointed out to me, she said, you know what they're trying to make? If your idol is peace, you're trying to make in that kitchen or if your idol is control. She said, we're trying to make peace. People with the idol of control, you know what they're trying to do with that control? They're trying to create a peace for themselves. They're trying to create rest for themselves. If this is your surface, if this is your source idol, and you try to control every aspect of your life, chances are that what's really motivating you to do that is a desire for peace in all the areas of your life. It's why your spirit can't feel at rest until your bed is made. And this is true. Why did I think of the things that I wanted to say to the counselor? Because I didn't want to get sidetracked. I didn't want to get surprised. I wanted to walk into that office with peace. Why do we prepare ourselves for the situations that we're going to face? Because we want to be peaceful in the midst of those situations. Why do we prepare for the week and get the Sunday scaries? Because we want to enter the week feeling at peace, feeling ready to go, feeling that we are in a place of rest and not a place of hurry. But here's the problem with the peace that we create with our control. It's fragile. It's threatened. It's uncertain. It's always at risk. We can do everything we can to create peace in our life with the way that we control every aspect of it. But the reality is we are one phone call away. We are one bad night away. We are one accident in the driveway away. One bad business decision. Two bad weeks of just being in a bad spot away from ruining all that peace. There are so many things that happen in life that are outside of our control that any peace that we have created for ourself is only ever infinitesimally small and thin and fragile. And when we live a life, even achieving peace, but when we live that life of a threatened peace so that now we have peace, we've done it, we've orchestrated, we've controlled, we have what we want, everything is ordered as it should be. Things are going well. Then where does our worrying mind go to? All the things that could possibly happen to disturb this peace. All of the threats real and imagined to my peaceful Monday. And then here's what we do. I know that we do it. I've seen it happen. Then we pick a hypothetical event that could possibly happen three months from now to threaten the peace that I've created, and we decide to stress about that today. And it's not even happened yet. But we're already jumping ahead because our anxiety monster needs something to eat. And I am reminded with this idea of a threatened and a fragile peace of the verse we looked at in our series, The Treasury of Isaiah, Isaiah 26.3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Isaiah says, and God promises, that he will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. And so what's our part in that peace? It's trusting in Jesus and not ourselves. And it occurs to me, I'm not saying this for sure, because it could just be poor planning, but I kind of believe in the Holy Spirit and the way that he times things out. I've seen over and over and over again how we've had a sermon planned for eight months, and I'll preach that sermon on that day, and someone will say, this is my first time at Grace. I'm so glad I heard that sermon. That's exactly what I needed. It's the Holy Spirit. I know that we just visited this verse. And I know that we just talked a couple weeks ago about a fragile peace. But maybe we're doing it again because some of us just need to hear it twice. Maybe some of us in this room need to hear this again and let the Holy Spirit talk to us again and be honest with God about what we're holding dear to our heart and what we may be idolizing without having realized it. Because what God promises us is a perfect peace. You know what perfect peace is? Perfect peace is an unthreatened peace. Here's what perfect peace is. Jen's family used to have a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And my favorite thing to do when I would go down there was to kind of separate from everybody, big surprise, and go and lay in the hammock right next to the lake. Because when I got in that hammock, and I could hear the occasional boat putter by several hundred yards away, and I could hear the waves slowly just kind of lapping against the wood at the edge of that lake, and I could hear the birds and the sound of the lake, that was all I could hear. It drowned out everything else. It never seemed to matter what was happening in life when I laid down in that hammock. Everything was at peace and everything was okay. When we trust in God's sovereignty and in God's peace instead of our own, it's like laying down in that hammock next to the lake. Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. God is in control. He knew this would happen, and I trust in him. I don't know what story he's writing. I don't know where he's going. This is not what I would have made with these ingredients, but I know that he wants what's best for me, and he wants what's best for the people that I love, so I trust him with the results of this. It's laying in that hammock and trusting in the sovereignty of God. Perfect peace is trusting in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness, in the truth that we know that he always, always, always wants what's best for us. And that he will bring that about in this life or the next. And we can trust in that. So, here's what I would say to you. My brothers and sisters who may struggle with control. I'm not here this morning to make you feel bad for your worry or your anxiety or to make fun of you for your Sunday scaries. I think all of those things are natural and a normal part of human life. It would be weird if you never worried about anything. I think it's a good goal to grow towards. But I'm not here to make you feel badly about that. But here's what I would say. If you're a person who's given to worry and anxiety and seeks to exert control, and when you don't have it, it starts to freak you out a little bit, that doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like laying in the hammock next to the lake trusting in God's protected peace rather than trusting in your fragile, unprotected, risky peace. You see? And so what I would encourage you to do is to see things this way. Excessive worry is a warning light. Excessive worry on the dashboard of your life is a warning light that should cause you to wonder what's really going on and what you're really worried about. A few weeks ago, I talked about those of us with the issue of power being a source idol and how that begets anger, and I said the same thing. Anger is the flashing warning light for us. When I'm having days when I'm excessively angry or frustrated all the time, I need to stop and pause and go, what is the source of this, and why am I so upset, and why do I have a hair trigger? What's going on with me? And wrestle that to the ground. For my brothers and sisters who who struggle with control maybe more than you realize before you walk in the door excessive worry and I don't know what excessive worry is I can't define that for you that's that's between you and God to decide how much is too much but here's what I do know excessive worry is a warning light and here's. And here's what it's telling you. It's telling you I am not existing in perfect peace. And what's our part of perfect peace? To keep our mind steadfast by trusting in him. So somewhere along the way, we've started trusting in ourself a little bit more to grab those ingredients and make what we want. Somewhere along the way, we've started taking control back from God, trusting in our sovereignty, not his, and beginning to create our own peace that is fragile and stressful. And so the question to ask yourself when that warning light starts to go off is simply this, whose peace am I trusting? I don't know what to tell you to do. Because I'll be honest with you. Like I said, I talked this sermon through with Jen. And she kind of said, yeah, all that's true. Okay, I get it. I agree. All true. What do I do? How do we not do those things? How do we not worry more than we should? What are my action steps? And I said, well, what advice would you give to so-and-so? She goes, I don't know. You're the pastor, so I'm asking you. Here's what I would simply go back to, is this question of whose peace am I trusting? Am I trusting in the peace that I've created? Or are my eyes focused on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, so that my mind is steadfast in him and I'm trusting in his peace? Whose peace are you trusting? My prayer for you is that you'll experience the rest of trusting in God's peace. And as I enter into prayer for you, there's a prayer that I found in a devotional that I have from the Common Book of Prayer from 1552. It's amazing to me how timeless the truths of faith and spirituality and Christianity are. And how this could be written today and still every bit as accurate. But I'm going to read this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. And then we're going to enter into a time of prayer together and then we'll worship. Oh God, from you all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works proceed. Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our heart may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Father, we love you. And we thank you that through your Son, we can have perfect peace. God, we are sorry for not claiming this gift that you offer us more readily. God, we are sorry for grabbing the ingredients and trying to make our own peace and write our own story. God, we are sorry that we sometimes trust in our wisdom and our sovereignty more than yours. Lord, I pray that no matter where we sit with this idol or how we might wrestle with it, that we would leave this place more desirous of you than when we came. And God, for my brothers and sisters that do struggle, that do find it difficult to give up control, that do find themselves battling that demon of worry sometimes, God, would you just speak to them? Would you let them know that you're there, that you love them, That you have a plan for them that they don't see but that they can trust? And would you give us the obedience to just do the next thing that you're asking us to do, not worrying about what the result is going to be, but worrying about just walking in lockstep with you? Father, make us a people of peace so that we might give that peace to others and that they might know you. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see everybody. And it sounds like to me that only the singers come during the summertime. You guys were singing great. And that was really always love it when the church sings together like that. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby. After the service, you have dropped in. If this is your first time, you've dropped into the middle of a series called Idols that's loosely based on a book by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods. If you haven't picked up a copy of that, we are out, but they are competitively priced on Amazon and will be brought right to your door for ease of purchase. So I would encourage you to grab one of those and kind of read through that as we finish up the series. This is week four. Next week is the last week. Week five, we're going to talk about comfort next week, which I'm very excited to talk about that because I think it's something that every American alive needs to hear. And I think it's going to be an important one next week. This week, we're looking at the source idol of control. And when I say source idol, one of the more interesting ideas that Tim Keller puts forward in his book is the idea that we have surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are the ones that are visible to us and people outside of us, a desire for money, a desire for friends, a desire for a perfect family, for appearances, things like that that are a little bit more visible. Source idols are things that exist in our heart beneath the surface that fuel our desire for those surface idols. And he identifies four. Power, which I preached about two weeks ago. That's the one that I primarily deal with. And then approval, preached about last week that's what he deals with a lot that is not one that that's probably the one I worry about the least and then control this week and comfort next week so as we approach this idea of control in our life I want us to understand what it is and what it means if we struggle with this source idol. And again, an idol is anything that becomes more important to us in our life than Jesus. It's something that we begin to prioritize over Jesus and we pour out our faith and our worship to that thing instead of to our Creator. About four or five years ago, I was in my therapist's office. I was seeing a counselor at the time just doing general maintenance, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's probably time for me to get back in there and let them tinker around a little bit. But one day I got there and whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, what a cliche, but whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, he would always ask me what's been going on, what's happened since I last saw you. That was always the first question, so I knew that was the question. So in the car, in my head, I'm thinking, how am I going to answer him? I can tell him about this thing and this thing and this thing. I think that'll be enough. Well, I'll start the bidding there, and we'll see where it goes. So I go in, I sit down and he asked me the question, how's it been going for you? What's been happening? And so I told him my three things, five or eight minutes. I don't know. And I get done with it. And he just looks at me and he kind of cocks his head and he goes, why'd you tell me those things? And the smart aleck in me is like, because you're a counselor, because this is the deal? Because that's what I'm supposed to do? What do you want me to do? But I said, well, I knew that you were going to ask me what happened, and that's what happened. So I told you those things. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but he pushed back on me and he goes do you do you ever enter a conversation without knowing what you're going to talk about and what the other person is probably going to talk about and I said not if I can help it I always plan ahead whenever I have a conversation or meeting coming up I always think through all the different ways it could go and how I want to respond because I don't want to be caught off guard in the moment. And he said, how many times are you in a situation that's taken you by surprise and you didn't expect to be there? I said, very rarely. And he goes, yeah, I think maybe you've got an issue with control. Because you have a hard time not being the one driving the bus, don't you? And I was like, you have a hard time not being the one. And I kind of thought about it, and I said, my gosh, is it possible that this need for control is so ingrained into me that the reason I told you those stories is so that I could control where the conversation went and we would talk about things I was willing to open up about and I could steer away from the areas that I wasn't willing to talk about. He said some effect of, and circle gets the square. Good job, buddy. And so this need for control that some of us all have to varying degrees can be so sneaky. Sometimes we don't even recognize it in ourselves until someone points it out in us. So let me point it out in you. Some people deal with this so much that it shows up in every aspect of their life. For me, it's relational, it's conversational. I don't want to look dumb. If someone has something negative to say, I want to be gracious and not be caught off guard, whatever it is. But for some of us, we're so regimented and ordered that we have our life together in every aspect of it. We have our routine. We wake up at a certain time. We go to bed at a certain time. Our kids do certain things on certain days. If you have a laundry day, you're gaining on it. If you make your bed, you're gaining on it. Like there are things that we do. We have a workout routine that we do. We have the way that we eat. We have the places that we go. We have our budget. We have our work schedule. We are very regimented. And a lot of that can come from this innate need to be in control of everything. I think about the all-star mom in the PTA, the one who runs a better house than you, who drives a cleaner car than you, and who makes cupcakes better than you, that mom. And her kids are always dressed better than your kids. This is this need for control. And if you're not yet sure if this is you, if this might be something that you do in your life where everything needs to be ordered, and if it's not ordered, your whole life is in shambles. I heard in the last year of this phrase that I had not heard before. I'm in the last year of the Gen Xers. I think the millennials coined this phrase. You boomers, unless you have millennial children, you probably have not heard this, but maybe you can identify it. It's a term called the Sunday Scaries. Anybody ever heard that term? You don't have to raise your hand and out yourself, but the Sunday Scaries. Okay. Now for me, I have the Saturday Scaries because about three times every Saturday, I kind of jolt myself into consciousness and ask if I know what I'm preaching about in the morning. So that's, that's what I have for me. Sunday scaries are when you take Sunday night to get ready for your week. And on Sunday afternoons and evenings, you begin to feel tremendous anxiety because the meals aren't prepped and the clothes aren't washed and the schedule isn't done and the things aren't laid out and the laundry isn't all the way ready and you start to worry, if I don't, I've got this limited amount of time, if I don't start my week right, everything's going to be off, it's going to be the worst and so you get the Sunday scaries and you experience stress on Sunday night. If that's you, friends, this might be for you. And when we do this, when we make control our idol, when we order our lives so that we manage every detail of it. And listen, I want to say this before I talk about the downside of it. Those of us who do live regimented lives and who are in control of many of the aspects of them, that ability comes from a place of diligence and discipline. That's a good thing. That's a muscle God has blessed you with that he has not blessed others with, but we can take it too far. And we can allow that to become what we serve. And we can allow control over the things in our life to become more important than the other things in our life and to become more important than Jesus himself. And here's what happens when we allow this sneaky idol to take hold in our lives. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful of the control we try to exert over them. I'll never forget, it's legendary in my group of buddies. I've got a good group of friends, eight guys, and we go on a trip about every other year. And one year we were in another city and one of my buddies named Dan just decided that he was the group mom on this trip. And I don't really know why he decided that, but he was bothering us the whole time. Don't do that. Don't go here. Where are you guys going? What are you guys talking about? Come over here. Be part of the group. Put your phone down. Let's go. Like just bossing us around the whole time. And we got mad at him. He spent the whole trip anxious. He didn't have as good a time as he could. And we, we spent the trip frustrated with Dan to the point where whenever he starts it now, we just call him mom and tell him to shut up. When we try to control everything in our life, we make ourselves anxious and we make the people around us resentful. We make ourselves anxious because we're trying to control everything. Everything's got to go according to plan. And now that we've structured this life, we have to protect this life with all the decisions that we're making and see all the threats, real and imagined, to this perfect order that we might have. And then the people around us grow to resent us because we're trying to exert unnecessary control over them as well. And it's really not a good path to be on. And the best example I can find in the Bible of someone who may have struggled with this idol of control and made herself anxious and everyone around her resentful is Sarah in the event with Hagar. Now, I'm going to read a portion of this, Genesis 16, 1 through 6, to kind of tell the story of Sarah and Hagar and Abraham. A couple bits of context. First of all, I know that at this point in the story, technically, her name is Sarai and his name is Abram, okay? For me, it feels like saying the nation Columbia with a Spanish accent all of a sudden after I've been talking in southern English for 30 minutes. So I'm not just going to break out into Hebrew. Okay, so they're going to be Sarah and Abraham, and you're going to bear that cross with me. And then what's happening in the story is in Genesis chapter 12, God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was in the Sumerian dynasty. He says, I want you to grab your family. I want you to move to this place I'm going to show you that became Canaan, the promised land in modern day Israel. And when he got there in Genesis 12, God made him three promises. He spoke to Abraham and he said, hey, this land is going to be your land and your descendants' land forever. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. He made those three promises to Abraham. Can I tell you, the rest of the Bible hinges on those promises. If we don't understand those promises, we can't understand the rest of Scripture. But all of those promises require a descendant to come true. Sarah and Abraham were getting on up there in age, maybe in their 80s. And Sarah had still not born Abraham a child. She was barren or he was impotent. And she begins to get concerned enough about this that she takes matters into her own hands. She arrests control away from God's sovereign plan. And this is what happens in Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 through 6. We're going to read it together. I don't see any problems so far. Okay, a little recap here. I, for one, am shocked that the story went that way. After she said, hey, here's what you should do. I have an Egyptian slave. You should sleep with her. She'll carry a baby, and then we'll raise that as our own child. I don't know what Abraham's moral compass was at this point in his story, what laws of God he had been equated with and not. I don't know how aware he was of the myriad egregious sins happening in this one instance. But this goes exactly how you'd think it would go. After a wife, likely much older than her slave, says, why don't you sleep with my slave and you all have a child together? And then what happens? She gets anxious. She gets resentful. She sees that Hagar is haughty towards her. And then she begins to resent Abraham, blames it on him. This is your fault. Excuse me. I'm sure it was your idea. And then runs Hagar off. By taking control in this situation, she made herself anxious about everyone around her, and she made everyone around her resentful of who she was. You can see it in Abram's response in verse 6. He says, listen, she's yours. You deal with it. Don't come to me with those problems. He's tired of dealing with it. And as I was thinking about the sin of Sarah, and as I was thinking about what it's like when we take control of our own life, when we kind of take the wheel from God and we say, I've got it from here, you can ride passenger, I'm going to be in control and orchestrate everything. That what we're really doing when we take control is this. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. We just get in the way. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. What did Sarah do? She got in his way. He had a story that he was writing with Isaac. He knew exactly when he would, God knew exactly when he was going to allow Abraham to make Sarah pregnant. He knew exactly how the rest of the story was going to go. Ishmael doesn't need to exist. That root of Ishmael doesn't need to exist. If Sarah would have just been patient and waited on God and his timing, if she had just been patient and waited on God to write the story that he intended, if she waited on his sovereignty and his will, but she got tired of waiting, she thought it should be happening differently than this, so she took control. And as a result of that control, we have this split in the line of Abraham that has echoed down through the centuries that we're still dealing with today, over which we are still warring right now in Abraham's promised land because Sarah took control when she wasn't supposed to. She got in the way of the story that God was wanting to write. And the more I thought about that, what it's like to be getting in God's way when he's trying to direct our life the way he wants it to go, I thought about this. Now, you can raise your hand for this one. Who in here loves themselves a good cooking show? I love a good cooking show. Just me and Jeff and Karen. Perfect. Nobody else likes cooking shows. You're liars. I love a good cooking show. At our house, the things that are on the TV are house hunters, cooking shows, and sports. That's it. By the way, my three-year-old son, John, calls all sports golf. Yesterday I was watching soccer, and he said, Daddy, you watch golf. And in our house, we have a rule. When a kid is making a dumb mistake like that, we do not correct them because it's adorable, and we want them to do it as long as possible. Like the days gone by when, to Lily, anything that had occurred before today was last-her-day. Could have been last year. Could have been last week. Could have been a couple hours ago. It happened last-her-day, and it was great. At some point, she figured it out, and now we don't like her as much. But I love a good cooking show. And my favorite chef, no one will be surprised by this if you know me, is Gordon Ramsay. I really like Gordon Ramsay. I like watching him cook. I like watching him interact. I think he's really great. And so I watch most of what he puts out. And I was thinking about this, getting in God's way. And I think this fits. Let's pretend that at an auction, at a charity auction from Ubuntu, which would be a great prize, I won a night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. First of all, I was given a significant raise. Second of all, I've spent it all on this night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. And the night comes around. I'm so excited. I would be thrilled to do this. It would really, really be fun. I do like to cook. And so let's say that night finally rolls around and I go to his kitchen and I walk in and all the ingredients are out on the counter. And he hasn't told me what he's going to make, but all the ingredients are there. And what I don't know is he's planning to make a beef Wellington. That's one of his signature dishes. I've only had one beef Wellington in my life. I loved it. I would kill to have one that was cooked by him for me. That would be amazing. But the deal is, I look at the ingredients and he's going to teach me how to do it. So he's going to walk me through it step by step. First, you want to sear the loin. Get that, get the skillet nice and hot, sear it. Then you rub the mustard on it. Now dice up some mushrooms. And I don't know where we're going or what we're doing. I'm just following him step by step doing what I'm supposed to do. And his goal is to show me how to make a beef wellington that we've done together. Great. Except stupid me sees the ingredients, sees the steak, sees some green beans, and I go, you know what, Gordon? Actually, I've got this. It's your night to cook with Nate. What I'd like you to do is just go sit behind the bar on the other side. Let's just chat it up. I'd like to hear some of your stories. I'm going to make you steak and green beans. And I take those ingredients, and I get in his way, and I go make overdone steak with soggy green beans, and I slide it across the table to him. Having no idea what I just missed out on. Because I insisted on taking control and making what I thought I should make with those ingredients. I think that when we insist on turning all the dials in our life ourselves, taking control of every aspect of our life. That what we do is very similar to being in the kitchen with a master chef and telling him we've got this. We see the ingredients available to us and we make the thing we think we're supposed to make. Having no idea that he had so much better plans for those ingredients than what we turned out. And as I was talking about this sermon and this idea with my wife, Jen, who has a different relationship with this source idol than I do, she pointed out to me, she said, you know what they're trying to make? If your idol is peace, you're trying to make in that kitchen or if your idol is control. She said, we're trying to make peace. People with the idol of control, you know what they're trying to do with that control? They're trying to create a peace for themselves. They're trying to create rest for themselves. If this is your surface, if this is your source idol, and you try to control every aspect of your life, chances are that what's really motivating you to do that is a desire for peace in all the areas of your life. It's why your spirit can't feel at rest until your bed is made. And this is true. Why did I think of the things that I wanted to say to the counselor? Because I didn't want to get sidetracked. I didn't want to get surprised. I wanted to walk into that office with peace. Why do we prepare ourselves for the situations that we're going to face? Because we want to be peaceful in the midst of those situations. Why do we prepare for the week and get the Sunday scaries? Because we want to enter the week feeling at peace, feeling ready to go, feeling that we are in a place of rest and not a place of hurry. But here's the problem with the peace that we create with our control. It's fragile. It's threatened. It's uncertain. It's always at risk. We can do everything we can to create peace in our life with the way that we control every aspect of it. But the reality is we are one phone call away. We are one bad night away. We are one accident in the driveway away. One bad business decision. Two bad weeks of just being in a bad spot away from ruining all that peace. There are so many things that happen in life that are outside of our control that any peace that we have created for ourself is only ever infinitesimally small and thin and fragile. And when we live a life, even achieving peace, but when we live that life of a threatened peace so that now we have peace, we've done it, we've orchestrated, we've controlled, we have what we want, everything is ordered as it should be. Things are going well. Then where does our worrying mind go to? All the things that could possibly happen to disturb this peace. All of the threats real and imagined to my peaceful Monday. And then here's what we do. I know that we do it. I've seen it happen. Then we pick a hypothetical event that could possibly happen three months from now to threaten the peace that I've created, and we decide to stress about that today. And it's not even happened yet. But we're already jumping ahead because our anxiety monster needs something to eat. And I am reminded with this idea of a threatened and a fragile peace of the verse we looked at in our series, The Treasury of Isaiah, Isaiah 26.3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Isaiah says, and God promises, that he will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. And so what's our part in that peace? It's trusting in Jesus and not ourselves. And it occurs to me, I'm not saying this for sure, because it could just be poor planning, but I kind of believe in the Holy Spirit and the way that he times things out. I've seen over and over and over again how we've had a sermon planned for eight months, and I'll preach that sermon on that day, and someone will say, this is my first time at Grace. I'm so glad I heard that sermon. That's exactly what I needed. It's the Holy Spirit. I know that we just visited this verse. And I know that we just talked a couple weeks ago about a fragile peace. But maybe we're doing it again because some of us just need to hear it twice. Maybe some of us in this room need to hear this again and let the Holy Spirit talk to us again and be honest with God about what we're holding dear to our heart and what we may be idolizing without having realized it. Because what God promises us is a perfect peace. You know what perfect peace is? Perfect peace is an unthreatened peace. Here's what perfect peace is. Jen's family used to have a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And my favorite thing to do when I would go down there was to kind of separate from everybody, big surprise, and go and lay in the hammock right next to the lake. Because when I got in that hammock, and I could hear the occasional boat putter by several hundred yards away, and I could hear the waves slowly just kind of lapping against the wood at the edge of that lake, and I could hear the birds and the sound of the lake, that was all I could hear. It drowned out everything else. It never seemed to matter what was happening in life when I laid down in that hammock. Everything was at peace and everything was okay. When we trust in God's sovereignty and in God's peace instead of our own, it's like laying down in that hammock next to the lake. Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. God is in control. He knew this would happen, and I trust in him. I don't know what story he's writing. I don't know where he's going. This is not what I would have made with these ingredients, but I know that he wants what's best for me, and he wants what's best for the people that I love, so I trust him with the results of this. It's laying in that hammock and trusting in the sovereignty of God. Perfect peace is trusting in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness, in the truth that we know that he always, always, always wants what's best for us. And that he will bring that about in this life or the next. And we can trust in that. So, here's what I would say to you. My brothers and sisters who may struggle with control. I'm not here this morning to make you feel bad for your worry or your anxiety or to make fun of you for your Sunday scaries. I think all of those things are natural and a normal part of human life. It would be weird if you never worried about anything. I think it's a good goal to grow towards. But I'm not here to make you feel badly about that. But here's what I would say. If you're a person who's given to worry and anxiety and seeks to exert control, and when you don't have it, it starts to freak you out a little bit, that doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like laying in the hammock next to the lake trusting in God's protected peace rather than trusting in your fragile, unprotected, risky peace. You see? And so what I would encourage you to do is to see things this way. Excessive worry is a warning light. Excessive worry on the dashboard of your life is a warning light that should cause you to wonder what's really going on and what you're really worried about. A few weeks ago, I talked about those of us with the issue of power being a source idol and how that begets anger, and I said the same thing. Anger is the flashing warning light for us. When I'm having days when I'm excessively angry or frustrated all the time, I need to stop and pause and go, what is the source of this, and why am I so upset, and why do I have a hair trigger? What's going on with me? And wrestle that to the ground. For my brothers and sisters who who struggle with control maybe more than you realize before you walk in the door excessive worry and I don't know what excessive worry is I can't define that for you that's that's between you and God to decide how much is too much but here's what I do know excessive worry is a warning light and here's. And here's what it's telling you. It's telling you I am not existing in perfect peace. And what's our part of perfect peace? To keep our mind steadfast by trusting in him. So somewhere along the way, we've started trusting in ourself a little bit more to grab those ingredients and make what we want. Somewhere along the way, we've started taking control back from God, trusting in our sovereignty, not his, and beginning to create our own peace that is fragile and stressful. And so the question to ask yourself when that warning light starts to go off is simply this, whose peace am I trusting? I don't know what to tell you to do. Because I'll be honest with you. Like I said, I talked this sermon through with Jen. And she kind of said, yeah, all that's true. Okay, I get it. I agree. All true. What do I do? How do we not do those things? How do we not worry more than we should? What are my action steps? And I said, well, what advice would you give to so-and-so? She goes, I don't know. You're the pastor, so I'm asking you. Here's what I would simply go back to, is this question of whose peace am I trusting? Am I trusting in the peace that I've created? Or are my eyes focused on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, so that my mind is steadfast in him and I'm trusting in his peace? Whose peace are you trusting? My prayer for you is that you'll experience the rest of trusting in God's peace. And as I enter into prayer for you, there's a prayer that I found in a devotional that I have from the Common Book of Prayer from 1552. It's amazing to me how timeless the truths of faith and spirituality and Christianity are. And how this could be written today and still every bit as accurate. But I'm going to read this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. And then we're going to enter into a time of prayer together and then we'll worship. Oh God, from you all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works proceed. Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our heart may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Father, we love you. And we thank you that through your Son, we can have perfect peace. God, we are sorry for not claiming this gift that you offer us more readily. God, we are sorry for grabbing the ingredients and trying to make our own peace and write our own story. God, we are sorry that we sometimes trust in our wisdom and our sovereignty more than yours. Lord, I pray that no matter where we sit with this idol or how we might wrestle with it, that we would leave this place more desirous of you than when we came. And God, for my brothers and sisters that do struggle, that do find it difficult to give up control, that do find themselves battling that demon of worry sometimes, God, would you just speak to them? Would you let them know that you're there, that you love them, That you have a plan for them that they don't see but that they can trust? And would you give us the obedience to just do the next thing that you're asking us to do, not worrying about what the result is going to be, but worrying about just walking in lockstep with you? Father, make us a people of peace so that we might give that peace to others and that they might know you. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see everybody. And it sounds like to me that only the singers come during the summertime. You guys were singing great. And that was really always love it when the church sings together like that. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby. After the service, you have dropped in. If this is your first time, you've dropped into the middle of a series called Idols that's loosely based on a book by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods. If you haven't picked up a copy of that, we are out, but they are competitively priced on Amazon and will be brought right to your door for ease of purchase. So I would encourage you to grab one of those and kind of read through that as we finish up the series. This is week four. Next week is the last week. Week five, we're going to talk about comfort next week, which I'm very excited to talk about that because I think it's something that every American alive needs to hear. And I think it's going to be an important one next week. This week, we're looking at the source idol of control. And when I say source idol, one of the more interesting ideas that Tim Keller puts forward in his book is the idea that we have surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are the ones that are visible to us and people outside of us, a desire for money, a desire for friends, a desire for a perfect family, for appearances, things like that that are a little bit more visible. Source idols are things that exist in our heart beneath the surface that fuel our desire for those surface idols. And he identifies four. Power, which I preached about two weeks ago. That's the one that I primarily deal with. And then approval, preached about last week that's what he deals with a lot that is not one that that's probably the one I worry about the least and then control this week and comfort next week so as we approach this idea of control in our life I want us to understand what it is and what it means if we struggle with this source idol. And again, an idol is anything that becomes more important to us in our life than Jesus. It's something that we begin to prioritize over Jesus and we pour out our faith and our worship to that thing instead of to our Creator. About four or five years ago, I was in my therapist's office. I was seeing a counselor at the time just doing general maintenance, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's probably time for me to get back in there and let them tinker around a little bit. But one day I got there and whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, what a cliche, but whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, he would always ask me what's been going on, what's happened since I last saw you. That was always the first question, so I knew that was the question. So in the car, in my head, I'm thinking, how am I going to answer him? I can tell him about this thing and this thing and this thing. I think that'll be enough. Well, I'll start the bidding there, and we'll see where it goes. So I go in, I sit down and he asked me the question, how's it been going for you? What's been happening? And so I told him my three things, five or eight minutes. I don't know. And I get done with it. And he just looks at me and he kind of cocks his head and he goes, why'd you tell me those things? And the smart aleck in me is like, because you're a counselor, because this is the deal? Because that's what I'm supposed to do? What do you want me to do? But I said, well, I knew that you were going to ask me what happened, and that's what happened. So I told you those things. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but he pushed back on me and he goes do you do you ever enter a conversation without knowing what you're going to talk about and what the other person is probably going to talk about and I said not if I can help it I always plan ahead whenever I have a conversation or meeting coming up I always think through all the different ways it could go and how I want to respond because I don't want to be caught off guard in the moment. And he said, how many times are you in a situation that's taken you by surprise and you didn't expect to be there? I said, very rarely. And he goes, yeah, I think maybe you've got an issue with control. Because you have a hard time not being the one driving the bus, don't you? And I was like, you have a hard time not being the one. And I kind of thought about it, and I said, my gosh, is it possible that this need for control is so ingrained into me that the reason I told you those stories is so that I could control where the conversation went and we would talk about things I was willing to open up about and I could steer away from the areas that I wasn't willing to talk about. He said some effect of, and circle gets the square. Good job, buddy. And so this need for control that some of us all have to varying degrees can be so sneaky. Sometimes we don't even recognize it in ourselves until someone points it out in us. So let me point it out in you. Some people deal with this so much that it shows up in every aspect of their life. For me, it's relational, it's conversational. I don't want to look dumb. If someone has something negative to say, I want to be gracious and not be caught off guard, whatever it is. But for some of us, we're so regimented and ordered that we have our life together in every aspect of it. We have our routine. We wake up at a certain time. We go to bed at a certain time. Our kids do certain things on certain days. If you have a laundry day, you're gaining on it. If you make your bed, you're gaining on it. Like there are things that we do. We have a workout routine that we do. We have the way that we eat. We have the places that we go. We have our budget. We have our work schedule. We are very regimented. And a lot of that can come from this innate need to be in control of everything. I think about the all-star mom in the PTA, the one who runs a better house than you, who drives a cleaner car than you, and who makes cupcakes better than you, that mom. And her kids are always dressed better than your kids. This is this need for control. And if you're not yet sure if this is you, if this might be something that you do in your life where everything needs to be ordered, and if it's not ordered, your whole life is in shambles. I heard in the last year of this phrase that I had not heard before. I'm in the last year of the Gen Xers. I think the millennials coined this phrase. You boomers, unless you have millennial children, you probably have not heard this, but maybe you can identify it. It's a term called the Sunday Scaries. Anybody ever heard that term? You don't have to raise your hand and out yourself, but the Sunday Scaries. Okay. Now for me, I have the Saturday Scaries because about three times every Saturday, I kind of jolt myself into consciousness and ask if I know what I'm preaching about in the morning. So that's, that's what I have for me. Sunday scaries are when you take Sunday night to get ready for your week. And on Sunday afternoons and evenings, you begin to feel tremendous anxiety because the meals aren't prepped and the clothes aren't washed and the schedule isn't done and the things aren't laid out and the laundry isn't all the way ready and you start to worry, if I don't, I've got this limited amount of time, if I don't start my week right, everything's going to be off, it's going to be the worst and so you get the Sunday scaries and you experience stress on Sunday night. If that's you, friends, this might be for you. And when we do this, when we make control our idol, when we order our lives so that we manage every detail of it. And listen, I want to say this before I talk about the downside of it. Those of us who do live regimented lives and who are in control of many of the aspects of them, that ability comes from a place of diligence and discipline. That's a good thing. That's a muscle God has blessed you with that he has not blessed others with, but we can take it too far. And we can allow that to become what we serve. And we can allow control over the things in our life to become more important than the other things in our life and to become more important than Jesus himself. And here's what happens when we allow this sneaky idol to take hold in our lives. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful of the control we try to exert over them. I'll never forget, it's legendary in my group of buddies. I've got a good group of friends, eight guys, and we go on a trip about every other year. And one year we were in another city and one of my buddies named Dan just decided that he was the group mom on this trip. And I don't really know why he decided that, but he was bothering us the whole time. Don't do that. Don't go here. Where are you guys going? What are you guys talking about? Come over here. Be part of the group. Put your phone down. Let's go. Like just bossing us around the whole time. And we got mad at him. He spent the whole trip anxious. He didn't have as good a time as he could. And we, we spent the trip frustrated with Dan to the point where whenever he starts it now, we just call him mom and tell him to shut up. When we try to control everything in our life, we make ourselves anxious and we make the people around us resentful. We make ourselves anxious because we're trying to control everything. Everything's got to go according to plan. And now that we've structured this life, we have to protect this life with all the decisions that we're making and see all the threats, real and imagined, to this perfect order that we might have. And then the people around us grow to resent us because we're trying to exert unnecessary control over them as well. And it's really not a good path to be on. And the best example I can find in the Bible of someone who may have struggled with this idol of control and made herself anxious and everyone around her resentful is Sarah in the event with Hagar. Now, I'm going to read a portion of this, Genesis 16, 1 through 6, to kind of tell the story of Sarah and Hagar and Abraham. A couple bits of context. First of all, I know that at this point in the story, technically, her name is Sarai and his name is Abram, okay? For me, it feels like saying the nation Columbia with a Spanish accent all of a sudden after I've been talking in southern English for 30 minutes. So I'm not just going to break out into Hebrew. Okay, so they're going to be Sarah and Abraham, and you're going to bear that cross with me. And then what's happening in the story is in Genesis chapter 12, God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was in the Sumerian dynasty. He says, I want you to grab your family. I want you to move to this place I'm going to show you that became Canaan, the promised land in modern day Israel. And when he got there in Genesis 12, God made him three promises. He spoke to Abraham and he said, hey, this land is going to be your land and your descendants' land forever. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. He made those three promises to Abraham. Can I tell you, the rest of the Bible hinges on those promises. If we don't understand those promises, we can't understand the rest of Scripture. But all of those promises require a descendant to come true. Sarah and Abraham were getting on up there in age, maybe in their 80s. And Sarah had still not born Abraham a child. She was barren or he was impotent. And she begins to get concerned enough about this that she takes matters into her own hands. She arrests control away from God's sovereign plan. And this is what happens in Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 through 6. We're going to read it together. I don't see any problems so far. Okay, a little recap here. I, for one, am shocked that the story went that way. After she said, hey, here's what you should do. I have an Egyptian slave. You should sleep with her. She'll carry a baby, and then we'll raise that as our own child. I don't know what Abraham's moral compass was at this point in his story, what laws of God he had been equated with and not. I don't know how aware he was of the myriad egregious sins happening in this one instance. But this goes exactly how you'd think it would go. After a wife, likely much older than her slave, says, why don't you sleep with my slave and you all have a child together? And then what happens? She gets anxious. She gets resentful. She sees that Hagar is haughty towards her. And then she begins to resent Abraham, blames it on him. This is your fault. Excuse me. I'm sure it was your idea. And then runs Hagar off. By taking control in this situation, she made herself anxious about everyone around her, and she made everyone around her resentful of who she was. You can see it in Abram's response in verse 6. He says, listen, she's yours. You deal with it. Don't come to me with those problems. He's tired of dealing with it. And as I was thinking about the sin of Sarah, and as I was thinking about what it's like when we take control of our own life, when we kind of take the wheel from God and we say, I've got it from here, you can ride passenger, I'm going to be in control and orchestrate everything. That what we're really doing when we take control is this. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. We just get in the way. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. What did Sarah do? She got in his way. He had a story that he was writing with Isaac. He knew exactly when he would, God knew exactly when he was going to allow Abraham to make Sarah pregnant. He knew exactly how the rest of the story was going to go. Ishmael doesn't need to exist. That root of Ishmael doesn't need to exist. If Sarah would have just been patient and waited on God and his timing, if she had just been patient and waited on God to write the story that he intended, if she waited on his sovereignty and his will, but she got tired of waiting, she thought it should be happening differently than this, so she took control. And as a result of that control, we have this split in the line of Abraham that has echoed down through the centuries that we're still dealing with today, over which we are still warring right now in Abraham's promised land because Sarah took control when she wasn't supposed to. She got in the way of the story that God was wanting to write. And the more I thought about that, what it's like to be getting in God's way when he's trying to direct our life the way he wants it to go, I thought about this. Now, you can raise your hand for this one. Who in here loves themselves a good cooking show? I love a good cooking show. Just me and Jeff and Karen. Perfect. Nobody else likes cooking shows. You're liars. I love a good cooking show. At our house, the things that are on the TV are house hunters, cooking shows, and sports. That's it. By the way, my three-year-old son, John, calls all sports golf. Yesterday I was watching soccer, and he said, Daddy, you watch golf. And in our house, we have a rule. When a kid is making a dumb mistake like that, we do not correct them because it's adorable, and we want them to do it as long as possible. Like the days gone by when, to Lily, anything that had occurred before today was last-her-day. Could have been last year. Could have been last week. Could have been a couple hours ago. It happened last-her-day, and it was great. At some point, she figured it out, and now we don't like her as much. But I love a good cooking show. And my favorite chef, no one will be surprised by this if you know me, is Gordon Ramsay. I really like Gordon Ramsay. I like watching him cook. I like watching him interact. I think he's really great. And so I watch most of what he puts out. And I was thinking about this, getting in God's way. And I think this fits. Let's pretend that at an auction, at a charity auction from Ubuntu, which would be a great prize, I won a night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. First of all, I was given a significant raise. Second of all, I've spent it all on this night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. And the night comes around. I'm so excited. I would be thrilled to do this. It would really, really be fun. I do like to cook. And so let's say that night finally rolls around and I go to his kitchen and I walk in and all the ingredients are out on the counter. And he hasn't told me what he's going to make, but all the ingredients are there. And what I don't know is he's planning to make a beef Wellington. That's one of his signature dishes. I've only had one beef Wellington in my life. I loved it. I would kill to have one that was cooked by him for me. That would be amazing. But the deal is, I look at the ingredients and he's going to teach me how to do it. So he's going to walk me through it step by step. First, you want to sear the loin. Get that, get the skillet nice and hot, sear it. Then you rub the mustard on it. Now dice up some mushrooms. And I don't know where we're going or what we're doing. I'm just following him step by step doing what I'm supposed to do. And his goal is to show me how to make a beef wellington that we've done together. Great. Except stupid me sees the ingredients, sees the steak, sees some green beans, and I go, you know what, Gordon? Actually, I've got this. It's your night to cook with Nate. What I'd like you to do is just go sit behind the bar on the other side. Let's just chat it up. I'd like to hear some of your stories. I'm going to make you steak and green beans. And I take those ingredients, and I get in his way, and I go make overdone steak with soggy green beans, and I slide it across the table to him. Having no idea what I just missed out on. Because I insisted on taking control and making what I thought I should make with those ingredients. I think that when we insist on turning all the dials in our life ourselves, taking control of every aspect of our life. That what we do is very similar to being in the kitchen with a master chef and telling him we've got this. We see the ingredients available to us and we make the thing we think we're supposed to make. Having no idea that he had so much better plans for those ingredients than what we turned out. And as I was talking about this sermon and this idea with my wife, Jen, who has a different relationship with this source idol than I do, she pointed out to me, she said, you know what they're trying to make? If your idol is peace, you're trying to make in that kitchen or if your idol is control. She said, we're trying to make peace. People with the idol of control, you know what they're trying to do with that control? They're trying to create a peace for themselves. They're trying to create rest for themselves. If this is your surface, if this is your source idol, and you try to control every aspect of your life, chances are that what's really motivating you to do that is a desire for peace in all the areas of your life. It's why your spirit can't feel at rest until your bed is made. And this is true. Why did I think of the things that I wanted to say to the counselor? Because I didn't want to get sidetracked. I didn't want to get surprised. I wanted to walk into that office with peace. Why do we prepare ourselves for the situations that we're going to face? Because we want to be peaceful in the midst of those situations. Why do we prepare for the week and get the Sunday scaries? Because we want to enter the week feeling at peace, feeling ready to go, feeling that we are in a place of rest and not a place of hurry. But here's the problem with the peace that we create with our control. It's fragile. It's threatened. It's uncertain. It's always at risk. We can do everything we can to create peace in our life with the way that we control every aspect of it. But the reality is we are one phone call away. We are one bad night away. We are one accident in the driveway away. One bad business decision. Two bad weeks of just being in a bad spot away from ruining all that peace. There are so many things that happen in life that are outside of our control that any peace that we have created for ourself is only ever infinitesimally small and thin and fragile. And when we live a life, even achieving peace, but when we live that life of a threatened peace so that now we have peace, we've done it, we've orchestrated, we've controlled, we have what we want, everything is ordered as it should be. Things are going well. Then where does our worrying mind go to? All the things that could possibly happen to disturb this peace. All of the threats real and imagined to my peaceful Monday. And then here's what we do. I know that we do it. I've seen it happen. Then we pick a hypothetical event that could possibly happen three months from now to threaten the peace that I've created, and we decide to stress about that today. And it's not even happened yet. But we're already jumping ahead because our anxiety monster needs something to eat. And I am reminded with this idea of a threatened and a fragile peace of the verse we looked at in our series, The Treasury of Isaiah, Isaiah 26.3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Isaiah says, and God promises, that he will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. And so what's our part in that peace? It's trusting in Jesus and not ourselves. And it occurs to me, I'm not saying this for sure, because it could just be poor planning, but I kind of believe in the Holy Spirit and the way that he times things out. I've seen over and over and over again how we've had a sermon planned for eight months, and I'll preach that sermon on that day, and someone will say, this is my first time at Grace. I'm so glad I heard that sermon. That's exactly what I needed. It's the Holy Spirit. I know that we just visited this verse. And I know that we just talked a couple weeks ago about a fragile peace. But maybe we're doing it again because some of us just need to hear it twice. Maybe some of us in this room need to hear this again and let the Holy Spirit talk to us again and be honest with God about what we're holding dear to our heart and what we may be idolizing without having realized it. Because what God promises us is a perfect peace. You know what perfect peace is? Perfect peace is an unthreatened peace. Here's what perfect peace is. Jen's family used to have a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And my favorite thing to do when I would go down there was to kind of separate from everybody, big surprise, and go and lay in the hammock right next to the lake. Because when I got in that hammock, and I could hear the occasional boat putter by several hundred yards away, and I could hear the waves slowly just kind of lapping against the wood at the edge of that lake, and I could hear the birds and the sound of the lake, that was all I could hear. It drowned out everything else. It never seemed to matter what was happening in life when I laid down in that hammock. Everything was at peace and everything was okay. When we trust in God's sovereignty and in God's peace instead of our own, it's like laying down in that hammock next to the lake. Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. God is in control. He knew this would happen, and I trust in him. I don't know what story he's writing. I don't know where he's going. This is not what I would have made with these ingredients, but I know that he wants what's best for me, and he wants what's best for the people that I love, so I trust him with the results of this. It's laying in that hammock and trusting in the sovereignty of God. Perfect peace is trusting in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness, in the truth that we know that he always, always, always wants what's best for us. And that he will bring that about in this life or the next. And we can trust in that. So, here's what I would say to you. My brothers and sisters who may struggle with control. I'm not here this morning to make you feel bad for your worry or your anxiety or to make fun of you for your Sunday scaries. I think all of those things are natural and a normal part of human life. It would be weird if you never worried about anything. I think it's a good goal to grow towards. But I'm not here to make you feel badly about that. But here's what I would say. If you're a person who's given to worry and anxiety and seeks to exert control, and when you don't have it, it starts to freak you out a little bit, that doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like laying in the hammock next to the lake trusting in God's protected peace rather than trusting in your fragile, unprotected, risky peace. You see? And so what I would encourage you to do is to see things this way. Excessive worry is a warning light. Excessive worry on the dashboard of your life is a warning light that should cause you to wonder what's really going on and what you're really worried about. A few weeks ago, I talked about those of us with the issue of power being a source idol and how that begets anger, and I said the same thing. Anger is the flashing warning light for us. When I'm having days when I'm excessively angry or frustrated all the time, I need to stop and pause and go, what is the source of this, and why am I so upset, and why do I have a hair trigger? What's going on with me? And wrestle that to the ground. For my brothers and sisters who who struggle with control maybe more than you realize before you walk in the door excessive worry and I don't know what excessive worry is I can't define that for you that's that's between you and God to decide how much is too much but here's what I do know excessive worry is a warning light and here's. And here's what it's telling you. It's telling you I am not existing in perfect peace. And what's our part of perfect peace? To keep our mind steadfast by trusting in him. So somewhere along the way, we've started trusting in ourself a little bit more to grab those ingredients and make what we want. Somewhere along the way, we've started taking control back from God, trusting in our sovereignty, not his, and beginning to create our own peace that is fragile and stressful. And so the question to ask yourself when that warning light starts to go off is simply this, whose peace am I trusting? I don't know what to tell you to do. Because I'll be honest with you. Like I said, I talked this sermon through with Jen. And she kind of said, yeah, all that's true. Okay, I get it. I agree. All true. What do I do? How do we not do those things? How do we not worry more than we should? What are my action steps? And I said, well, what advice would you give to so-and-so? She goes, I don't know. You're the pastor, so I'm asking you. Here's what I would simply go back to, is this question of whose peace am I trusting? Am I trusting in the peace that I've created? Or are my eyes focused on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, so that my mind is steadfast in him and I'm trusting in his peace? Whose peace are you trusting? My prayer for you is that you'll experience the rest of trusting in God's peace. And as I enter into prayer for you, there's a prayer that I found in a devotional that I have from the Common Book of Prayer from 1552. It's amazing to me how timeless the truths of faith and spirituality and Christianity are. And how this could be written today and still every bit as accurate. But I'm going to read this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. And then we're going to enter into a time of prayer together and then we'll worship. Oh God, from you all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works proceed. Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our heart may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Father, we love you. And we thank you that through your Son, we can have perfect peace. God, we are sorry for not claiming this gift that you offer us more readily. God, we are sorry for grabbing the ingredients and trying to make our own peace and write our own story. God, we are sorry that we sometimes trust in our wisdom and our sovereignty more than yours. Lord, I pray that no matter where we sit with this idol or how we might wrestle with it, that we would leave this place more desirous of you than when we came. And God, for my brothers and sisters that do struggle, that do find it difficult to give up control, that do find themselves battling that demon of worry sometimes, God, would you just speak to them? Would you let them know that you're there, that you love them, That you have a plan for them that they don't see but that they can trust? And would you give us the obedience to just do the next thing that you're asking us to do, not worrying about what the result is going to be, but worrying about just walking in lockstep with you? Father, make us a people of peace so that we might give that peace to others and that they might know you. In Jesus' name, amen.
I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.
I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.
I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.
