James

Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in this way. I am excited for the fifth part in our series called Things You Should Know, where we're looking through things in Scripture or that come up in church or in Christendom that we are familiar with, we've heard of before, but maybe we don't know how to explain or maybe it hasn't been discussed or maybe we're just too far down the rabbit hole of faith to raise our hand and ask about these things to get some clarity. And so what we wanted to do, so that you didn't have to ask those embarrassing questions in small groups, is take five weeks here at the beginning of the year and talk through some of these topics that we may have questions about, because we don't really discuss them all the time. This morning, I wanted us to look at grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are two things that we see come up in Scripture a lot. We're going to look at Scripture in a little bit to see how replete it is with references to God's grace and God's mercy. And we sing songs about them. We certainly know about them. We've heard about them. The name of the church is Grace, for crying out loud. But I wonder how many of us would be confident in whatever your working definition of grace is. I wonder how many of us would be confident understanding mercy or explaining it to our kids if they heard those words and said, hey, what does that mean? How many of you would feel comfortable going, I got this, I'm going to knock this out of the park? If I asked those of us listening and watching, hey, could you explain grace and mercy to the church? Could I get you to come in one Sunday morning, I'm just going to bring you up on stage, and you tell the good people of grace what the name of the church really means. Now, I have no doubt in our church, we would do a good job. There would be, I think, a myriad answers across a wide range of definitions using a lot of unnecessary words that would be mostly right. But I think it's worth it as a church to take some time and define these words in a simple way and understand what grace and mercy really are. Because when we understand God's grace and God's mercy towards us, I think that we can't help but want to respond in exuberant praise. I think when we really understand what's going on with grace and mercy, when we really properly understand those two characteristics of God, that it inspires within us a response of gratitude, and that gratitude manifests joy, and it ought to make us want to leap out of our skin and praise our good God. Which is why we've positioned the sermon at the beginning of the service this week, and we're going to transition right into worship as I wrap up the sermon. Because I wanted to give you guys a chance to respond to the reality of God's grace and mercy. So with that in mind, and I would also say, for those of you who are listening to this or me, not on Sunday morning, if you're catching up later in the day, if you're listening on a podcast in the car or on a walk or something like that, as you listen to my voice right now, I would encourage you, plan to listen to some praise and worship music on your own at the end of this sermon. Just go ahead and budget some time in your head to listen to two or three songs or just have it playing in the car and allow yourself to respond to what's shared here this morning. But with that preamble, I wanted to jump right in to defining these words for us so we have a working definition here at Grace. So mercy, the way I understand it, is simply when we do not get what we deserve. Mercy is when we do not get something that we deserve. When our actions or our attitude or our behavior warrants punishment, something punitive, or just some natural consequences, and we don't receive those consequences, we don't receive the punishment that we deserve, when we've earned some trouble and we don't get into that trouble, that's mercy. So mercy is simply when we don't get something that we do deserve. Think of it this way. Pretend you've got a 16-year-old son. He's just got a new car. He's got the keys. And part of the deal with having the freedom to drive is that there's a curfew. And his very first time out, he goes out with his buddies and he breaks a curfew. And he understands that you guys have set up these rules that if you go and you break curfew, when you come back, we're going to take your car keys for a week. That's the deal. All right? So he gets back, he's broken curfew, and what he deserves is for you to take his car keys. And instead you say, you know what? I hope that you remember this. I want to forgive you. I'm not going to hold this against you. Go into bed. I'm not going to take your car keys. Right? That's mercy. He does not get a punishment that he does deserve. He doesn't get the consequences that his behaviors warrant. You just showed your son mercy. That's what that is. So mercy is when we do not get something that we do deserve. Grace, conversely, is when we do get something that we don't deserve. Grace is when we get a special favor or a blessing that we did not earn, that our behavior does not warrant. So we go back to the 16-year-old kid. You've forgiven him and you've sent him to his room, go to bed. I'm not going to take your keys. You can continue to have that freedom. You deserve that punishment, but I'm not going to give it to you. But grace is this. Maybe part of the agreement with your son is if he's going to have the freedom of driving, then he has to be responsible and earn his own gas money, which is a pretty fair driving arrangement across, I think, all families. That's a pretty typical arrangement. You're going to have a car, you've got to pay for your gas money. And because you love him, and because you want him to be blessed, and because it seems like he felt particularly bad about breaking curfew, not only do you send him to bed without taking his keys, but then after he's gone, you take his car and you sneak over to the gas station and you fill that thing all the way up for him. And you leave it there as a surprise the next morning. That's grace. Grace is the full gas tank that he doesn't deserve. He just broke the rules, man. He doesn't deserve that at all. He doesn't deserve any special favors. But because you love him, because you're a good parent, you fill up his gas tank. That's grace, right? And it's important that we understand these concepts because they are all over Scripture. Scripture shows us over and over again that God shows us mercy and that God shows us grace. I went through this week and just kind of looked at some of the passages, and I wanted you to see a few of them. So I'm going to read them kind of machine gun style real quick here. There's going to be three in a row for mercy, and then we're going to talk about these. But just look what Scripture has to say about mercy. I love this one in James. This is just a snippet of the verse, but it's a simple phrase. James writes that mercy triumphs over judgment. And then on in Lamentations, back in the Old Testament, the scriptures say, And then finally, Paul writes in Ephesians, What we see in those verses very clearly is that God's mercy is the forgiveness of our sins. God's mercy to us is forgiving our sins, is not giving us the just punishment that we deserve for our sins. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but when we sin, it is offensive to Creator God. When we sin, we take up arms in a violent insurrection against God's domain in the universe. Last week, we talked about Satan, and we talked about his fundamental sin that is all of our fundamental sins, which is to look at God and to say, you're supposed to be up there. You're supposed to be the authority figure, but I don't want that to be true in my life, so I'm going to be my own authority figure. When we sin, when we choose something that is outside of God's will, what we're saying to God is, I don't accept your authority in my life. You're not the boss of me. I'm the boss of me. You don't make my decisions. I make my decisions. You see, when we sin, it is an active rebellion against the way that God created us. God is the creator. We are the created. I'm firmly convinced, and I've said it before, that that's why Genesis starts the way it does. The very first words in the Bible are, in the beginning, God created. It establishes that relationship, creator, creation. In charge, subservient. And when we sin, we go, I don't like that you're in charge. I want to be in charge. And we rebel against God. And God sent his son in light of that rebellion to make a path back to him so that we could spend eternity with him. And God says, when we sin, listen, you can't spend eternity with me anymore. You can't do it. You're imperfect. You've offended me. You violated the terms of the agreement. I am taking your keys. And then God sends his son to make a way for us to go to heaven anyways, for us to spend eternity with him anyways. And what do we do? We trample on that. We sin again. We demand forgiveness again. And I'm not sure that we stop and realize the miracle of God's mercy, the miracle of his forgiveness. When we do, that phrase in James, mercy triumphs over judgment, becomes really amazing. We deserve judgment. We broke the rules. He should take our keys. But he doesn't because our God chooses mercy and mercy triumphs over judgment. Jesus tells Peter, when Peter says, how many times should you forgive someone when they wrong you? Jesus says, 70 times seven. As many times as they wrong you, show them mercy. It's in his very nature to do this. Even though we are involved in a rebellious insurrection against Creator God, He looks at us in all of our offense. And for many of us, we're not talking about ignorant sin here. We're not talking about this thing that we did and now we realize, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be doing that. Now that I'm acquainted with Scripture, I know better. I'm talking about the willful sin that you and I commit every week, every day. Who am I kidding? That's offensive to Creator God. And yet he shows us mercy because lamentation says his mercies are new every morning. Every day requires more of God's forgiveness. Every day we break curfew and every day he gives us mercy for that. He withholds the punishment from us that we do deserve. He withholds the separation from us that we do deserve, the damnation from us that we do deserve. That's God's mercy. But it gets better because I think God's grace adds another layer on top of that that's even more remarkable. Look at what Scripture says about God's grace, just two verses really quickly. In Ephesians, Paul writes, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. And then on in Romans he writes, and we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So mercy forgives us. God's mercy forgives us, but God's grace restores us. You see? God's mercy says, you're forgiven. I know you messed up. I know you broke curfew. You're forgiven. But then God's grace says, and I've made a way for you to be in my family. He fills up the tank. God's mercy says, I no longer hold your sins against you. God's grace says, because of that, I sent my son to die for you, and now you have a seat at my table etern, Do you understand? God's mercy says we messed up, we've offended Creator God, we've willfully sinned, and we've offended Him, and we deserve punishment, and He says, I'm not going to punish you. And He could stop there. He could say, I'm not going to punish you, I'm not going to punish you this one time for breaking curfew, but don't mess up anymore. And then if we mess up again, then we're done. We're toast. That's it. But in his grace and in his goodness, he doesn't stop at forgiveness. He stops at restoration. Not only are you forgiven, but now here, have a seat at my table. Not only are you forgiven, but now you are an adopted son or daughter of the king. You are an heir to the universal throne. Not only am I not going to hold it against you, not only am I going to clothe you in the righteousness ofal son. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I'm about to give you the quickest, worst rendition of it ever. All right. I've preached about this before. I can do a better job than this, but for the sake of time, we're going to look at some essential details. The parable of the prodigal son goes like this. There's a father who's wealthy and he has two sons. And one of those sons, the younger one, looks at the dad and he says, you know what? I really just want your stuff. I don't want you. Can you just go ahead and give me my inheritance? I'd rather you be dead anyway. Just give me my money so that I can live how I want. And that father, in his goodness, for reasons I don't understand, says, okay, fine, and gives him the money. And the son goes off into the city and he spends it on living in ways that just feed his appetites and his lusts. And he runs out of money. He spends it in totally dishonorable ways. He comes to the end of it. Everybody leaves him. He can't find a job. He ends up eating slop on a pig farm. And one day the Bible says he comes to his senses in this really poignant moment and he decides, I'm going to go back to my dad's house. But he works out this speech in his head where he's going to go back and he's going to say, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell him, can you just please forgive me and let me be your servant? I don't deserve to be your son anymore. What I've done is too offensive. Will you please just let me be your servant? Because they live better than I do right now. And so he heads home with this speech in mind, which, by the way, it's a pretty fair speech, right? Dude took his dad's money, went off and spent it however he wanted to, wasted it on debaucherous things, and then comes back with his hat in his hand. Yeah, you're darn right he doesn't deserve to be a son anymore. He should live as a servant, at least for a few years, right? But he goes back, and the father sees him from a long way off and runs out to greet him. And the son starts in with his speech, dad, I'm so sorry, I don't deserve, yada, yada, yada. And the dad shuts him up right away, flings his arms around him and hugs him. And in that moment, the son knows that he's forgiven, that his father's not going to hold those things against him. That's mercy. But he doesn't stop there. He takes the ring, the signet of the family, and he puts it on his son's finger. And he takes the robe and he takes the slippers and he puts those on the son. And then he goes and he kills the fattened calf, the really good stuff. And he throws a big, huge party. And he says, my son is back, and he welcomes him right back into the family, which he didn't have to do, and his behavior didn't warrant. It's the perfect picture of the mercy and the grace that God offers us. We're the prodigals. We run away and make willful decisions to offend our God, to throw off his authority in our life and be our own authority. And then at some point or another, we come back, hat in hand, apologetic, I'm so sorry. And he forgives us. But he doesn't just forgive us. He restores us. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not mad at you. Come here. You would expect that he would say, you're forgiven. Get away from me. I need a minute. That's not what he does. He says, you're forgiven. And then he hugs us. And then he sends his son, his only son, whom he loves, who was perfect, who never offended him, to die for you and for me. He gave us that gift. Do you understand? We don't deserve the grace of Jesus. We don't deserve that. We didn't earn it. Our behavior doesn't warrant it. Nowhere in the scripture is there a contract that says when we break the law and offend Almighty God that he owes us the death of his son? That's not the deal. But he does it anyways. That's grace. And in light of that, the mercy of forgiveness and the grace of restoration, we should want to exuberantly praise our God. But I'm also aware of the fact that many of us, as we listen to this, if you look at the ends of the spectrum of, Nick, you better shut up so I can start praising God right now. I'm about to jump out of my skin. And then, oh, okay, that's cool. I think I understand grace and mercy a little bit better now. A lot of us are closer to this end. A lot of us have responded in our heads and in our hearts to what I just said in that way. Oh, okay, yeah, I get it. I understand that better. That's good. Thank you. And it makes me wonder, me included, why we're on that end of the spectrum. And as I thought about that this week, I could only include that it's probably because we're all entitled brats. We're probably on that end of the spectrum because there's a very good chance that the two to three hundred adults I'm talking to right now are really just entitled brats. Here's what I mean. I just want to give you a picture of my daughter's life. I have a daughter named Lily. She just recently turned five. This is her last six weeks. Before you get offended at me calling you an entitled brat, which I did just do, just hear me out. Lily's last six weeks have been unbelievable. She is, through no fault of her own, incredibly entitled now. I ran this by Jen. She's not happy I'm saying this, but we've accepted that it's true. Here's what's happened with her. In December, we as a family spent basically the month down in Athens, Georgia with Jen's family as her dad transitioned into eternity. And in doing that, with Christmas coming up, there are people here in Raleigh who love us and who love Lily and wanted to make sure that Lily got a gift. So a couple times I would come back to Raleigh to take care of some church stuff, and there would be packages waiting on me at the house. I had, I literally, the first time I came back, this is embarrassing, we had some neighbors collecting our mail for us. I had to get a wheelbarrow and go down to their house and fill it up with all the stuff that was waiting on us. And then they pulled a wagon and we unloaded it at my house. That was Christmas arriving at the Rector's. That's us. And other people had like dropped things off at the door. So now I go home, I'm getting these gifts. I take them back to Lily, who is now opening these gifts like, hey, all these people got you these things. Okay, great, thank you. So she's opening them. We're trying to do the video with excitement. She's trying to fan excitement, but she's four at the time. She's not really good at this yet. She doesn't know that's part of the deal when you get gifts. So she's already getting gifts in early December. I made another trip back. There's more stuff waiting. I bring that back. I go ahead and give that to her because we know that there's Christmas coming. We don't want to mute those things. Then at Jen's house, because of things going on, we did early Christmas with her dad. So all the grandkids go in and she's now opening three or four other gifts from her grandparents. Thank you for these and these and these. Then Christmas Eve, we have real Christmas with Jen's family and she gets more gifts. Then the next day we go to my family's house and she gets more gifts, right, on Christmas. And so now the situation in a state that we don't even live in is at my parents' house, there's a pile of gifts that's too big to carry back to Jen's parents' house. So we just have to leave it there for a second. At Jen's parents' house, she has gifts strewn across three stories of a home, including inside a princess room that her grandfather made for her while he still could that she gets to sleep in, complete with lit teepee, okay? This is her life. There's a mess of toys there. There's some on the main floor. There's a basement that she's adopted as a playroom. And then there's toys in the playroom that my parents have for her. And then she comes back. We don't get back until early January, right? When we get back, there's more gifts waiting on her because people at the church love her and are so good to us. And then her birthday's on January 15th. So on January 15th, prior to that, more gifts are showing up at the house. She's opening them up. She lives in a, in a, like a dang gift parade. It's a totally normal thing for her to come home and open up to like, hey, these two things came for you today. And she just opens it up like they're nothing. Then on her birthday, the neighborhood kids come over and give her stuff she doesn't need in exchange for cake that they don't need. And then the next day we have church drive by where the families come through and they hand her more stuff that she doesn't need. And we wave at them in the freezing cold, and we just have so much junk all over our house. And to this child, it's totally normal. She has no idea that she lives inside of a gift parade. They just show up every day. And what Jen and I have realized is she's entitled. Now, I will say this. She is not a brat. She's not that. That word was for dramatic effect only. She's sweet and kind and loving, but she has no capacity to show the proper gratitude for all the gifts that she's been getting because to her it's a totally normal thing. It's embarrassing to me how much people love us and love her. And I don't know what I'm going to do as a dad. I've literally tried to talk Jen into when somebody gives us a gift, let's put it in a room somewhere. And then as she is good, if she has a good week, then we'll give her one of the gifts from the gift room, right? To try to help her earn it. I don't know exactly how to solve this. I would imagine that we're not on an island with this issue. But the reality of my daughter's life is she's entitled. And she doesn't know it. We're going to try to correct it. But what I understand is that that entitlement blinds her to what generosity really is. That entitlement works to mute her joy because she sees everything through the lens of this is normal. I deserve this. If I ask for a thing, I get the thing. This is how life goes. And she has no reason to believe that that's not how life goes. She's only barely five, and she's loved. See, here's the thing. I think it's great. I'm happy for her. I'm floored by the love that our family experiences. I'm grateful that she gets to live a life like that. But she has no perspective on how grateful she should really be. Because again, her entitlement blinds her to the generosity around her and serves to mute her joy that she should have when she receives a gift. I bring that up because I believe that you and I live in a stinking gift parade and we just don't know it. We live in parades of God's goodness and we don't see it. All of our life, if we grew up in church, as soon as you're involved in church, at some point or another, you're going to hear, you've sinned and you've offended Almighty God. And then as soon as that is said to help us feel better, as a capstone to it, you've sinned and offended Almighty God, but God offers us mercy, so you're good. Jesus died on the cross for your sins, so you're fine. You've sinned, you don't get to spend eternity with heaven, but God offers us mercy and sends his son to die for us, so you're forgiven. So we never have to sit in the reality of what our sin really warrants. We never have to sit under the weight of, I have sinned, I have chosen my authority over God's authority, and that has earned me eternal separation from him. We don't have to sit in that for more than 30 seconds before the pastor comes back and says, but God died for you, so we have mercy. We never stop to think that we don't deserve mercy. We never stop to consider that these gifts don't have to keep showing up at my house. We've never done the math to understand that God doesn't owe you forgiveness. Do you understand? He doesn't owe it to you. He created you. He set you on the planet. He said, these are the rules. This is how you can please me. And we've all at different points in our life said, you know, I'm not really that interested in pleasing you. He doesn't owe us forgiveness for that. We walk around like we're entitled to it. We walk around like we deserve it. We walk around like, listen, the deal should be, God, I'm going to mess up a couple times. If you could let some people kill your son, that seems pretty fair. Grace, we are not owed mercy. That's nowhere in the contract. You say, yeah, but God is love. God forgives. He is love. He does forgive. He's also just. And what we deserve is separation from the God that we've offended. But because mercy triumphs over judgment, and because His mercies are new every morning, he withholds that judgment from us and he offers us forgiveness. He offers us a mercy that we are not owed and that we do not deserve. Yet we are so familiar with it and we sing songs about it so often and we count on it and take it for granted so regularly that sometimes we treat mercy like another doll that someone handed us out the window that, yeah, of course I get this. It's my birthday. This is what we do. And our entitlement blinds us to the grandeur and the majesty of God's mercy. Not to mention the graces that we don't see. Grace is a goodness that we get that we have not earned. Grace is God's favor on our life that doesn't warrant it. We just walked through the really, and we're in the middle of the really difficult season of losing Jen's dad. His name was John. Towards the end of John's life, we found out we were pregnant with a boy that we're going to name John. What grace from God. What grace from God that he says, listen, everybody has to go. As appointed to man wants to die. Everyone's going to have to walk this path. And now it's John's turn to walk this path. But because I love you and because you're good and because you're my child, you're good because I made you good. Here's another John for you to love. That's grace. We don't deserve that. We didn't warrant that. Do you understand that the goodness in your life is grace? It's God's goodness in your life that when you get the new car and you drive it down the road and it smells nice and it looks nice and you're real proud of yourself and it makes us feel like we arrived, that happiness, that moment, that's God's grace. When we sit in our living room and our kids are back from college and we watch our grandkids scurry around or we see their joy and a gift that we were able to buy them, like that's God's grace. When we sit around with our friends and we laugh and we have a good night and we go home and we feel warm, that's God's grace. Your gifts and talents that got you where you are, those are gifts from God that are his grace. His grace is all over our lives. And if we would just stop and look around and acknowledge that we're in a dang gift parade, I think we would be blown away by God's goodness. It reminds me of one of my favorite verses in John, where he simply writes, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, out of the goodness of his heart, we have all received grace upon grace. He just lavishes them upon us because he's a good father and he likes to see you happy. He likes it when you cry tears of joy. He likes the moments that you share with your husband or your wife or your friend or your parents or your kids. He likes those sweet moments. He designs those for you. He doesn't just forgive you. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not going to hold your sins against you, but he fills up your tank with gas every day over and over from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. He doesn't just forgive you. He sends his son to die for you and he restores you and he welcomes you into his house to sit at his table. And these little snippets of grace are just glimpses into eternity where it's nothing but grace and nothing but goodness and nothing but joy that's waiting for us, that he won for us, that he gifts to us that we didn't earn. And so I just wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see them through the lens of entitlement. I wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see those things through the lens of entitlement. When we can just stop for a second and acknowledge, yeah, I don't deserve mercy. That's not part of the deal. God chooses to show me mercy because he loves me. What will it look like if we take for a second? In a few minutes we're going to sing that song that has the line, I see the evidence of your goodness all around me. What would happen if we would look around at all the goodness in our life that's a gift from God and acknowledge that, man, we live inside of a gift parade. God has given us countless goodness and countless grace. He lavishes it upon us. His mercies are new every morning because we require them every morning. Let's this morning be grateful for God's grace and for God's mercy. Let's see them fresh and new, not through the lens of entitlement that blinds us to the grandeur of his generosity, but through the lens of humility that helps us see his grace and mercy for what they are. And let's be humbly blown away by those things. So sing along as we sing or sit and listen as we sing. But in light of God's grace and mercy, let's praise him together this morning.

Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in this way. I am excited for the fifth part in our series called Things You Should Know, where we're looking through things in Scripture or that come up in church or in Christendom that we are familiar with, we've heard of before, but maybe we don't know how to explain or maybe it hasn't been discussed or maybe we're just too far down the rabbit hole of faith to raise our hand and ask about these things to get some clarity. And so what we wanted to do, so that you didn't have to ask those embarrassing questions in small groups, is take five weeks here at the beginning of the year and talk through some of these topics that we may have questions about, because we don't really discuss them all the time. This morning, I wanted us to look at grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are two things that we see come up in Scripture a lot. We're going to look at Scripture in a little bit to see how replete it is with references to God's grace and God's mercy. And we sing songs about them. We certainly know about them. We've heard about them. The name of the church is Grace, for crying out loud. But I wonder how many of us would be confident in whatever your working definition of grace is. I wonder how many of us would be confident understanding mercy or explaining it to our kids if they heard those words and said, hey, what does that mean? How many of you would feel comfortable going, I got this, I'm going to knock this out of the park? If I asked those of us listening and watching, hey, could you explain grace and mercy to the church? Could I get you to come in one Sunday morning, I'm just going to bring you up on stage, and you tell the good people of grace what the name of the church really means. Now, I have no doubt in our church, we would do a good job. There would be, I think, a myriad answers across a wide range of definitions using a lot of unnecessary words that would be mostly right. But I think it's worth it as a church to take some time and define these words in a simple way and understand what grace and mercy really are. Because when we understand God's grace and God's mercy towards us, I think that we can't help but want to respond in exuberant praise. I think when we really understand what's going on with grace and mercy, when we really properly understand those two characteristics of God, that it inspires within us a response of gratitude, and that gratitude manifests joy, and it ought to make us want to leap out of our skin and praise our good God. Which is why we've positioned the sermon at the beginning of the service this week, and we're going to transition right into worship as I wrap up the sermon. Because I wanted to give you guys a chance to respond to the reality of God's grace and mercy. So with that in mind, and I would also say, for those of you who are listening to this or me, not on Sunday morning, if you're catching up later in the day, if you're listening on a podcast in the car or on a walk or something like that, as you listen to my voice right now, I would encourage you, plan to listen to some praise and worship music on your own at the end of this sermon. Just go ahead and budget some time in your head to listen to two or three songs or just have it playing in the car and allow yourself to respond to what's shared here this morning. But with that preamble, I wanted to jump right in to defining these words for us so we have a working definition here at Grace. So mercy, the way I understand it, is simply when we do not get what we deserve. Mercy is when we do not get something that we deserve. When our actions or our attitude or our behavior warrants punishment, something punitive, or just some natural consequences, and we don't receive those consequences, we don't receive the punishment that we deserve, when we've earned some trouble and we don't get into that trouble, that's mercy. So mercy is simply when we don't get something that we do deserve. Think of it this way. Pretend you've got a 16-year-old son. He's just got a new car. He's got the keys. And part of the deal with having the freedom to drive is that there's a curfew. And his very first time out, he goes out with his buddies and he breaks a curfew. And he understands that you guys have set up these rules that if you go and you break curfew, when you come back, we're going to take your car keys for a week. That's the deal. All right? So he gets back, he's broken curfew, and what he deserves is for you to take his car keys. And instead you say, you know what? I hope that you remember this. I want to forgive you. I'm not going to hold this against you. Go into bed. I'm not going to take your car keys. Right? That's mercy. He does not get a punishment that he does deserve. He doesn't get the consequences that his behaviors warrant. You just showed your son mercy. That's what that is. So mercy is when we do not get something that we do deserve. Grace, conversely, is when we do get something that we don't deserve. Grace is when we get a special favor or a blessing that we did not earn, that our behavior does not warrant. So we go back to the 16-year-old kid. You've forgiven him and you've sent him to his room, go to bed. I'm not going to take your keys. You can continue to have that freedom. You deserve that punishment, but I'm not going to give it to you. But grace is this. Maybe part of the agreement with your son is if he's going to have the freedom of driving, then he has to be responsible and earn his own gas money, which is a pretty fair driving arrangement across, I think, all families. That's a pretty typical arrangement. You're going to have a car, you've got to pay for your gas money. And because you love him, and because you want him to be blessed, and because it seems like he felt particularly bad about breaking curfew, not only do you send him to bed without taking his keys, but then after he's gone, you take his car and you sneak over to the gas station and you fill that thing all the way up for him. And you leave it there as a surprise the next morning. That's grace. Grace is the full gas tank that he doesn't deserve. He just broke the rules, man. He doesn't deserve that at all. He doesn't deserve any special favors. But because you love him, because you're a good parent, you fill up his gas tank. That's grace, right? And it's important that we understand these concepts because they are all over Scripture. Scripture shows us over and over again that God shows us mercy and that God shows us grace. I went through this week and just kind of looked at some of the passages, and I wanted you to see a few of them. So I'm going to read them kind of machine gun style real quick here. There's going to be three in a row for mercy, and then we're going to talk about these. But just look what Scripture has to say about mercy. I love this one in James. This is just a snippet of the verse, but it's a simple phrase. James writes that mercy triumphs over judgment. And then on in Lamentations, back in the Old Testament, the scriptures say, And then finally, Paul writes in Ephesians, What we see in those verses very clearly is that God's mercy is the forgiveness of our sins. God's mercy to us is forgiving our sins, is not giving us the just punishment that we deserve for our sins. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but when we sin, it is offensive to Creator God. When we sin, we take up arms in a violent insurrection against God's domain in the universe. Last week, we talked about Satan, and we talked about his fundamental sin that is all of our fundamental sins, which is to look at God and to say, you're supposed to be up there. You're supposed to be the authority figure, but I don't want that to be true in my life, so I'm going to be my own authority figure. When we sin, when we choose something that is outside of God's will, what we're saying to God is, I don't accept your authority in my life. You're not the boss of me. I'm the boss of me. You don't make my decisions. I make my decisions. You see, when we sin, it is an active rebellion against the way that God created us. God is the creator. We are the created. I'm firmly convinced, and I've said it before, that that's why Genesis starts the way it does. The very first words in the Bible are, in the beginning, God created. It establishes that relationship, creator, creation. In charge, subservient. And when we sin, we go, I don't like that you're in charge. I want to be in charge. And we rebel against God. And God sent his son in light of that rebellion to make a path back to him so that we could spend eternity with him. And God says, when we sin, listen, you can't spend eternity with me anymore. You can't do it. You're imperfect. You've offended me. You violated the terms of the agreement. I am taking your keys. And then God sends his son to make a way for us to go to heaven anyways, for us to spend eternity with him anyways. And what do we do? We trample on that. We sin again. We demand forgiveness again. And I'm not sure that we stop and realize the miracle of God's mercy, the miracle of his forgiveness. When we do, that phrase in James, mercy triumphs over judgment, becomes really amazing. We deserve judgment. We broke the rules. He should take our keys. But he doesn't because our God chooses mercy and mercy triumphs over judgment. Jesus tells Peter, when Peter says, how many times should you forgive someone when they wrong you? Jesus says, 70 times seven. As many times as they wrong you, show them mercy. It's in his very nature to do this. Even though we are involved in a rebellious insurrection against Creator God, He looks at us in all of our offense. And for many of us, we're not talking about ignorant sin here. We're not talking about this thing that we did and now we realize, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be doing that. Now that I'm acquainted with Scripture, I know better. I'm talking about the willful sin that you and I commit every week, every day. Who am I kidding? That's offensive to Creator God. And yet he shows us mercy because lamentation says his mercies are new every morning. Every day requires more of God's forgiveness. Every day we break curfew and every day he gives us mercy for that. He withholds the punishment from us that we do deserve. He withholds the separation from us that we do deserve, the damnation from us that we do deserve. That's God's mercy. But it gets better because I think God's grace adds another layer on top of that that's even more remarkable. Look at what Scripture says about God's grace, just two verses really quickly. In Ephesians, Paul writes, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. And then on in Romans he writes, and we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So mercy forgives us. God's mercy forgives us, but God's grace restores us. You see? God's mercy says, you're forgiven. I know you messed up. I know you broke curfew. You're forgiven. But then God's grace says, and I've made a way for you to be in my family. He fills up the tank. God's mercy says, I no longer hold your sins against you. God's grace says, because of that, I sent my son to die for you, and now you have a seat at my table etern, Do you understand? God's mercy says we messed up, we've offended Creator God, we've willfully sinned, and we've offended Him, and we deserve punishment, and He says, I'm not going to punish you. And He could stop there. He could say, I'm not going to punish you, I'm not going to punish you this one time for breaking curfew, but don't mess up anymore. And then if we mess up again, then we're done. We're toast. That's it. But in his grace and in his goodness, he doesn't stop at forgiveness. He stops at restoration. Not only are you forgiven, but now here, have a seat at my table. Not only are you forgiven, but now you are an adopted son or daughter of the king. You are an heir to the universal throne. Not only am I not going to hold it against you, not only am I going to clothe you in the righteousness ofal son. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I'm about to give you the quickest, worst rendition of it ever. All right. I've preached about this before. I can do a better job than this, but for the sake of time, we're going to look at some essential details. The parable of the prodigal son goes like this. There's a father who's wealthy and he has two sons. And one of those sons, the younger one, looks at the dad and he says, you know what? I really just want your stuff. I don't want you. Can you just go ahead and give me my inheritance? I'd rather you be dead anyway. Just give me my money so that I can live how I want. And that father, in his goodness, for reasons I don't understand, says, okay, fine, and gives him the money. And the son goes off into the city and he spends it on living in ways that just feed his appetites and his lusts. And he runs out of money. He spends it in totally dishonorable ways. He comes to the end of it. Everybody leaves him. He can't find a job. He ends up eating slop on a pig farm. And one day the Bible says he comes to his senses in this really poignant moment and he decides, I'm going to go back to my dad's house. But he works out this speech in his head where he's going to go back and he's going to say, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell him, can you just please forgive me and let me be your servant? I don't deserve to be your son anymore. What I've done is too offensive. Will you please just let me be your servant? Because they live better than I do right now. And so he heads home with this speech in mind, which, by the way, it's a pretty fair speech, right? Dude took his dad's money, went off and spent it however he wanted to, wasted it on debaucherous things, and then comes back with his hat in his hand. Yeah, you're darn right he doesn't deserve to be a son anymore. He should live as a servant, at least for a few years, right? But he goes back, and the father sees him from a long way off and runs out to greet him. And the son starts in with his speech, dad, I'm so sorry, I don't deserve, yada, yada, yada. And the dad shuts him up right away, flings his arms around him and hugs him. And in that moment, the son knows that he's forgiven, that his father's not going to hold those things against him. That's mercy. But he doesn't stop there. He takes the ring, the signet of the family, and he puts it on his son's finger. And he takes the robe and he takes the slippers and he puts those on the son. And then he goes and he kills the fattened calf, the really good stuff. And he throws a big, huge party. And he says, my son is back, and he welcomes him right back into the family, which he didn't have to do, and his behavior didn't warrant. It's the perfect picture of the mercy and the grace that God offers us. We're the prodigals. We run away and make willful decisions to offend our God, to throw off his authority in our life and be our own authority. And then at some point or another, we come back, hat in hand, apologetic, I'm so sorry. And he forgives us. But he doesn't just forgive us. He restores us. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not mad at you. Come here. You would expect that he would say, you're forgiven. Get away from me. I need a minute. That's not what he does. He says, you're forgiven. And then he hugs us. And then he sends his son, his only son, whom he loves, who was perfect, who never offended him, to die for you and for me. He gave us that gift. Do you understand? We don't deserve the grace of Jesus. We don't deserve that. We didn't earn it. Our behavior doesn't warrant it. Nowhere in the scripture is there a contract that says when we break the law and offend Almighty God that he owes us the death of his son? That's not the deal. But he does it anyways. That's grace. And in light of that, the mercy of forgiveness and the grace of restoration, we should want to exuberantly praise our God. But I'm also aware of the fact that many of us, as we listen to this, if you look at the ends of the spectrum of, Nick, you better shut up so I can start praising God right now. I'm about to jump out of my skin. And then, oh, okay, that's cool. I think I understand grace and mercy a little bit better now. A lot of us are closer to this end. A lot of us have responded in our heads and in our hearts to what I just said in that way. Oh, okay, yeah, I get it. I understand that better. That's good. Thank you. And it makes me wonder, me included, why we're on that end of the spectrum. And as I thought about that this week, I could only include that it's probably because we're all entitled brats. We're probably on that end of the spectrum because there's a very good chance that the two to three hundred adults I'm talking to right now are really just entitled brats. Here's what I mean. I just want to give you a picture of my daughter's life. I have a daughter named Lily. She just recently turned five. This is her last six weeks. Before you get offended at me calling you an entitled brat, which I did just do, just hear me out. Lily's last six weeks have been unbelievable. She is, through no fault of her own, incredibly entitled now. I ran this by Jen. She's not happy I'm saying this, but we've accepted that it's true. Here's what's happened with her. In December, we as a family spent basically the month down in Athens, Georgia with Jen's family as her dad transitioned into eternity. And in doing that, with Christmas coming up, there are people here in Raleigh who love us and who love Lily and wanted to make sure that Lily got a gift. So a couple times I would come back to Raleigh to take care of some church stuff, and there would be packages waiting on me at the house. I had, I literally, the first time I came back, this is embarrassing, we had some neighbors collecting our mail for us. I had to get a wheelbarrow and go down to their house and fill it up with all the stuff that was waiting on us. And then they pulled a wagon and we unloaded it at my house. That was Christmas arriving at the Rector's. That's us. And other people had like dropped things off at the door. So now I go home, I'm getting these gifts. I take them back to Lily, who is now opening these gifts like, hey, all these people got you these things. Okay, great, thank you. So she's opening them. We're trying to do the video with excitement. She's trying to fan excitement, but she's four at the time. She's not really good at this yet. She doesn't know that's part of the deal when you get gifts. So she's already getting gifts in early December. I made another trip back. There's more stuff waiting. I bring that back. I go ahead and give that to her because we know that there's Christmas coming. We don't want to mute those things. Then at Jen's house, because of things going on, we did early Christmas with her dad. So all the grandkids go in and she's now opening three or four other gifts from her grandparents. Thank you for these and these and these. Then Christmas Eve, we have real Christmas with Jen's family and she gets more gifts. Then the next day we go to my family's house and she gets more gifts, right, on Christmas. And so now the situation in a state that we don't even live in is at my parents' house, there's a pile of gifts that's too big to carry back to Jen's parents' house. So we just have to leave it there for a second. At Jen's parents' house, she has gifts strewn across three stories of a home, including inside a princess room that her grandfather made for her while he still could that she gets to sleep in, complete with lit teepee, okay? This is her life. There's a mess of toys there. There's some on the main floor. There's a basement that she's adopted as a playroom. And then there's toys in the playroom that my parents have for her. And then she comes back. We don't get back until early January, right? When we get back, there's more gifts waiting on her because people at the church love her and are so good to us. And then her birthday's on January 15th. So on January 15th, prior to that, more gifts are showing up at the house. She's opening them up. She lives in a, in a, like a dang gift parade. It's a totally normal thing for her to come home and open up to like, hey, these two things came for you today. And she just opens it up like they're nothing. Then on her birthday, the neighborhood kids come over and give her stuff she doesn't need in exchange for cake that they don't need. And then the next day we have church drive by where the families come through and they hand her more stuff that she doesn't need. And we wave at them in the freezing cold, and we just have so much junk all over our house. And to this child, it's totally normal. She has no idea that she lives inside of a gift parade. They just show up every day. And what Jen and I have realized is she's entitled. Now, I will say this. She is not a brat. She's not that. That word was for dramatic effect only. She's sweet and kind and loving, but she has no capacity to show the proper gratitude for all the gifts that she's been getting because to her it's a totally normal thing. It's embarrassing to me how much people love us and love her. And I don't know what I'm going to do as a dad. I've literally tried to talk Jen into when somebody gives us a gift, let's put it in a room somewhere. And then as she is good, if she has a good week, then we'll give her one of the gifts from the gift room, right? To try to help her earn it. I don't know exactly how to solve this. I would imagine that we're not on an island with this issue. But the reality of my daughter's life is she's entitled. And she doesn't know it. We're going to try to correct it. But what I understand is that that entitlement blinds her to what generosity really is. That entitlement works to mute her joy because she sees everything through the lens of this is normal. I deserve this. If I ask for a thing, I get the thing. This is how life goes. And she has no reason to believe that that's not how life goes. She's only barely five, and she's loved. See, here's the thing. I think it's great. I'm happy for her. I'm floored by the love that our family experiences. I'm grateful that she gets to live a life like that. But she has no perspective on how grateful she should really be. Because again, her entitlement blinds her to the generosity around her and serves to mute her joy that she should have when she receives a gift. I bring that up because I believe that you and I live in a stinking gift parade and we just don't know it. We live in parades of God's goodness and we don't see it. All of our life, if we grew up in church, as soon as you're involved in church, at some point or another, you're going to hear, you've sinned and you've offended Almighty God. And then as soon as that is said to help us feel better, as a capstone to it, you've sinned and offended Almighty God, but God offers us mercy, so you're good. Jesus died on the cross for your sins, so you're fine. You've sinned, you don't get to spend eternity with heaven, but God offers us mercy and sends his son to die for us, so you're forgiven. So we never have to sit in the reality of what our sin really warrants. We never have to sit under the weight of, I have sinned, I have chosen my authority over God's authority, and that has earned me eternal separation from him. We don't have to sit in that for more than 30 seconds before the pastor comes back and says, but God died for you, so we have mercy. We never stop to think that we don't deserve mercy. We never stop to consider that these gifts don't have to keep showing up at my house. We've never done the math to understand that God doesn't owe you forgiveness. Do you understand? He doesn't owe it to you. He created you. He set you on the planet. He said, these are the rules. This is how you can please me. And we've all at different points in our life said, you know, I'm not really that interested in pleasing you. He doesn't owe us forgiveness for that. We walk around like we're entitled to it. We walk around like we deserve it. We walk around like, listen, the deal should be, God, I'm going to mess up a couple times. If you could let some people kill your son, that seems pretty fair. Grace, we are not owed mercy. That's nowhere in the contract. You say, yeah, but God is love. God forgives. He is love. He does forgive. He's also just. And what we deserve is separation from the God that we've offended. But because mercy triumphs over judgment, and because His mercies are new every morning, he withholds that judgment from us and he offers us forgiveness. He offers us a mercy that we are not owed and that we do not deserve. Yet we are so familiar with it and we sing songs about it so often and we count on it and take it for granted so regularly that sometimes we treat mercy like another doll that someone handed us out the window that, yeah, of course I get this. It's my birthday. This is what we do. And our entitlement blinds us to the grandeur and the majesty of God's mercy. Not to mention the graces that we don't see. Grace is a goodness that we get that we have not earned. Grace is God's favor on our life that doesn't warrant it. We just walked through the really, and we're in the middle of the really difficult season of losing Jen's dad. His name was John. Towards the end of John's life, we found out we were pregnant with a boy that we're going to name John. What grace from God. What grace from God that he says, listen, everybody has to go. As appointed to man wants to die. Everyone's going to have to walk this path. And now it's John's turn to walk this path. But because I love you and because you're good and because you're my child, you're good because I made you good. Here's another John for you to love. That's grace. We don't deserve that. We didn't warrant that. Do you understand that the goodness in your life is grace? It's God's goodness in your life that when you get the new car and you drive it down the road and it smells nice and it looks nice and you're real proud of yourself and it makes us feel like we arrived, that happiness, that moment, that's God's grace. When we sit in our living room and our kids are back from college and we watch our grandkids scurry around or we see their joy and a gift that we were able to buy them, like that's God's grace. When we sit around with our friends and we laugh and we have a good night and we go home and we feel warm, that's God's grace. Your gifts and talents that got you where you are, those are gifts from God that are his grace. His grace is all over our lives. And if we would just stop and look around and acknowledge that we're in a dang gift parade, I think we would be blown away by God's goodness. It reminds me of one of my favorite verses in John, where he simply writes, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, out of the goodness of his heart, we have all received grace upon grace. He just lavishes them upon us because he's a good father and he likes to see you happy. He likes it when you cry tears of joy. He likes the moments that you share with your husband or your wife or your friend or your parents or your kids. He likes those sweet moments. He designs those for you. He doesn't just forgive you. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not going to hold your sins against you, but he fills up your tank with gas every day over and over from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. He doesn't just forgive you. He sends his son to die for you and he restores you and he welcomes you into his house to sit at his table. And these little snippets of grace are just glimpses into eternity where it's nothing but grace and nothing but goodness and nothing but joy that's waiting for us, that he won for us, that he gifts to us that we didn't earn. And so I just wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see them through the lens of entitlement. I wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see those things through the lens of entitlement. When we can just stop for a second and acknowledge, yeah, I don't deserve mercy. That's not part of the deal. God chooses to show me mercy because he loves me. What will it look like if we take for a second? In a few minutes we're going to sing that song that has the line, I see the evidence of your goodness all around me. What would happen if we would look around at all the goodness in our life that's a gift from God and acknowledge that, man, we live inside of a gift parade. God has given us countless goodness and countless grace. He lavishes it upon us. His mercies are new every morning because we require them every morning. Let's this morning be grateful for God's grace and for God's mercy. Let's see them fresh and new, not through the lens of entitlement that blinds us to the grandeur of his generosity, but through the lens of humility that helps us see his grace and mercy for what they are. And let's be humbly blown away by those things. So sing along as we sing or sit and listen as we sing. But in light of God's grace and mercy, let's praise him together this morning.

All right, good morning, everyone. As Steve said, my name is Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace. And before I get started, not for nothing, when Aaron announced that we're starting kids back, your woos were very weak. So, I mean, I was just like, just sitting and just listening to a lot of weak woos. So you owe Aaron a much more hearty woo after the service is over. That's all I have to say. But I'm thrilled to be able to be up here this morning. I'm thrilled to be able to go through James as we are doing so as a church. I'm thankful to Nate who, you know, since I'm the student pastor, kind of tossed up the softball of being able to have the opportunity to talk about taming the tongue. I mean, certainly a very easy thing to be discussing and going through. Obviously, I'm kidding. But that's kind of as is the way of James. This morning, we're going to be going through James 3, mostly focusing on verses 3 through 8. If you have your Bible or if there's a Bible in front of you, I would love for you to grab that. I would love for you to go ahead and open up to that section as that is where we are going to be parked for this morning. As the video talked about last weekend that we watched in our introduction to James, the Bible Project put it as, James is a beautifully crafted punch to the gut. And I hate to tell you, but this is certainly no different. As we get into this, it's going to be pretty overwhelming to read, but I think we're going to get through it. So hopefully we can get through it together. Let me see some thumbs up. Yeah, good, good. Glad to hear it. Glad to hear you're with me. Let's go ahead and jump in. We're going to start with verse 3. Go all the way through verse 8 of James chapter 3. When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one's life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. So I'm just going to let us all take a quick collective breath as we just read all of those verses together. That is certainly strong language. Those are certainly incredibly powerful images basically saying that the tongue is like the small bit inside of a horse that steers the horse and makes it turn anywhere you want it to go. That it's the rudder, the tiny rudder on a ship that regardless of wind, regardless of sea, you can change the direction of an entire ship with this small rudder. It's like a small spark that creates a giant forest fire that it can corrupt every part of us and it can corrupt anyone else who's around to get burned. And it's funny because these are beautiful illustrations, but they're pretty heightened. They're pretty strong, but as I read them, and the first time that I read through this, my response wasn't, man, James is wilding out right now. My response was, yes, certainly this is a lot, but I don't see any hyperbole here. As I read that, I kind of just shrugged, nodded my head and said, yeah, he's right. The tongue has immense and incredible power to do evil. I imagine that you guys probably feel the same way as I just got done reading and as you just got done reading along with me. I bet that none of you were like, okay, that seems a little bit intense. I can almost guarantee you everyone in here fully agrees with everything he just said. Why? Because we've experienced it. We've experienced someone using just a few words to completely light us on fire. We've experienced being completely broken down to our core because of a simple phrase uttered to us. Even more of a bummer, we know we've done it to other people. That in a moment of frustration, in a moment of a lack of willpower, whatever it may be, we slip up, we say something that you probably have those things that ring back in your mind right now that you still regret that you said five years ago. The author William Barclay, who wrote a commentary on James, puts it this way. He says, Once again, that's a big and that's a bold claim, but I don't see any lies there. The sin that comes out of our mouth is something that can have dire consequences, not only in that moment, but for years to come. And as he starts it, and as I think is so beautifully put, there is no sin into which is easier to fall, right? Because when we're wronged, when we're angry, when we're upset, when something happens to us, we want, and so often our knee-jerk reaction is to respond. Setting ablaze a large fire by a small spark. So what do we do? I mean, with how heightened this language, with how heightened this diction is, it feels like the only thing that we could possibly do is just stop talking altogether, right? The classic, if my tongue causes me to sin, let me cut it off. And I'm going to walk over here, as Nate has taught me, I'm going to go over here to say that while this is certainly not the purpose and the point of what I'm talking about, I do believe and I do think that there is very distinct and very clear merit and wisdom that comes from all human beings, but especially believers, knowing when to respond in silence, when to simply be quiet, when to simply hold their tongue and respond in listening as opposed to responding with being the first to say something. I don't say that to put you guys on blast. I say that to put myself on blast. If you look around and find anyone who I've ever been in a small group with or who's ever sat in a staff meeting with me, you will see emphatic nodding because Kyle is at the top of that list of people slash believers who needs to learn sometimes how to just be quiet. Thank you for that amen in the back. I love being made to feel great by my fellow staff members. But obviously we can't do that, right? Obviously we can't stop talking, we can't just cut out our tongues because that would hurt. But obvious issues of practicality aside, there's other issues with that. There's other issues with simply stopping and abstaining from talking. The main one is that the tongue's immense power isn't limited to evil, but also to do substantial good. Paul reminds us of this in Ephesians 4.29 as he writes, What Paul encourages us to do here and is all through Scripture. Every writer and the Lord himself and Jesus, they are encouraging us not simply to give up our evil discussions and our evil talking, but instead to replace those with good. Instead to replace those with speaking life and speaking love and speaking encouragement to any and every one of us around, and that doesn't happen if we just stop talking. The same commentator, William Barclay, puts it this way. He says, I'll say that again. Abstention from anything is never a complete substitute for control in its use. Simply abstaining from speaking isn't enough. The goal is not to be quiet. The goal is to be able to control the things that come out of our mouth so that not only are we getting rid of the evil that comes out of our mouths, but we are replacing it with good and with love and with all great things. So the question obviously is how? Because I know, I'm 100% certain that every person in this room, every person watching at home, every person wherever you are, has done just as I've tried to do in trying to do it, in trying to tame the tongue, in trying my very hardest to hold back the things that I'm feeling and instead to change those and to still show love to people, still encouraging people even when I don't want to. Trying my best to speak humility even though I feel a sense of arrogance or ego. Trying my best to live by the old saying of if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. But what happens? We try to be silent or we try to replace our speech. We try to replace and hold back how we actually feel to instead be uplifting and encouraging, instead being loving. And that just builds up and it erodes our insides, it erodes our heart. And then at some point, whether it be the person who's actually causing you anger and frustration, or whether it just be the first person to look at you wrong that you just blow up on, right? Small words, huge fires. So what do we do? James in verse 8 literally says, no human being can tame the tongue. It would be incredibly unwise for me to stand up here and try to argue to you guys that he's wrong. It'd be unwise for me to say, yeah, you're the half-brother of Jesus, you wrote James, which is in the Bible, but I think, you know, like, I'm Kyle, I know more. But, what I will argue is I think that this statement, this claim that he makes is a bit more nuanced than how it sounds by simply reading it once. Growing up, if me, if myself, my brother, and my dad were all riding together in my dad's car, we were almost always listening to one of two cassette tapes. The first, License to Ill by the Beastie Boys. I think it probably won't surprise you that that's not the one that we're going to focus on this morning. We can talk about that afterwards. I'll pass you the mic and you can show me what you got. The other, probably the exact opposite, I guess, was this old sermon from 1995 by this pastor named Tony Evans that he gave at some men's conference. I'm sure anyone who's sitting here listening to me run my mouth, especially if you've never heard a sermon before today or like why in the world would anyone ever want to re-listen to a sermon? But I can assure you that this is a sermon to be listened to. This is a sermon to get excited about. Tony Evans has a way with illustrations and a way with both telling stories and connecting stories to this greater and larger point that I think is unparalleled and unmatched. This sermon is as entertaining as it is powerful. And as a three-year-old child, I'm sitting in this car just quoting along with Tony Evans this sermon. I'm hyping it up a lot. Reach out to me and I'll send it to you because I promise you I will not do this justice. But as I went through this and as I was preparing, I kept coming back to this story that Tony Evans opens his sermon by telling. The story starts off by him having a problem in his bedroom because he's got a crack in the wall of his bedroom. Can I get an aww? Yeah, that's a bummer, right? But hey, you know, easy fix. He reaches out to a painter. The painter comes. He says, my man, I've got a crack in the bedroom. Can you fix it? He said, yeah, of course. He does what he does to fix a crack in the wall. He replasters it. He paints it. It's all good. Beautiful wall. Zero cracks available. Everything's great. Pays him along the way. A month later, guess who's back? The crack. The crack is back. And so as he so eloquently puts it, somewhat evangelically ticked off, he calls the painter back. He says, sir, the crack is back. Can you please come fix it? So he apologizes. I'm sorry. I'll come and fix it. He goes, does his thing, replasters, paints it. Good to go. Month and a half goes by and the crack reappears. As he says, this time, this crack that is in the wall has been visited by all of its nieces and nephews. There are now a family of cracks living on his walls. So out of frustration, he goes, okay, clearly this painter has no clue what he's doing. Let me get another one. Calls another one. He's like, I've got cracks in my walls. Can you please come and fix it? The guy comes. He takes a look at the wall. He looks at him. He says, I can't help you. And he's like, sir, what do you mean you can't help me? You're a painter. He goes, yeah, but the problem is you don't have a problem with cracks in your wall. And to which Tony replies, to which Tony looks up quietly at the cracks in his walls. And as he says, he looks back at the crack standing in front of him, telling him he doesn't have a problem with cracks in his walls. And he says, sir, you see cracks. I see cracks. All God's children see cracks. How are you going to tell me I don't have a problem with cracks on my walls? And he says, I can fix this. I can replaster your wall. I can make it to where you don't have any cracks on your wall, but the problem is not with your walls. The problem is not with cracks. The problem is you have a shifting foundation. And until you fix your foundation, you will always be fixing cracks in your walls. Until you fix your foundation, you will always be fixing cracks in your walls. When it comes to our tongue, we try so hard. We try to edit our language. We try to replace how we feel with what we say. We try so hard to bury all of that down so that we can be as kind and as godly as possible when we have interactions and when we have conversations. We hold back our actual thoughts and our feelings. But the problem is that we don't have a problem with our tongue. And when we think we do, it's never going to be eradicated. You see, taming the tongue has nothing to do with the tongue. The tongue is simply a vehicle for the heart to speak. We attempt to tame our tongue through our own willpower and we focus so much on what comes out. We focus on the outside. We focus on the words that leave our mouths when our foundation, our hearts, are corrupted. If our hearts are harboring ill will, if they're harboring hatred, helplessness, negativity, arrogance, impatience, curses, and or doubts, we don't have a willpower that is strong enough to prevent the tongue from slipping up and expressing these things. If that evil rests inside of our hearts, at some point it's going to make its way out of our mouths. And until our hearts begin to reflect God's heart, we will never be able to control our tongues. And so the goal becomes our hearts. We have to fix our hearts or we can never fix our tongues. Taming the tongue is no longer about our speech. It's not about changing your speech. It's about allowing God to change our hearts. It's about allowing God to mold our hearts. It's about allowing Christ to come and to shape our hearts into what it should be. We give our hearts to Christ. We learn, we realize, and we continue to grow in our joyful understanding of the fact that God created every one of us. And even though we sin, even though we deserve hell, we deserve eternity in hell, God sends his perfect son to live and then to die in our place. All so that we can live forever with him in a relationship with him, our hearts are changed. And as our hearts are changed, they continue to be molded as we realize that this gospel truth that God created us, that God sent his son to die for me. That same gospel truth is also true of literally every single person you will ever make contact with. In the same way God created you, in the same way God loves you, in the same way that Christ died for you, he also did all of those things for every single person you will ever interact with. And when we start to look at people that way, as God's children, as our hearts are being molded into seeing people the way that God sees them, our tongues are going to respond in kind. No pun intended, because I think our tongues are going to also respond with much more kindness. And as we continue to read through the Gospels and read through Jesus's life and with the memory and with the knowledge that Jesus not only died for us, but he lived on earth to give us a measure of this is what it should look like for you to live. This is how you glorify God through your language. This is how you glorify God with the way that you see and the way that you treat people with the openness and with the grace that you show people and the love that you show each and every person. And our goal becomes just trying to be more Christ-like. And that starts at the heart. And it all culminates with constant prayer. As Nate talked about, what, two or three weeks ago, that we continue to keep God at the center of our hearts and we continue to think through and pray with him and have him on our minds, meditating in scripture and meditating in prayer so that God is always at the forefront because if God is at the forefront of our hearts and if he is at the forefront of our minds, I think it means we are going to speak differently. And when we allow God to change and to mold and to shape our hearts in this way, we are able to replace both in our hearts and in our speech, ill will and hatred with love, helplessness with hope, negativity with positivity, arrogance with humility, impatience with patience, curses with blessings, and doubt with faith. And most importantly, when our hearts have been transformed by the gospel of Christ, our tongues have no choice but to rejoice and to proclaim that gospel. Will you pray with me? Lord, I pray that as we try to glorify you in our words, in our actions, as we try to glorify you through our prayers to you, but God, also our words and our prayers, our words and just the way that we interact with any and everyone. The way we talk to people, the way that we talk about people, the way that we talk about ourselves. Lord, I pray that we put aside and we stop worrying about and we stop trying to fix our tongues by simply our own power and our own willpower because, God, we know it's never going to work. God, instead, allow us to come to you. Allow your heart to shape, mold, impact our hearts, God. Allow our hearts to look more like yours so that our speech can do the same. We love you. Amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. As Steve said, my name is Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace. And before I get started, not for nothing, when Aaron announced that we're starting kids back, your woos were very weak. So, I mean, I was just like, just sitting and just listening to a lot of weak woos. So you owe Aaron a much more hearty woo after the service is over. That's all I have to say. But I'm thrilled to be able to be up here this morning. I'm thrilled to be able to go through James as we are doing so as a church. I'm thankful to Nate who, you know, since I'm the student pastor, kind of tossed up the softball of being able to have the opportunity to talk about taming the tongue. I mean, certainly a very easy thing to be discussing and going through. Obviously, I'm kidding. But that's kind of as is the way of James. This morning, we're going to be going through James 3, mostly focusing on verses 3 through 8. If you have your Bible or if there's a Bible in front of you, I would love for you to grab that. I would love for you to go ahead and open up to that section as that is where we are going to be parked for this morning. As the video talked about last weekend that we watched in our introduction to James, the Bible Project put it as, James is a beautifully crafted punch to the gut. And I hate to tell you, but this is certainly no different. As we get into this, it's going to be pretty overwhelming to read, but I think we're going to get through it. So hopefully we can get through it together. Let me see some thumbs up. Yeah, good, good. Glad to hear it. Glad to hear you're with me. Let's go ahead and jump in. We're going to start with verse 3. Go all the way through verse 8 of James chapter 3. When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one's life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. So I'm just going to let us all take a quick collective breath as we just read all of those verses together. That is certainly strong language. Those are certainly incredibly powerful images basically saying that the tongue is like the small bit inside of a horse that steers the horse and makes it turn anywhere you want it to go. That it's the rudder, the tiny rudder on a ship that regardless of wind, regardless of sea, you can change the direction of an entire ship with this small rudder. It's like a small spark that creates a giant forest fire that it can corrupt every part of us and it can corrupt anyone else who's around to get burned. And it's funny because these are beautiful illustrations, but they're pretty heightened. They're pretty strong, but as I read them, and the first time that I read through this, my response wasn't, man, James is wilding out right now. My response was, yes, certainly this is a lot, but I don't see any hyperbole here. As I read that, I kind of just shrugged, nodded my head and said, yeah, he's right. The tongue has immense and incredible power to do evil. I imagine that you guys probably feel the same way as I just got done reading and as you just got done reading along with me. I bet that none of you were like, okay, that seems a little bit intense. I can almost guarantee you everyone in here fully agrees with everything he just said. Why? Because we've experienced it. We've experienced someone using just a few words to completely light us on fire. We've experienced being completely broken down to our core because of a simple phrase uttered to us. Even more of a bummer, we know we've done it to other people. That in a moment of frustration, in a moment of a lack of willpower, whatever it may be, we slip up, we say something that you probably have those things that ring back in your mind right now that you still regret that you said five years ago. The author William Barclay, who wrote a commentary on James, puts it this way. He says, Once again, that's a big and that's a bold claim, but I don't see any lies there. The sin that comes out of our mouth is something that can have dire consequences, not only in that moment, but for years to come. And as he starts it, and as I think is so beautifully put, there is no sin into which is easier to fall, right? Because when we're wronged, when we're angry, when we're upset, when something happens to us, we want, and so often our knee-jerk reaction is to respond. Setting ablaze a large fire by a small spark. So what do we do? I mean, with how heightened this language, with how heightened this diction is, it feels like the only thing that we could possibly do is just stop talking altogether, right? The classic, if my tongue causes me to sin, let me cut it off. And I'm going to walk over here, as Nate has taught me, I'm going to go over here to say that while this is certainly not the purpose and the point of what I'm talking about, I do believe and I do think that there is very distinct and very clear merit and wisdom that comes from all human beings, but especially believers, knowing when to respond in silence, when to simply be quiet, when to simply hold their tongue and respond in listening as opposed to responding with being the first to say something. I don't say that to put you guys on blast. I say that to put myself on blast. If you look around and find anyone who I've ever been in a small group with or who's ever sat in a staff meeting with me, you will see emphatic nodding because Kyle is at the top of that list of people slash believers who needs to learn sometimes how to just be quiet. Thank you for that amen in the back. I love being made to feel great by my fellow staff members. But obviously we can't do that, right? Obviously we can't stop talking, we can't just cut out our tongues because that would hurt. But obvious issues of practicality aside, there's other issues with that. There's other issues with simply stopping and abstaining from talking. The main one is that the tongue's immense power isn't limited to evil, but also to do substantial good. Paul reminds us of this in Ephesians 4.29 as he writes, What Paul encourages us to do here and is all through Scripture. Every writer and the Lord himself and Jesus, they are encouraging us not simply to give up our evil discussions and our evil talking, but instead to replace those with good. Instead to replace those with speaking life and speaking love and speaking encouragement to any and every one of us around, and that doesn't happen if we just stop talking. The same commentator, William Barclay, puts it this way. He says, I'll say that again. Abstention from anything is never a complete substitute for control in its use. Simply abstaining from speaking isn't enough. The goal is not to be quiet. The goal is to be able to control the things that come out of our mouth so that not only are we getting rid of the evil that comes out of our mouths, but we are replacing it with good and with love and with all great things. So the question obviously is how? Because I know, I'm 100% certain that every person in this room, every person watching at home, every person wherever you are, has done just as I've tried to do in trying to do it, in trying to tame the tongue, in trying my very hardest to hold back the things that I'm feeling and instead to change those and to still show love to people, still encouraging people even when I don't want to. Trying my best to speak humility even though I feel a sense of arrogance or ego. Trying my best to live by the old saying of if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. But what happens? We try to be silent or we try to replace our speech. We try to replace and hold back how we actually feel to instead be uplifting and encouraging, instead being loving. And that just builds up and it erodes our insides, it erodes our heart. And then at some point, whether it be the person who's actually causing you anger and frustration, or whether it just be the first person to look at you wrong that you just blow up on, right? Small words, huge fires. So what do we do? James in verse 8 literally says, no human being can tame the tongue. It would be incredibly unwise for me to stand up here and try to argue to you guys that he's wrong. It'd be unwise for me to say, yeah, you're the half-brother of Jesus, you wrote James, which is in the Bible, but I think, you know, like, I'm Kyle, I know more. But, what I will argue is I think that this statement, this claim that he makes is a bit more nuanced than how it sounds by simply reading it once. Growing up, if me, if myself, my brother, and my dad were all riding together in my dad's car, we were almost always listening to one of two cassette tapes. The first, License to Ill by the Beastie Boys. I think it probably won't surprise you that that's not the one that we're going to focus on this morning. We can talk about that afterwards. I'll pass you the mic and you can show me what you got. The other, probably the exact opposite, I guess, was this old sermon from 1995 by this pastor named Tony Evans that he gave at some men's conference. I'm sure anyone who's sitting here listening to me run my mouth, especially if you've never heard a sermon before today or like why in the world would anyone ever want to re-listen to a sermon? But I can assure you that this is a sermon to be listened to. This is a sermon to get excited about. Tony Evans has a way with illustrations and a way with both telling stories and connecting stories to this greater and larger point that I think is unparalleled and unmatched. This sermon is as entertaining as it is powerful. And as a three-year-old child, I'm sitting in this car just quoting along with Tony Evans this sermon. I'm hyping it up a lot. Reach out to me and I'll send it to you because I promise you I will not do this justice. But as I went through this and as I was preparing, I kept coming back to this story that Tony Evans opens his sermon by telling. The story starts off by him having a problem in his bedroom because he's got a crack in the wall of his bedroom. Can I get an aww? Yeah, that's a bummer, right? But hey, you know, easy fix. He reaches out to a painter. The painter comes. He says, my man, I've got a crack in the bedroom. Can you fix it? He said, yeah, of course. He does what he does to fix a crack in the wall. He replasters it. He paints it. It's all good. Beautiful wall. Zero cracks available. Everything's great. Pays him along the way. A month later, guess who's back? The crack. The crack is back. And so as he so eloquently puts it, somewhat evangelically ticked off, he calls the painter back. He says, sir, the crack is back. Can you please come fix it? So he apologizes. I'm sorry. I'll come and fix it. He goes, does his thing, replasters, paints it. Good to go. Month and a half goes by and the crack reappears. As he says, this time, this crack that is in the wall has been visited by all of its nieces and nephews. There are now a family of cracks living on his walls. So out of frustration, he goes, okay, clearly this painter has no clue what he's doing. Let me get another one. Calls another one. He's like, I've got cracks in my walls. Can you please come and fix it? The guy comes. He takes a look at the wall. He looks at him. He says, I can't help you. And he's like, sir, what do you mean you can't help me? You're a painter. He goes, yeah, but the problem is you don't have a problem with cracks in your wall. And to which Tony replies, to which Tony looks up quietly at the cracks in his walls. And as he says, he looks back at the crack standing in front of him, telling him he doesn't have a problem with cracks in his walls. And he says, sir, you see cracks. I see cracks. All God's children see cracks. How are you going to tell me I don't have a problem with cracks on my walls? And he says, I can fix this. I can replaster your wall. I can make it to where you don't have any cracks on your wall, but the problem is not with your walls. The problem is not with cracks. The problem is you have a shifting foundation. And until you fix your foundation, you will always be fixing cracks in your walls. Until you fix your foundation, you will always be fixing cracks in your walls. When it comes to our tongue, we try so hard. We try to edit our language. We try to replace how we feel with what we say. We try so hard to bury all of that down so that we can be as kind and as godly as possible when we have interactions and when we have conversations. We hold back our actual thoughts and our feelings. But the problem is that we don't have a problem with our tongue. And when we think we do, it's never going to be eradicated. You see, taming the tongue has nothing to do with the tongue. The tongue is simply a vehicle for the heart to speak. We attempt to tame our tongue through our own willpower and we focus so much on what comes out. We focus on the outside. We focus on the words that leave our mouths when our foundation, our hearts, are corrupted. If our hearts are harboring ill will, if they're harboring hatred, helplessness, negativity, arrogance, impatience, curses, and or doubts, we don't have a willpower that is strong enough to prevent the tongue from slipping up and expressing these things. If that evil rests inside of our hearts, at some point it's going to make its way out of our mouths. And until our hearts begin to reflect God's heart, we will never be able to control our tongues. And so the goal becomes our hearts. We have to fix our hearts or we can never fix our tongues. Taming the tongue is no longer about our speech. It's not about changing your speech. It's about allowing God to change our hearts. It's about allowing God to mold our hearts. It's about allowing Christ to come and to shape our hearts into what it should be. We give our hearts to Christ. We learn, we realize, and we continue to grow in our joyful understanding of the fact that God created every one of us. And even though we sin, even though we deserve hell, we deserve eternity in hell, God sends his perfect son to live and then to die in our place. All so that we can live forever with him in a relationship with him, our hearts are changed. And as our hearts are changed, they continue to be molded as we realize that this gospel truth that God created us, that God sent his son to die for me. That same gospel truth is also true of literally every single person you will ever make contact with. In the same way God created you, in the same way God loves you, in the same way that Christ died for you, he also did all of those things for every single person you will ever interact with. And when we start to look at people that way, as God's children, as our hearts are being molded into seeing people the way that God sees them, our tongues are going to respond in kind. No pun intended, because I think our tongues are going to also respond with much more kindness. And as we continue to read through the Gospels and read through Jesus's life and with the memory and with the knowledge that Jesus not only died for us, but he lived on earth to give us a measure of this is what it should look like for you to live. This is how you glorify God through your language. This is how you glorify God with the way that you see and the way that you treat people with the openness and with the grace that you show people and the love that you show each and every person. And our goal becomes just trying to be more Christ-like. And that starts at the heart. And it all culminates with constant prayer. As Nate talked about, what, two or three weeks ago, that we continue to keep God at the center of our hearts and we continue to think through and pray with him and have him on our minds, meditating in scripture and meditating in prayer so that God is always at the forefront because if God is at the forefront of our hearts and if he is at the forefront of our minds, I think it means we are going to speak differently. And when we allow God to change and to mold and to shape our hearts in this way, we are able to replace both in our hearts and in our speech, ill will and hatred with love, helplessness with hope, negativity with positivity, arrogance with humility, impatience with patience, curses with blessings, and doubt with faith. And most importantly, when our hearts have been transformed by the gospel of Christ, our tongues have no choice but to rejoice and to proclaim that gospel. Will you pray with me? Lord, I pray that as we try to glorify you in our words, in our actions, as we try to glorify you through our prayers to you, but God, also our words and our prayers, our words and just the way that we interact with any and everyone. The way we talk to people, the way that we talk about people, the way that we talk about ourselves. Lord, I pray that we put aside and we stop worrying about and we stop trying to fix our tongues by simply our own power and our own willpower because, God, we know it's never going to work. God, instead, allow us to come to you. Allow your heart to shape, mold, impact our hearts, God. Allow our hearts to look more like yours so that our speech can do the same. We love you. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Erin. I get the honor and the privilege of being one of your pastors, and I can't tell you how excited I am to actually be in Big Church today. As our kids call it down the hall, this is Big Church, and I'm thrilled to be here and to be hanging out with y'all. But I do need to start our morning in a place of confession. You see, I have struggled a whole lot in the process of putting this together to bring to you guys this morning. It first started with the idea of this sermon series forever ago, and Nate and everybody was talking about it, and they're like, let's do this, 27. We'll do the 27 books of the New Testament. It's going to be great. And I was like, oh, okay. Did you say the New Testament? Well, okay. Yeah, well, for those of you guys that know me, anytime that I've actually stood up here before you guys, I've spoken from the Old Testament. So the New Testament, while I have read it and I have studied it and all those things, and that is not my safe place, maybe is a good way to put it. I love the Old Testament stories. I love the details. I love the battles. I love all those things. I'm a book girl. That's where I am, right? Now the New Testament has a little bit of that. The New Testament tells a fabulous story, but it's just not quite the same. And then we said, okay, so now you're going to pick one of these books and you're going to take it and you're going to study it and you're going to find one thing to talk about and you're going to present it. I'm like, okay, so I have to take a whole book and I have to go through it. And then I have to come up with one thing to tell you all. For those of you guys that know me, you know, brevity is not exactly one of my strong suits. I like words. I have lots of them and they tend to come forth. So, so, so now we have New Testament, we have brevity, and then now I have to pick a book. And there's 27. Thankfully, Nate took four. Aaron has taken one. Kyle has taken one. So I'm just down to 21. So I struggled with that as well. I went back and forth. Aaron and Kyle can attest to it because they kept saying, have you landed on one yet? No, I'm not there yet. So I went back and forth. And so one day I just was kind of picking up my Bible. I moved to the back and then moved forward because Revelation is not where I'm going to be. And then I moved forward and I dropped into the book of James. And I had read James. It had been a long time. And I sat down and I read James again. And then I kind of read it again. And it just settled in my heart and said, you know, this is the place, Aaron, that you need to be for the next little while. I think you need to study this. And then we'll find one thing that you can talk about together. And so this is where I am. And I think the other part that struck me as funny is that James's book is a very to the point and practical advice to people. So he got the brevity thing. So we're hoping that somehow over the course of the last little while, I have learned the brevity as well. But you guys can be the judge and you all can tell me at the end of the day today as to whether I hit home or not. But before we jump into the actual book itself, I would love to take the opportunity to introduce you to the person of James. Because I think if you sit back and you learn who he is and you get to know James' heart, then as we talk about the book, you'll see how very much of his heart comes through in the words that he presents to his followers. So, brevity, and here we go. We're going to make this work, I think. There are three prominent Jameses that you will learn about in the New Testament. There is James, the son of Zebedee and the brother of John. Then there was James, the son of Alphaeus. And these both were part of the 12 disciples. And then you had James, the brother of Jesus. Well, it is highly believed or widely believed that this book of James was written by Jesus's brother. And so we find out that James is the oldest of what would be the half siblings of Jesus. There were three other brothers and a group of sisters. We don't know the sisters because of course it doesn't tell us names. It just says he had sisters as well. So we have this group of brothers, this group of sisters, and we have James as the oldest. How many of you in here are younger siblings? Yeah? That's me too. I have an older brother who is six years older than me. So thankfully that gap helped a little bit. I've looked at my kids with their two-year age gap, and I see it more with the older sibling, the younger sibling. There's a little bit of maybe jealousy of the older sibling, or even the younger sometimes, but there's also a comparison that starts to happen because people know the older brother or the older sister, and they think that the little is supposed to be like the big. There's a lot of that. As the younger, you also tend to live in the shadow of your older sibling. And so here we have James. It says James is the oldest of the half siblings, but guess what? That also makes James the what? The little brother of Jesus. Okay, sit on that one for just a second. He was the little brother of Jesus. So that takes the whole living in somebody else's shadow to another level. I just can't even imagine what it must have been like for him. And in scripture, it continues to go on and tell us though that, oh, by the way, his siblings didn't believe him. They didn't believe in him. They didn't believe he was who he says he was. As a matter of fact, they spent a lot of their time following him around. And when he's in these crowds of people, they're going into the crowds, and they're trying to pull him out. And in the process, they're saying, we're really sorry. He's out of his mind. And I promise you, it says that in Mark 3 21, it quotes that as saying he's out of his mind. So you have James, you have all of these brothers and sisters, and they're trying really hard to kind of like convince everybody that Jesus is not who he says he is and that he's kind of crazy. Y'all, this is Jesus' family that's doing this. So let's fast forward now. We have Jesus' death, his burial, his resurrection. We're told that when Jesus is resurrected, he appears to his disciples. Then he appears to a really large group of believers. And then he appears to James. We have no idea from scripture what that meeting was like. But when I read that and thought about it, my heart melted, y'all. Like, this is Jesus coming to his baby brother. And of course, my human brain goes to the fact that wouldn't it have been funny to have been a fly on the wall? And could you have seen Jesus go, hey, so do you think I'm out of my mind now? But we don't have any idea, again, what was said. But all I could hear and all I could think about was just how sweet this moment was between two brothers, one who didn't believe, but one who is now experiencing this moment with the risen Lord. his life is now forever going to be changed. Because what we see now is James begins to hang out with all of the believers. James begins to hang out with the disciples in Jerusalem. And then Peter, who is in Jerusalem with him at this point in time, Peter decides to take off and go spread the gospel, leaving James behind. So there stands James in Jerusalem with this brand new group of Jewish Christians. And he becomes basically the first pastor of the first Christian church ever that's now set up in Jerusalem, which is the hub of Judaism, but it's also now the birthplace of Christianity. And there he sits. I can only imagine kind of the pressure that sits on James's shoulders during this. Y'all, he's the first kind of like pastor. He doesn't have any other pastors to talk to. Like, hey, did you know this is going on inside of my congregation? You got any advice? Or I want to talk about this. Do you not? He doesn't have anybody to talk to. It's him. He's by himself with this group of new believers. But the one thing that I think that is so cool that he does have, no Bible, but he has the time that he spent with his brother. He has all of the time that he spent with Jesus to be the place that he holds on to and the words that he then can speak to the people that are following him. And so now during the middle of James's leadership of this church in Jerusalem, Saul decides to start his great persecution campaign. What we know about Saul is Saul was someone who felt that the Christians were wrong in their belief structure and felt that he was going to throw them all in jail because they didn't belong out there. We know eventually Saul has an encounter with the risen Lord as well, and he is forever changed. And he becomes Paul, who we have been talking about before today. And we'll continue in the New Testament. But for now, he's Saul. And he is out to get these Christians. So this sweet little flock that James is in charge of is sitting in their homes or walking through the market in complete fear at all times of the fact that somebody's going to snatch them up, drag them off, and throw them in prison. They don't know if that knock on the door is a friend or somebody coming to get them. They don't know if they leave their house and head to the market, if they're going to come back to see their family again. It's a place of fear that I'm not sure any of us could ever really and truly understand. But that's where they are. And then let's add a little insult to that. And there's a great famine happening at this point in time as well. And so because of this famine and the persecution, James's people start to leave the city. They start to flee into the countryside to escape all that's happening in the city of Jerusalem. And as they escape, they're running into places called Judea and called Samaria, which what we know about Jewish faith is that was places that as a Jew, they never would have gone. But as a Jewish Christian, that's where they went for refuge. So they're now depositing themselves in these areas that are filled with pagans. And they're trying their best to reestablish their life. To bring their families back together. To find new jobs, and to find new community. And so this is where we find James sitting in Jerusalem still, he and a few apostles are all that's left, and wondering how his people are. Where have they gone? Have they found a place to settle? Are they together? Is there a chance that there's some community around them? And as I was reading this and I was thinking about it, it brought me back to some of the COVID lockdowns for us. I know as a staff, we struggled really, really hard with trying to do ministry and loving on our people when I couldn't see our people, when we couldn't really, we had the luxury of being able to talk to our people. We had phones, we had all that other stuff, but you get where I'm headed with this. We just were very separated and it was hard. Well, that's where James is. He doesn't know where they are. He doesn't know what's happening to him, but he does know that they have headed into lands that are not gonna be the most friendly to someone in a new faith. And so this is where James sits down with pen and paper or quill and parchment or papyrus. I don't know what he used, but he sat down at this point in time to write this letter to his people. And the thing that I found as I read through this, and like I said before, it's very practical advice. However, the overarching place from James's heart was to tell his people to live it. This idea that if you are a Christian, if you're going to say that you're a Christian, your life must reflect your words. That the people in Judea and the people in Samaria, when they look at you, they should know that you're different. They should know by your actions and the way that you choose to live your life that you're different and that you're a follower of Christ. And so in James chapter 2 verses 14 through 19, you can check out a Bible if you'd like. I did not have them put on the screens. You can just listen to me read it, whatever y'all would like to do. But that's where I am. So James 2, 14 through 19, if not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, I have faith, I have deeds. Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there's one God, well, good, because even the demons believe that, and they shudder. So right now, I know I have gained the attention of all of those that were trying to decide where they were headed for lunch after church was over because I made the statement about faith and deeds and everybody has it in their head that, oh, wait a second, wait a second. We all know that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works. And I'm going to tell you that's still 100% true. And I don't believe that that's what James is saying here. But what I believe he's doing is he is questioning our commitment to our faith. When we talk about our faith, we talk about this idea of trusting God fully and committing to this idea of lordship, that Jesus has lordship over our life, over all pieces and parts of our life. That's what it is to have faith. But I think, and that's 100% true, and that's what we get through our belief in Christ. But what James is saying is, I want you to take that a step further. And what I want you to do is, I want you not to just say that you believe in me, but I want that complete lordship of your life to show in what it is that you do. I want you to realize that people will see you and know you and know who you are in Christ because of what you say and what you do. So if we peace and keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? That's it right there. Somebody sits, somebody's cold, somebody's hungry, and I look at them and say, go in peace. I hope you get warm and I hope you get food. And I go this way. That's not living out our faith. Because I could say I'm a Christian, but I did nothing. There was nothing that shows. We talked about James having an encounter with the living God and then from there, everything changed. He changed. If we have this encounter with the living God, we can't live as if we have not been changed, because we have been. We have to learn to live in a place of obedience to what it is that he tells us to do. We can't just be hearers of the word. We also have to be doers. We can't come into church every Sunday and sit here and listen to what Aaron and Kyle and Nate have to say, but then not apply it to what we do. We can't sit down with our Bibles in the morning and read through them and be convicted by something and then, eh, maybe I will, maybe I won't. We have to be willing to allow that change to happen. Another simplified example, and this one's really simplified, but if I were to say to you that I have made a decision that it's time for me to shed a couple pounds, to get myself into great shape, well, I can talk about that all I want. I'm going to put together a great plan and I'm going to shop better and I'm going to eat better and I'm going to exercise. I'm going to the gym three times a week. It's going to be great. And then you come see me two months later and I still look like this. Hey, Aaron, what happened? Well, I talked about it, but I didn't do anything about it. Now, if I could talk it off, y'all, I would just be the most fit person that walked to the face of this earth. But I can't talk it off. I have to be willing to commit to, to be obedient to a plan, a course of action, whatever it is that's going to help, right? And that's what he's talking about here. We cannot serve a full-time God with a part-time faith. It doesn't work. So now if we go back and we remember James's original audience, we have this group of tired, fearful, relatively new, maybe even new to Christianity, Jewish Christians that are living amongst this group of pagans. How easy do you think it would have been for them to have kind of fallen into this idea of a part-time faith? I don't know about you, but I think it would have been pretty easy because they have no Christian community around them. They didn't have Bibles. They don't have somebody speaking into their life. It's just them trying to hold on, right? It would have been so easy to have fallen into a part-time faith. And that's where James' heart is, is he's writing these words to them and he's saying, y'all, I just want you to go back and remember what it was like when we were together. I want you to remember what it was like when you came to that moment and said, I've been changed and I now want to live this out. And so the rest of the book of James, he goes through and he reminds them of what this looks like in their words and their actions. And there's so much of this book of James that sounds like Jesus. It sounds like Jesus as he stands on the Sermon on the Mount and is teaching. And it's because we find out that James actually teaches the most from Jesus' words than any other author in the New Testament. And you gotta love that little brother who now thinks that his big brother is really cool. And he wants to make sure that everybody hears and knows what it is that he taught. And so he continues in this book to talk of a faith, of an active faith that endures in the midst of trials, that calls on God for wisdom, that bridles the tongue. That's a lesson for all of us. Bridles the tongue that sets aside wickedness, that visits orphans and widows, an active faith that guards against greed, that's patient in suffering, that's rich in prayer, that doesn't play favorites. And he stresses that this life of faith should be all-encompassing and pressing us to engage in the life of others. And so as I continued to read through this and I was thinking about like, hey, does James' teaching actually apply to us in 2023? And of course I came up with a resounding yes, it does. Because y'all, in the culture and the world that we live in today, if we as Grace Raleigh, as the people of Grace Raleigh, are this living example of people who are walking out their faith. They're not just talking about it, but they're actually walking out their faith, like the impact that we can have both as an individual and as a group. And so one of the things that really also hit me is, is that as I went through this is I was reminded of our traits of grace. For those of you guys that don't know what I'm talking about when I say the traits of grace, this was five traits that the elders and the staff came up with that describe our people, that as partners of grace, this is who we are and what we reflect. And there's a whole section that talks about our core beliefs, but then it goes on with the sentence that says, in the light of the gospel and because we love Jesus. So going back to like what James said, he had an encounter with the living God. He was forever changed. So in light of the gospel and because we love Jesus, this is what we choose to do. And it goes on to say that we are kingdom builders, that we leverage everything that we have, our time, our treasures, and our talents to build God's kingdom. We are partners. We partner with each other. We partner with our ministries. We partner with our missionaries. We partner with nonprofits because we truly believe that no one should ever do life alone. And of course, to further God's kingdom. That we're people of devotion where we spend time daily in prayer and in God's word to grow closer to him. That we're step-takers where we're committed to this next step of obedience. And then finally, that we're conduits of grace, that we acknowledge that God has lavished grace upon us and that because of that, we're actually able to lavish it on others. And so this is who the people of grace are. And I have to say that my family and I had the opportunity to be huge benefactors of watching the people of grace live out their faith. For many of you, many of you may or may not know who, I don't know. But over the course of the last year or so my mom was exceptionally sick and in poor health or declining health and starting about a year ago her health took a little bit steeper trajectory downward and we started with some hospital visits and I was running back and forth between Raleigh and Pinehurst on a weekly basis on the weekends. And then as time went on, the time increased a little bit more. I'd spend more weekend time down there, etc. And then in October of this year, mom was hospitalized. It was a sudden hospitalization. She was severely ill at that point in time. I dropped everything. I went to Pinehurst with my laptop and a bag, not knowing what I was going to find. When I got there, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Well, come to find out that over the month of October, so 31 days, my mom spent 21 of them in the hospital. And during that time, I watched as Julie slowly made sure that everything in Grace Kids was running as smoothly as it possibly could, so I didn't have to worry about that. I had parts of our small group, Tammy Vinson and Karen Latta and some of the others that jumped in and said, we've got this. And they took over all of the responsibilities that I had there, and the small group kept moving right along. I had Nate and the elders saying to me, you do what you need to do, Aaron. Your family is the most important thing. And so I was given the freedom to be there with my mom and with my dad to do what it was that I needed to do at that time. And Jesus took my mom home at the beginning of December. And as I look back on it now, though, I was given such a gift by the people of grace who loved on us so well, who loved on my family in my absence. It's something I can never, ever repay. But y'all, that's the best example that I have of what it looks like when a people live it. They didn't just say they believed in Jesus. Everything that was extended to my family during this time just shone the light of Jesus. And again, it's something I can never, ever repay. So a life where our words and our actions come together, where in light of the gospel and because we love Jesus, we are showing the world how an encounter with the living God has changed us and changed us for the better. So this little book of, it's five chapters and a hundred verses, y'all. That's it. It's not a lot. I promise y'all can sit down and read it. And I hope that you can hear the pastor's heart behind this book. And I also hope that you will allow it to challenge you like it's challenged me. On a little bit of a side note, I found this one funny. As we talk about being challenged by this book, Martin Luther actually was severely challenged by the book of James, and he called it a right strawy epistle, and then went on to say, away with James, I feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove, which I just had to giggle a little bit at that one, because I tell you what, if Martin Luther can be that challenged by this book, so much so that he wants to pick it up and throw it in the fire, oh, can you imagine what it's going to do to the rest of us? It might step on your toes a little. I expect it to. But I hope and I pray that you accept that challenge because in that challenge, it's going to produce change. And it's that change that helps us to grow and to continue to mature in our faith. So people of grace and followers of the risen Lord, will you look in the mirror each day? Will you take the opportunity to ask God what you need to change, what you need to do in order to get a little bit closer to him? And what is it that we can do in order to learn how to live it so that we're known by what we do, not what we say. Will y'all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you for these beautiful words of James. Thank you for the challenge that you give us. This challenge to take that step of obedience and learn to not just talk the talk, but to walk the walk. We want our words and we want our actions to do nothing but bring the glory to you. So will we become that people, Lord, that when the people of Raleigh look at us, they see something different. They see lives that have had encounters with the living God that have been forever changed and who want to bring that change and that love to others. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Erin. I get the honor and the privilege of being one of your pastors, and I can't tell you how excited I am to actually be in Big Church today. As our kids call it down the hall, this is Big Church, and I'm thrilled to be here and to be hanging out with y'all. But I do need to start our morning in a place of confession. You see, I have struggled a whole lot in the process of putting this together to bring to you guys this morning. It first started with the idea of this sermon series forever ago, and Nate and everybody was talking about it, and they're like, let's do this, 27. We'll do the 27 books of the New Testament. It's going to be great. And I was like, oh, okay. Did you say the New Testament? Well, okay. Yeah, well, for those of you guys that know me, anytime that I've actually stood up here before you guys, I've spoken from the Old Testament. So the New Testament, while I have read it and I have studied it and all those things, and that is not my safe place, maybe is a good way to put it. I love the Old Testament stories. I love the details. I love the battles. I love all those things. I'm a book girl. That's where I am, right? Now the New Testament has a little bit of that. The New Testament tells a fabulous story, but it's just not quite the same. And then we said, okay, so now you're going to pick one of these books and you're going to take it and you're going to study it and you're going to find one thing to talk about and you're going to present it. I'm like, okay, so I have to take a whole book and I have to go through it. And then I have to come up with one thing to tell you all. For those of you guys that know me, you know, brevity is not exactly one of my strong suits. I like words. I have lots of them and they tend to come forth. So, so, so now we have New Testament, we have brevity, and then now I have to pick a book. And there's 27. Thankfully, Nate took four. Aaron has taken one. Kyle has taken one. So I'm just down to 21. So I struggled with that as well. I went back and forth. Aaron and Kyle can attest to it because they kept saying, have you landed on one yet? No, I'm not there yet. So I went back and forth. And so one day I just was kind of picking up my Bible. I moved to the back and then moved forward because Revelation is not where I'm going to be. And then I moved forward and I dropped into the book of James. And I had read James. It had been a long time. And I sat down and I read James again. And then I kind of read it again. And it just settled in my heart and said, you know, this is the place, Aaron, that you need to be for the next little while. I think you need to study this. And then we'll find one thing that you can talk about together. And so this is where I am. And I think the other part that struck me as funny is that James's book is a very to the point and practical advice to people. So he got the brevity thing. So we're hoping that somehow over the course of the last little while, I have learned the brevity as well. But you guys can be the judge and you all can tell me at the end of the day today as to whether I hit home or not. But before we jump into the actual book itself, I would love to take the opportunity to introduce you to the person of James. Because I think if you sit back and you learn who he is and you get to know James' heart, then as we talk about the book, you'll see how very much of his heart comes through in the words that he presents to his followers. So, brevity, and here we go. We're going to make this work, I think. There are three prominent Jameses that you will learn about in the New Testament. There is James, the son of Zebedee and the brother of John. Then there was James, the son of Alphaeus. And these both were part of the 12 disciples. And then you had James, the brother of Jesus. Well, it is highly believed or widely believed that this book of James was written by Jesus's brother. And so we find out that James is the oldest of what would be the half siblings of Jesus. There were three other brothers and a group of sisters. We don't know the sisters because of course it doesn't tell us names. It just says he had sisters as well. So we have this group of brothers, this group of sisters, and we have James as the oldest. How many of you in here are younger siblings? Yeah? That's me too. I have an older brother who is six years older than me. So thankfully that gap helped a little bit. I've looked at my kids with their two-year age gap, and I see it more with the older sibling, the younger sibling. There's a little bit of maybe jealousy of the older sibling, or even the younger sometimes, but there's also a comparison that starts to happen because people know the older brother or the older sister, and they think that the little is supposed to be like the big. There's a lot of that. As the younger, you also tend to live in the shadow of your older sibling. And so here we have James. It says James is the oldest of the half siblings, but guess what? That also makes James the what? The little brother of Jesus. Okay, sit on that one for just a second. He was the little brother of Jesus. So that takes the whole living in somebody else's shadow to another level. I just can't even imagine what it must have been like for him. And in scripture, it continues to go on and tell us though that, oh, by the way, his siblings didn't believe him. They didn't believe in him. They didn't believe he was who he says he was. As a matter of fact, they spent a lot of their time following him around. And when he's in these crowds of people, they're going into the crowds, and they're trying to pull him out. And in the process, they're saying, we're really sorry. He's out of his mind. And I promise you, it says that in Mark 3 21, it quotes that as saying he's out of his mind. So you have James, you have all of these brothers and sisters, and they're trying really hard to kind of like convince everybody that Jesus is not who he says he is and that he's kind of crazy. Y'all, this is Jesus' family that's doing this. So let's fast forward now. We have Jesus' death, his burial, his resurrection. We're told that when Jesus is resurrected, he appears to his disciples. Then he appears to a really large group of believers. And then he appears to James. We have no idea from scripture what that meeting was like. But when I read that and thought about it, my heart melted, y'all. Like, this is Jesus coming to his baby brother. And of course, my human brain goes to the fact that wouldn't it have been funny to have been a fly on the wall? And could you have seen Jesus go, hey, so do you think I'm out of my mind now? But we don't have any idea, again, what was said. But all I could hear and all I could think about was just how sweet this moment was between two brothers, one who didn't believe, but one who is now experiencing this moment with the risen Lord. his life is now forever going to be changed. Because what we see now is James begins to hang out with all of the believers. James begins to hang out with the disciples in Jerusalem. And then Peter, who is in Jerusalem with him at this point in time, Peter decides to take off and go spread the gospel, leaving James behind. So there stands James in Jerusalem with this brand new group of Jewish Christians. And he becomes basically the first pastor of the first Christian church ever that's now set up in Jerusalem, which is the hub of Judaism, but it's also now the birthplace of Christianity. And there he sits. I can only imagine kind of the pressure that sits on James's shoulders during this. Y'all, he's the first kind of like pastor. He doesn't have any other pastors to talk to. Like, hey, did you know this is going on inside of my congregation? You got any advice? Or I want to talk about this. Do you not? He doesn't have anybody to talk to. It's him. He's by himself with this group of new believers. But the one thing that I think that is so cool that he does have, no Bible, but he has the time that he spent with his brother. He has all of the time that he spent with Jesus to be the place that he holds on to and the words that he then can speak to the people that are following him. And so now during the middle of James's leadership of this church in Jerusalem, Saul decides to start his great persecution campaign. What we know about Saul is Saul was someone who felt that the Christians were wrong in their belief structure and felt that he was going to throw them all in jail because they didn't belong out there. We know eventually Saul has an encounter with the risen Lord as well, and he is forever changed. And he becomes Paul, who we have been talking about before today. And we'll continue in the New Testament. But for now, he's Saul. And he is out to get these Christians. So this sweet little flock that James is in charge of is sitting in their homes or walking through the market in complete fear at all times of the fact that somebody's going to snatch them up, drag them off, and throw them in prison. They don't know if that knock on the door is a friend or somebody coming to get them. They don't know if they leave their house and head to the market, if they're going to come back to see their family again. It's a place of fear that I'm not sure any of us could ever really and truly understand. But that's where they are. And then let's add a little insult to that. And there's a great famine happening at this point in time as well. And so because of this famine and the persecution, James's people start to leave the city. They start to flee into the countryside to escape all that's happening in the city of Jerusalem. And as they escape, they're running into places called Judea and called Samaria, which what we know about Jewish faith is that was places that as a Jew, they never would have gone. But as a Jewish Christian, that's where they went for refuge. So they're now depositing themselves in these areas that are filled with pagans. And they're trying their best to reestablish their life. To bring their families back together. To find new jobs, and to find new community. And so this is where we find James sitting in Jerusalem still, he and a few apostles are all that's left, and wondering how his people are. Where have they gone? Have they found a place to settle? Are they together? Is there a chance that there's some community around them? And as I was reading this and I was thinking about it, it brought me back to some of the COVID lockdowns for us. I know as a staff, we struggled really, really hard with trying to do ministry and loving on our people when I couldn't see our people, when we couldn't really, we had the luxury of being able to talk to our people. We had phones, we had all that other stuff, but you get where I'm headed with this. We just were very separated and it was hard. Well, that's where James is. He doesn't know where they are. He doesn't know what's happening to him, but he does know that they have headed into lands that are not gonna be the most friendly to someone in a new faith. And so this is where James sits down with pen and paper or quill and parchment or papyrus. I don't know what he used, but he sat down at this point in time to write this letter to his people. And the thing that I found as I read through this, and like I said before, it's very practical advice. However, the overarching place from James's heart was to tell his people to live it. This idea that if you are a Christian, if you're going to say that you're a Christian, your life must reflect your words. That the people in Judea and the people in Samaria, when they look at you, they should know that you're different. They should know by your actions and the way that you choose to live your life that you're different and that you're a follower of Christ. And so in James chapter 2 verses 14 through 19, you can check out a Bible if you'd like. I did not have them put on the screens. You can just listen to me read it, whatever y'all would like to do. But that's where I am. So James 2, 14 through 19, if not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, I have faith, I have deeds. Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there's one God, well, good, because even the demons believe that, and they shudder. So right now, I know I have gained the attention of all of those that were trying to decide where they were headed for lunch after church was over because I made the statement about faith and deeds and everybody has it in their head that, oh, wait a second, wait a second. We all know that we are saved by grace through faith, not by works. And I'm going to tell you that's still 100% true. And I don't believe that that's what James is saying here. But what I believe he's doing is he is questioning our commitment to our faith. When we talk about our faith, we talk about this idea of trusting God fully and committing to this idea of lordship, that Jesus has lordship over our life, over all pieces and parts of our life. That's what it is to have faith. But I think, and that's 100% true, and that's what we get through our belief in Christ. But what James is saying is, I want you to take that a step further. And what I want you to do is, I want you not to just say that you believe in me, but I want that complete lordship of your life to show in what it is that you do. I want you to realize that people will see you and know you and know who you are in Christ because of what you say and what you do. So if we peace and keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? That's it right there. Somebody sits, somebody's cold, somebody's hungry, and I look at them and say, go in peace. I hope you get warm and I hope you get food. And I go this way. That's not living out our faith. Because I could say I'm a Christian, but I did nothing. There was nothing that shows. We talked about James having an encounter with the living God and then from there, everything changed. He changed. If we have this encounter with the living God, we can't live as if we have not been changed, because we have been. We have to learn to live in a place of obedience to what it is that he tells us to do. We can't just be hearers of the word. We also have to be doers. We can't come into church every Sunday and sit here and listen to what Aaron and Kyle and Nate have to say, but then not apply it to what we do. We can't sit down with our Bibles in the morning and read through them and be convicted by something and then, eh, maybe I will, maybe I won't. We have to be willing to allow that change to happen. Another simplified example, and this one's really simplified, but if I were to say to you that I have made a decision that it's time for me to shed a couple pounds, to get myself into great shape, well, I can talk about that all I want. I'm going to put together a great plan and I'm going to shop better and I'm going to eat better and I'm going to exercise. I'm going to the gym three times a week. It's going to be great. And then you come see me two months later and I still look like this. Hey, Aaron, what happened? Well, I talked about it, but I didn't do anything about it. Now, if I could talk it off, y'all, I would just be the most fit person that walked to the face of this earth. But I can't talk it off. I have to be willing to commit to, to be obedient to a plan, a course of action, whatever it is that's going to help, right? And that's what he's talking about here. We cannot serve a full-time God with a part-time faith. It doesn't work. So now if we go back and we remember James's original audience, we have this group of tired, fearful, relatively new, maybe even new to Christianity, Jewish Christians that are living amongst this group of pagans. How easy do you think it would have been for them to have kind of fallen into this idea of a part-time faith? I don't know about you, but I think it would have been pretty easy because they have no Christian community around them. They didn't have Bibles. They don't have somebody speaking into their life. It's just them trying to hold on, right? It would have been so easy to have fallen into a part-time faith. And that's where James' heart is, is he's writing these words to them and he's saying, y'all, I just want you to go back and remember what it was like when we were together. I want you to remember what it was like when you came to that moment and said, I've been changed and I now want to live this out. And so the rest of the book of James, he goes through and he reminds them of what this looks like in their words and their actions. And there's so much of this book of James that sounds like Jesus. It sounds like Jesus as he stands on the Sermon on the Mount and is teaching. And it's because we find out that James actually teaches the most from Jesus' words than any other author in the New Testament. And you gotta love that little brother who now thinks that his big brother is really cool. And he wants to make sure that everybody hears and knows what it is that he taught. And so he continues in this book to talk of a faith, of an active faith that endures in the midst of trials, that calls on God for wisdom, that bridles the tongue. That's a lesson for all of us. Bridles the tongue that sets aside wickedness, that visits orphans and widows, an active faith that guards against greed, that's patient in suffering, that's rich in prayer, that doesn't play favorites. And he stresses that this life of faith should be all-encompassing and pressing us to engage in the life of others. And so as I continued to read through this and I was thinking about like, hey, does James' teaching actually apply to us in 2023? And of course I came up with a resounding yes, it does. Because y'all, in the culture and the world that we live in today, if we as Grace Raleigh, as the people of Grace Raleigh, are this living example of people who are walking out their faith. They're not just talking about it, but they're actually walking out their faith, like the impact that we can have both as an individual and as a group. And so one of the things that really also hit me is, is that as I went through this is I was reminded of our traits of grace. For those of you guys that don't know what I'm talking about when I say the traits of grace, this was five traits that the elders and the staff came up with that describe our people, that as partners of grace, this is who we are and what we reflect. And there's a whole section that talks about our core beliefs, but then it goes on with the sentence that says, in the light of the gospel and because we love Jesus. So going back to like what James said, he had an encounter with the living God. He was forever changed. So in light of the gospel and because we love Jesus, this is what we choose to do. And it goes on to say that we are kingdom builders, that we leverage everything that we have, our time, our treasures, and our talents to build God's kingdom. We are partners. We partner with each other. We partner with our ministries. We partner with our missionaries. We partner with nonprofits because we truly believe that no one should ever do life alone. And of course, to further God's kingdom. That we're people of devotion where we spend time daily in prayer and in God's word to grow closer to him. That we're step-takers where we're committed to this next step of obedience. And then finally, that we're conduits of grace, that we acknowledge that God has lavished grace upon us and that because of that, we're actually able to lavish it on others. And so this is who the people of grace are. And I have to say that my family and I had the opportunity to be huge benefactors of watching the people of grace live out their faith. For many of you, many of you may or may not know who, I don't know. But over the course of the last year or so my mom was exceptionally sick and in poor health or declining health and starting about a year ago her health took a little bit steeper trajectory downward and we started with some hospital visits and I was running back and forth between Raleigh and Pinehurst on a weekly basis on the weekends. And then as time went on, the time increased a little bit more. I'd spend more weekend time down there, etc. And then in October of this year, mom was hospitalized. It was a sudden hospitalization. She was severely ill at that point in time. I dropped everything. I went to Pinehurst with my laptop and a bag, not knowing what I was going to find. When I got there, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Well, come to find out that over the month of October, so 31 days, my mom spent 21 of them in the hospital. And during that time, I watched as Julie slowly made sure that everything in Grace Kids was running as smoothly as it possibly could, so I didn't have to worry about that. I had parts of our small group, Tammy Vinson and Karen Latta and some of the others that jumped in and said, we've got this. And they took over all of the responsibilities that I had there, and the small group kept moving right along. I had Nate and the elders saying to me, you do what you need to do, Aaron. Your family is the most important thing. And so I was given the freedom to be there with my mom and with my dad to do what it was that I needed to do at that time. And Jesus took my mom home at the beginning of December. And as I look back on it now, though, I was given such a gift by the people of grace who loved on us so well, who loved on my family in my absence. It's something I can never, ever repay. But y'all, that's the best example that I have of what it looks like when a people live it. They didn't just say they believed in Jesus. Everything that was extended to my family during this time just shone the light of Jesus. And again, it's something I can never, ever repay. So a life where our words and our actions come together, where in light of the gospel and because we love Jesus, we are showing the world how an encounter with the living God has changed us and changed us for the better. So this little book of, it's five chapters and a hundred verses, y'all. That's it. It's not a lot. I promise y'all can sit down and read it. And I hope that you can hear the pastor's heart behind this book. And I also hope that you will allow it to challenge you like it's challenged me. On a little bit of a side note, I found this one funny. As we talk about being challenged by this book, Martin Luther actually was severely challenged by the book of James, and he called it a right strawy epistle, and then went on to say, away with James, I feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove, which I just had to giggle a little bit at that one, because I tell you what, if Martin Luther can be that challenged by this book, so much so that he wants to pick it up and throw it in the fire, oh, can you imagine what it's going to do to the rest of us? It might step on your toes a little. I expect it to. But I hope and I pray that you accept that challenge because in that challenge, it's going to produce change. And it's that change that helps us to grow and to continue to mature in our faith. So people of grace and followers of the risen Lord, will you look in the mirror each day? Will you take the opportunity to ask God what you need to change, what you need to do in order to get a little bit closer to him? And what is it that we can do in order to learn how to live it so that we're known by what we do, not what we say. Will y'all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you for these beautiful words of James. Thank you for the challenge that you give us. This challenge to take that step of obedience and learn to not just talk the talk, but to walk the walk. We want our words and we want our actions to do nothing but bring the glory to you. So will we become that people, Lord, that when the people of Raleigh look at us, they see something different. They see lives that have had encounters with the living God that have been forever changed and who want to bring that change and that love to others. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.