James

Grace, this week there's a man named George Floyd who was killed by a police officer. George was a black man, and you can't help but think that his race was a white woman who, in a racially fueled fear, weaponized the black man's race against him in a threat. And those instances are the most recent that have come into the national conscience. But there are just more instances in a long string of events that have happened that have pointed to the fact that we live in a culture with simmering racial tension. We live in a place where racial inequality is real. And I didn't think it would be right to get up here and just start preaching about Acts as if those things hadn't happened this week. I didn't think it would be right to meet together as together as we can be on a Sunday morning now and not acknowledge those things and pray for the racial divide and the wounds in our country to heal. And I didn't think it would be right to start this Sunday as a church and not earnestly ask our God together, what can we do, what can grace do to be a part of healing this divide? What portions of it as a greatly and majorly lily-white congregation can we own? And how can we contribute to closing the divide that exists in our culture? So I wanted to take a minute as we begin and pray for George Floyd and his family and pray for the racial divide in our country and pray for wisdom, for grace, as we seek to find how the Lord would have us be an active part of the healing of these wounds. So would you please pray with me? Father, our hearts are broken that we live in a place where things like this happen. Our hearts are broken that these incidents are not isolated. They're just the ones that we see. We know that you see all the incidents. We know that you have seen all the injustice. And we know that your heart breaks over injustice far more than ours ever could. So Father, first we pray for your heart in the face of these things. Break ours with yours. Father, we pray for the family of George Floyd. We ask that you would bring a healing that only you could bring. We pray for the attitudes that underlie the fear of Amy Cooper. And ask that you would solve those and bring those to the fore so that we might confront them and deal with them with equanimity and with justice and with grace. And Father, we ask that you would guide the partners and the leadership of grace and show us how we are to contribute to closing this divide and healing these wounds. Show us the path forward as we grieve, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. This morning is part two of a sermon that I'm calling Early Church Distinctives. Last week was part one. Hopefully you have your notes and you've got them numbered one through three. This week is going to be four, five, six, and seven. And last week I opened up with a short fictional story, really a parable, about a boy that was firing arrows at a barn and the arrows would land in the midst of a sea of red and then he would walk up and paint a target around the arrow and go, look, I hit the bullseye. And we talked about how, you know, this happens and this is applicable in a lot of organizations and institutions. It's a good parable about the dangers of mission drift. And often we start things without even knowing what we're going for, without even knowing what the goal is, without even knowing what the target is. And so we are asking last week as a church, how do we know that we're hitting the target? Another way to think about it is if Jesus and Paul were to come into the church on a Sunday morning when that's allowed, would they look around grace and everything that we're doing and say, yeah, you guys are nailing it. This is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. This is the target that we painted for you. So last week we asked the question, how do we know that we're hitting that target? How do we know that what we're doing as Grace is right? That Sunday mornings and small groups and children's ministry and student ministry and the philanthropic ministries that we do, how do we know that all that is right and good? Well, in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, we have a seminal passage that defines the early church. It paints the target for us. It shows us these are the things that the early church was characterized by. What's going on in the passage is Jesus has gone into heaven. He's left the disciples with the keys to the kingdom. They've received the Holy Spirit. They went out and they preached to thousands of people this gospel of repentance. Repent of who you thought Jesus was when you killed him and accept and walk in faith in the fact that Jesus and when he challenged them to repentance, it says about 3,000 were added to their number. And then those 3,000 formed the church. And right after that, we get Acts 2, 42 through 47, and it tells us the very things that defined the church. So last week, we looked at the first three distinctives that we see as defining the early church. This week, I want to look at the next four, four, five, six, and seven. And we said last week, there's different ways to group these together. You could pull out four distinctives or nine, but we're doing seven. And so last week we talked about the fact that they were devoted to the apostles' teaching, meaning they were eager learners. They were devoted to fellowship, meaning they were devoted to Christ-centered time together, and they were devoted to prayers, meaning that they were committed to the spiritual disciplines that they expressed in that day. So this week, as we continue to ask, how do we know if we're doing it right? What does God expect of his church? I want to continue to look at these distinctives that define the early church. By way of review, I wanted to take a minute and read the breaking of bread at the prayers. This week I want to start out by looking at that phrase that they sold all that they had in common and gave to any who had need. And we want to sum that up by saying that the fourth distinctive, if you're keeping your list there, is that they were known for generosity. They were known for their generosity. And it's interesting what's happening in this passage because what's literally happening is as the church is formed, everybody is selling whatever they have and giving it to the church leadership and saying, here, this is for the greater good. You guys use it for whatever you need to use it for. Obviously, my family's going to have some needs, but we trust you to provide for those. Here's everything that we own. Please use it to provide for everyone here, which is a super high bar. That's really daunting. Can you imagine if when we had our new members class at Grace, when we did Discover Grace and we talked all about Grace and who we are, and then we got to the end of it and it was like, okay, if you want to be a partner, here are the requirements. You know, you need to commit to Sunday morning attendance. You should be a believer. We'd like to see you in a small group. Also, small thing, if you could just kind of sell everything that you have and write a check to the elders, we'll take it from here. That would be a pretty tough sell. That's a pretty tall order. But to understand what's happening here, we need to feel the freedom to apply the principle and not necessarily the practice, because the principle is far more important. First, we need to understand what's happening in ancient Israel, in Israel at the time of Christ. Israel is what we would think of as a third world country. There's lots of joblessness. There's lots of poverty. There's lots of hunger. There's lots of suffering. There's no medical system really to speak of. And so suffering and need and want in Jerusalem was great. And while it was great, there was no infrastructure to provide for those who had fallen through the cracks of society. And what we understand is that God has intentionally designed the institution of the church to undergird society as a safety net to catch those who have fallen through the cracks of familial care. God first assigns to care for others. He first assigns family to care for family. This is why over and over again in Scripture, God makes a point of saying that if you love me, if you want to express true religion, then you'll care for the widows and the orphans. We see this in James in the New Testament, that true religion is to care for the widows and the orphans. We see it in Isaiah in the Old Testament, where God says, if you really want to please me, then plead the cause of the fatherless and take up the case of the widow. And what he's saying there is, and even in Deuteronomy when he says, look out for the sojourners, for the aliens, for the ones that don't have a family and can't support themselves, what he's saying in all that is, the church needs to serve in society as a safety net to care for those who fall through the cracks of familial care. We're supposed to be there and be helping them. And when there is a need, we are supposed to meet it. God has designed the church as an institutional safety net for society. And so in that time, there was no government. There was no Medicare. There was no welfare. There was no food stamps. There was no health care. There was none of that. And so the church was the only hope for the person who didn't have a family and was in need and couldn't support themselves. But now in our culture, thankfully, we have another safety net, which is the government. We do have a societal infrastructure to watch out for people who fall through the cracks of familial care. But still, the church undergirds all of that, and people who cannot be cared for by their family and cannot be cared for by the government, God looks at us, the church, and says, now you, you care for them. So we're still there, and it's still our responsibility, which is why the point from this part of the passage is that we need to be generous. We need to be conduits of God's generosity. We need to have a grieving heart for those who hurt and reach out to help those who can't help themselves. We need to be glad providers for those that are not provided for by their family or provided for by the government. We need to rally around them and be generous in spirits and be conduits of God's generosity. Another way to think of it perhaps is like this. When I became a senior pastor, I learned eventually about a thing called a designated giving fund. I'd really never heard of that before. It might shock you guys to know that I'm not a financial titan. I don't really know all the ins and outs of all that stuff. It's all news to me. I just try to spend less than what I make. That's pretty much it. But I found out that there's these things called designated giving funds. And how this works is you have money and you give a portion of that money to this fund that a company or an individual manages. And a lot of people will give money to this individual and they manage all the money in a fund. And that money is earmarked for charitable donations, charitable causes. And whoever you give your money to, they just sit on it and they hold it for however long you want to. And then when something pricks your heart, when something touches you, when you see a need that you'd like to meet, you pick up the phone or you type the email and you let the person managing your money know, hey, I would like you to send this much money to this person because they need it. This matters to me. I'd like you to allocate my resources to that person or that institution for those people. That's how a designated giving fund works fundamentally. And what it's made me realize is that we're all God's designated giving funds. That's what stewardship is. We've heard about this idea of stewardship before, that everything we have is God's and not our own. We've heard about that. But the more I thought about it this week, I've realized we're all God's designated giving funds. He allocates a portion of money to us. He entrusts it to us. And every now and again, he picks up the phone or he writes the email and he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this thing matters to me. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to them. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to these people. That's the principle of what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, is they're expressing the Lord's generosity. And I think increasingly, and I know that that's a tall order, and I know that you may be very far away from viewing everything you have as really belonging to God. And that's, I think, a progressive revelation as we understand God. But I think one of the marks of spiritual maturity in a church and in an individual is when the church and when the person understands that we're really just designated giving funds for God. He's allocated a portion of his resources to us as individuals and to us as a church. And every now and again, he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this matters to me. I'd like you to shift some of those resources over there to them. And that's how we're to serve. It's the mark of the church to be generous. The fifth distinctive that I see in this text is that they were committed to gathering. It says they gathered day by day in the temple courts. It's this old school way of church. You know, when I grew up, we were there every time the doors were open. We went Sunday morning, we went Sunday night, we went Wednesday night, every week. That was the deal. The doors were open, we were there. That's kind of old school church. Now, increasingly, if someone is a regular church attender, it means they come to church maybe twice a month. But the early church was committed to the gathering. It mattered to them. It mattered to them to come together when they were able to be in the temple learning and praising and fellowshipping together. The early church intuitively and instinctively understood the power and efficacy of being around one another, the power and the efficacy of the gathering. This is why in Hebrews we're told to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together. Because there's something special about being in the same place. And if nothing else, that's what this time of pandemic and isolation has taught us. Across the board, across the country, almost universally, church engagement and virtual attendance is declining. And as we've talked about that as a staff, and I've talked about that with the elders, I've just made the point that, you know, online church, this ability to participate in church in our sweatpants and the comfort of our own home, that's been a thing for at least 15 years, maybe longer. And there's a reason why it hasn't taken off. There's a reason why it hasn't overtaken in-person church. Because even now in the 21st century, we understand that there's a power and an efficacy that's difficult to capture in simply being together, in experiencing the teaching together, in laughing together, in and worshiping together and sharing together in the lobby, we understand that that is important. It's why at Grace, if you do come to a Discover Grace class, that one of the things we do ask our partners to commit to is to prioritize Sunday morning service. Because we believe that the gathering matters. And I can't wait until we are able to gather again. It's a distinctive of the early church and it ought to define our church. The sixth distinctive is the one that, of all of them, probably fires me up the most. I get so excited about this, and I think that it defines the early church. They were defined by communion and community. They were defined by communion and community. We see in verse 42 that they were devoted to the breaking of bread. And then again in 46 that they gathered in one another's homes and they broke bread together. It happens two times. And then all throughout this passage, we see they, they, they, collective, collective, collective. It's always about others. And the church is a fundamentally communal institution. It is fundamentally involved with others. I've said often it is impossible to live out the Christian life on an island. It is impossible to grow closer to Jesus void of the influence of others in your life. We absolutely, our souls need to be surrounded by godly Christian community. That's why at Grace, our mission statement is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people because we believe that we cannot deepen our connection with Jesus void of connections with others. And I believe this so fervently that I would say to you, if you're listening this morning and you're not sure that you have Christian community in your life, ignore everything else that I'm saying. Put it all on the back burner. Just take it and set it aside for a later date and get Christian community in your life. Stop right now. Quit listening to me and pray that God would provide for you a community of faith who supports you, who love you, who have permission to tell you the truth about yourself and to tell you what Jesus says about you. We desperately need Christian community in our life. And the early church was a communal thing, and that persists to this day. But it wasn't just about community. It was about communion. We see that phrase, the breaking of bread, and we automatically think that this is an expression of community and hospitality, and it is. And for all of history, for all of history, that has been how we've expressed hospitality. Food has been the fundamental way that we've expressed community. Once you get to know somebody a little bit, maybe you have a common activity or something, but eventually you're going to say, hey, let's grab lunch. Let's get the wives together and let's go to dinner. Let's get the families together and y'all come over. And increasingly that means we go somewhere and we experience a food together, but the most intimate time, the most special times are when people are invited over to the home. When you invite people into your home, there's a special care taken. You clean up the house. You let them know that you care about them, that they matter to you. You try to think of the special thing that they like, of the appetizer that they went nuts over the last time, of the dessert that you can remember in conversation that they said they like. If you're making steaks and there's somebody who doesn't like steak, you make sure and you have chicken to make them feel thought for and cared for. You make sure that there's something for their kids so that they know that their kid is important to you as well. There's this special power of hospitality, of welcoming people into our homes and expressing community in that way. And when the tradition of communion started, that's where it started. It started in someone's home as Jesus and the disciples sat around and broke bread together. They sat around and they were having a meal together. They were expressing community. It was the Passover supper. And you know, we observe communion in our churches. Most churches observe it like grace does. At grace, we do it once a month in the service. The elders stand on either side at the end of the sermon. I'll go through the story of communion and when it started and we'll have a particular thought that we go with. Then we spend some time in prayer and then we line up and we get we get the bread, and we dip it, and we go back to our seats, and it's an austere, respectful time, and that's right and good. But communion didn't start that way. Communion started in community. Communion started around a table. When Jesus took the bread, and he looked at the disciples, and and he broke it and he began to hand it out. And this was not an unusual practice. Every home didn't have a knife. The way that you serve bread was to take the loaf and tear off a portion of it and give it to your guests. So what Jesus did was not a new thing. This wasn't unusual to the disciples or anyone else who could have seen it. It was a ubiquitous, common part of the meal. And in this moment, Jesus takes the thing that we do every time we express community and he imbues it with purpose. And he says, every time you do this, do what? Line up in church and get in the line and tear off the bread and dip it in the wine and spend some time praying? No, not that. Every time you do this, every time you gather in community with me as your focus and you break bread, you serve the bread to the people who are in your house. This common activity that was mundane until this moment. Jesus says, every time you do this from now on, I want you to remember me. I want you to remember that I'm the bread, that I'm the bread of life, that my body was broken for you. Similarly, he takes the wine and he pours it. It's a totally common mundane activity. It happens in every dinner party ever where the host takes the glasses and pours the drink. And Jesus says, whenever you do this, whenever you do what? Gather in church and dip the bread in the wine? No, whenever you experience community together and when you serve the drinks, I want you to stop and remember me and feel that and see that as my blood that is poured out for you. Remember my crucifixion and that I am the tie that binds here and that I am what brings you in common with one another and that I am what reconciles you with the heavenly Father. Remember that. Communion didn't start in church buildings. It started at dinner tables. It started in community. And Jesus took these mundane expressions that are a part of every communal gathering around the table, and he said, from now on, when you do these things, don't just let them be a passive thing where you just serve the bread and you serve the drinks and you move on. I want you to stop and I want you to remember me. That's communion. Communion is always an expression of community. Communion always draws us into community and community should always focus on communion. So I think the challenge for us at Grace, who love community very much, we're real good at community. That's one of my favorite things about this church. We love having people over. We love getting together. But the challenge for us is when we do, when that bread is served and when it's broken, when the drinks are poured, it is right and good and obedient to pause and to pray and to say, Jesus, thank you that you are this bread. Thank you that you are this drink. Thank you that you make tonight possible and that you make our relationship with you possible. We're having fun here tonight, Jesus, but we want to pause and we want to say thank you for making this possible and we want to remember you because that's the instruction of communion. Not once a month when you're in church, come to the front and take the bread and dip it in the wine. That is a shadow. That is a mimicry of the actual communion. And it is right and good to do it in church. But it is forgetful and wrong if we don't do it together in community. So let the challenge be to grace as we commune, as we gather, as we express hospitality and we all begin to fling our doors back open and have people over. Can we please take a moment in those times and do things in remembrance of Christ and make communion more a part of our community. Finally, the seventh distinctive is that this church had a contagious joy. I want to read for you the last portion of scripture so that you kind of know what I'm talking about. It says, They gathered together every day. They invited people into their homes. It's not a stretch to think that they would just invite their neighbors in too because there's a meal and you should come have fun with us. They gathered in the temple courts. They pooled their resources and gave to anyone who had need. No doubt that brought people in who had need, who experienced this genuine community and love for the first time in their life. And then in all of that, as they met with glad and happy hearts, they praised their God and it said that they won favor with all the people. Not just the people of the church, but the people around them, which means that the people of Jerusalem at large began to take notice of this infectious community of joy that was the early church. And because they began to take notice of that, because they won favor with the people surrounding them simply by being an expression of the church and exuding that contagious joy, because people saw that, this passage ends with, and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Their contagious and infectious joy led to the salvation of souls. It's really interesting to me that two weeks ago I talked in Acts 2 about the fundamental and foundational repentance of the church. It's a confession that I've been wrong about who I thought Jesus was and I'm going to walk in the belief that he is who he says he is. And out of that confession and repentance, 3,000 people were added to that number. And now in Acts 2, 42 through 47, we see more people being added to their numbers. And the confession and repentance is what drew people in at the beginning, but now at this point in the church, what's now drawing people in? Now what's drawing people in is the favor that their infectious joy is winning with all people. Now what we're seeing is the church cranking on all cylinders. We're seeing the results of what happens when people are devoted to the apostles' teaching and are eager learners, when they're devoted to fellowship in Christ and their time together, when they're defined by community and communion, when they're known for their generosity, when they're experiencing joy, and all of that is working together to cause the people of Jerusalem to look at the church and go, what's going on over there? That's different. I want to be a part of that. That's why when we have Grace's big night out, whenever we can do that again, I cannot wait. I always tell Compass Rose where we have them. They say, do you want to just rent it out? Should we shut it down and just invite Grace people? I always say, no way. I want the other folks of Raleigh to see our community because I believe our community is infectious. This is how the church ought to work. This is how we draw people in. And I believe, Grace, I absolutely do, that even though we are in a time of trial right now because we can't meet together, that as soon as we can fling the doors open and as we move forward, I think grace is going to be stronger than it ever has. And I think if we will commit ourselves to these seven distinctives, that if we will be eager learners, that if we will devote ourselves to Christ-centered time together, that if we will be known for our generosity, committed to spiritual disciplines, if we will be committed to the gathering, if we will see the importance of community and communion, I think if we will do all those things, it will produce in us an infectious and contagious joy that the people of Raleigh will notice and come to. And I hope that's what we will be. I hope that we will be a church in the 21st century that embodies all the distinctives of the church of the first century. And I'm so excited to see where we get to go from here when this season of quarantine is over. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so good to us. We can't fathom how you love us. We can't fathom how you look out for us. We are collectively thrilled that we get to be participants in your church, in your kingdom, in your bride that you came to rescue. Thank you for Jesus, who is the tie that binds us together and reconciles us to you. God, I pray that we would be every bit as unflinchingly the church in the 21st century as they were in the first century. Give us boldness to go where you would have us go. Give us zeal and energy to get there. Give us a devotion to you to sustain us. Give us an infectious joy to draw others in. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Grace, this week there's a man named George Floyd who was killed by a police officer. George was a black man, and you can't help but think that his race was a white woman who, in a racially fueled fear, weaponized the black man's race against him in a threat. And those instances are the most recent that have come into the national conscience. But there are just more instances in a long string of events that have happened that have pointed to the fact that we live in a culture with simmering racial tension. We live in a place where racial inequality is real. And I didn't think it would be right to get up here and just start preaching about Acts as if those things hadn't happened this week. I didn't think it would be right to meet together as together as we can be on a Sunday morning now and not acknowledge those things and pray for the racial divide and the wounds in our country to heal. And I didn't think it would be right to start this Sunday as a church and not earnestly ask our God together, what can we do, what can grace do to be a part of healing this divide? What portions of it as a greatly and majorly lily-white congregation can we own? And how can we contribute to closing the divide that exists in our culture? So I wanted to take a minute as we begin and pray for George Floyd and his family and pray for the racial divide in our country and pray for wisdom, for grace, as we seek to find how the Lord would have us be an active part of the healing of these wounds. So would you please pray with me? Father, our hearts are broken that we live in a place where things like this happen. Our hearts are broken that these incidents are not isolated. They're just the ones that we see. We know that you see all the incidents. We know that you have seen all the injustice. And we know that your heart breaks over injustice far more than ours ever could. So Father, first we pray for your heart in the face of these things. Break ours with yours. Father, we pray for the family of George Floyd. We ask that you would bring a healing that only you could bring. We pray for the attitudes that underlie the fear of Amy Cooper. And ask that you would solve those and bring those to the fore so that we might confront them and deal with them with equanimity and with justice and with grace. And Father, we ask that you would guide the partners and the leadership of grace and show us how we are to contribute to closing this divide and healing these wounds. Show us the path forward as we grieve, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. This morning is part two of a sermon that I'm calling Early Church Distinctives. Last week was part one. Hopefully you have your notes and you've got them numbered one through three. This week is going to be four, five, six, and seven. And last week I opened up with a short fictional story, really a parable, about a boy that was firing arrows at a barn and the arrows would land in the midst of a sea of red and then he would walk up and paint a target around the arrow and go, look, I hit the bullseye. And we talked about how, you know, this happens and this is applicable in a lot of organizations and institutions. It's a good parable about the dangers of mission drift. And often we start things without even knowing what we're going for, without even knowing what the goal is, without even knowing what the target is. And so we are asking last week as a church, how do we know that we're hitting the target? Another way to think about it is if Jesus and Paul were to come into the church on a Sunday morning when that's allowed, would they look around grace and everything that we're doing and say, yeah, you guys are nailing it. This is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. This is the target that we painted for you. So last week we asked the question, how do we know that we're hitting that target? How do we know that what we're doing as Grace is right? That Sunday mornings and small groups and children's ministry and student ministry and the philanthropic ministries that we do, how do we know that all that is right and good? Well, in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, we have a seminal passage that defines the early church. It paints the target for us. It shows us these are the things that the early church was characterized by. What's going on in the passage is Jesus has gone into heaven. He's left the disciples with the keys to the kingdom. They've received the Holy Spirit. They went out and they preached to thousands of people this gospel of repentance. Repent of who you thought Jesus was when you killed him and accept and walk in faith in the fact that Jesus and when he challenged them to repentance, it says about 3,000 were added to their number. And then those 3,000 formed the church. And right after that, we get Acts 2, 42 through 47, and it tells us the very things that defined the church. So last week, we looked at the first three distinctives that we see as defining the early church. This week, I want to look at the next four, four, five, six, and seven. And we said last week, there's different ways to group these together. You could pull out four distinctives or nine, but we're doing seven. And so last week we talked about the fact that they were devoted to the apostles' teaching, meaning they were eager learners. They were devoted to fellowship, meaning they were devoted to Christ-centered time together, and they were devoted to prayers, meaning that they were committed to the spiritual disciplines that they expressed in that day. So this week, as we continue to ask, how do we know if we're doing it right? What does God expect of his church? I want to continue to look at these distinctives that define the early church. By way of review, I wanted to take a minute and read the breaking of bread at the prayers. This week I want to start out by looking at that phrase that they sold all that they had in common and gave to any who had need. And we want to sum that up by saying that the fourth distinctive, if you're keeping your list there, is that they were known for generosity. They were known for their generosity. And it's interesting what's happening in this passage because what's literally happening is as the church is formed, everybody is selling whatever they have and giving it to the church leadership and saying, here, this is for the greater good. You guys use it for whatever you need to use it for. Obviously, my family's going to have some needs, but we trust you to provide for those. Here's everything that we own. Please use it to provide for everyone here, which is a super high bar. That's really daunting. Can you imagine if when we had our new members class at Grace, when we did Discover Grace and we talked all about Grace and who we are, and then we got to the end of it and it was like, okay, if you want to be a partner, here are the requirements. You know, you need to commit to Sunday morning attendance. You should be a believer. We'd like to see you in a small group. Also, small thing, if you could just kind of sell everything that you have and write a check to the elders, we'll take it from here. That would be a pretty tough sell. That's a pretty tall order. But to understand what's happening here, we need to feel the freedom to apply the principle and not necessarily the practice, because the principle is far more important. First, we need to understand what's happening in ancient Israel, in Israel at the time of Christ. Israel is what we would think of as a third world country. There's lots of joblessness. There's lots of poverty. There's lots of hunger. There's lots of suffering. There's no medical system really to speak of. And so suffering and need and want in Jerusalem was great. And while it was great, there was no infrastructure to provide for those who had fallen through the cracks of society. And what we understand is that God has intentionally designed the institution of the church to undergird society as a safety net to catch those who have fallen through the cracks of familial care. God first assigns to care for others. He first assigns family to care for family. This is why over and over again in Scripture, God makes a point of saying that if you love me, if you want to express true religion, then you'll care for the widows and the orphans. We see this in James in the New Testament, that true religion is to care for the widows and the orphans. We see it in Isaiah in the Old Testament, where God says, if you really want to please me, then plead the cause of the fatherless and take up the case of the widow. And what he's saying there is, and even in Deuteronomy when he says, look out for the sojourners, for the aliens, for the ones that don't have a family and can't support themselves, what he's saying in all that is, the church needs to serve in society as a safety net to care for those who fall through the cracks of familial care. We're supposed to be there and be helping them. And when there is a need, we are supposed to meet it. God has designed the church as an institutional safety net for society. And so in that time, there was no government. There was no Medicare. There was no welfare. There was no food stamps. There was no health care. There was none of that. And so the church was the only hope for the person who didn't have a family and was in need and couldn't support themselves. But now in our culture, thankfully, we have another safety net, which is the government. We do have a societal infrastructure to watch out for people who fall through the cracks of familial care. But still, the church undergirds all of that, and people who cannot be cared for by their family and cannot be cared for by the government, God looks at us, the church, and says, now you, you care for them. So we're still there, and it's still our responsibility, which is why the point from this part of the passage is that we need to be generous. We need to be conduits of God's generosity. We need to have a grieving heart for those who hurt and reach out to help those who can't help themselves. We need to be glad providers for those that are not provided for by their family or provided for by the government. We need to rally around them and be generous in spirits and be conduits of God's generosity. Another way to think of it perhaps is like this. When I became a senior pastor, I learned eventually about a thing called a designated giving fund. I'd really never heard of that before. It might shock you guys to know that I'm not a financial titan. I don't really know all the ins and outs of all that stuff. It's all news to me. I just try to spend less than what I make. That's pretty much it. But I found out that there's these things called designated giving funds. And how this works is you have money and you give a portion of that money to this fund that a company or an individual manages. And a lot of people will give money to this individual and they manage all the money in a fund. And that money is earmarked for charitable donations, charitable causes. And whoever you give your money to, they just sit on it and they hold it for however long you want to. And then when something pricks your heart, when something touches you, when you see a need that you'd like to meet, you pick up the phone or you type the email and you let the person managing your money know, hey, I would like you to send this much money to this person because they need it. This matters to me. I'd like you to allocate my resources to that person or that institution for those people. That's how a designated giving fund works fundamentally. And what it's made me realize is that we're all God's designated giving funds. That's what stewardship is. We've heard about this idea of stewardship before, that everything we have is God's and not our own. We've heard about that. But the more I thought about it this week, I've realized we're all God's designated giving funds. He allocates a portion of money to us. He entrusts it to us. And every now and again, he picks up the phone or he writes the email and he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this thing matters to me. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to them. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to these people. That's the principle of what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, is they're expressing the Lord's generosity. And I think increasingly, and I know that that's a tall order, and I know that you may be very far away from viewing everything you have as really belonging to God. And that's, I think, a progressive revelation as we understand God. But I think one of the marks of spiritual maturity in a church and in an individual is when the church and when the person understands that we're really just designated giving funds for God. He's allocated a portion of his resources to us as individuals and to us as a church. And every now and again, he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this matters to me. I'd like you to shift some of those resources over there to them. And that's how we're to serve. It's the mark of the church to be generous. The fifth distinctive that I see in this text is that they were committed to gathering. It says they gathered day by day in the temple courts. It's this old school way of church. You know, when I grew up, we were there every time the doors were open. We went Sunday morning, we went Sunday night, we went Wednesday night, every week. That was the deal. The doors were open, we were there. That's kind of old school church. Now, increasingly, if someone is a regular church attender, it means they come to church maybe twice a month. But the early church was committed to the gathering. It mattered to them. It mattered to them to come together when they were able to be in the temple learning and praising and fellowshipping together. The early church intuitively and instinctively understood the power and efficacy of being around one another, the power and the efficacy of the gathering. This is why in Hebrews we're told to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together. Because there's something special about being in the same place. And if nothing else, that's what this time of pandemic and isolation has taught us. Across the board, across the country, almost universally, church engagement and virtual attendance is declining. And as we've talked about that as a staff, and I've talked about that with the elders, I've just made the point that, you know, online church, this ability to participate in church in our sweatpants and the comfort of our own home, that's been a thing for at least 15 years, maybe longer. And there's a reason why it hasn't taken off. There's a reason why it hasn't overtaken in-person church. Because even now in the 21st century, we understand that there's a power and an efficacy that's difficult to capture in simply being together, in experiencing the teaching together, in laughing together, in and worshiping together and sharing together in the lobby, we understand that that is important. It's why at Grace, if you do come to a Discover Grace class, that one of the things we do ask our partners to commit to is to prioritize Sunday morning service. Because we believe that the gathering matters. And I can't wait until we are able to gather again. It's a distinctive of the early church and it ought to define our church. The sixth distinctive is the one that, of all of them, probably fires me up the most. I get so excited about this, and I think that it defines the early church. They were defined by communion and community. They were defined by communion and community. We see in verse 42 that they were devoted to the breaking of bread. And then again in 46 that they gathered in one another's homes and they broke bread together. It happens two times. And then all throughout this passage, we see they, they, they, collective, collective, collective. It's always about others. And the church is a fundamentally communal institution. It is fundamentally involved with others. I've said often it is impossible to live out the Christian life on an island. It is impossible to grow closer to Jesus void of the influence of others in your life. We absolutely, our souls need to be surrounded by godly Christian community. That's why at Grace, our mission statement is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people because we believe that we cannot deepen our connection with Jesus void of connections with others. And I believe this so fervently that I would say to you, if you're listening this morning and you're not sure that you have Christian community in your life, ignore everything else that I'm saying. Put it all on the back burner. Just take it and set it aside for a later date and get Christian community in your life. Stop right now. Quit listening to me and pray that God would provide for you a community of faith who supports you, who love you, who have permission to tell you the truth about yourself and to tell you what Jesus says about you. We desperately need Christian community in our life. And the early church was a communal thing, and that persists to this day. But it wasn't just about community. It was about communion. We see that phrase, the breaking of bread, and we automatically think that this is an expression of community and hospitality, and it is. And for all of history, for all of history, that has been how we've expressed hospitality. Food has been the fundamental way that we've expressed community. Once you get to know somebody a little bit, maybe you have a common activity or something, but eventually you're going to say, hey, let's grab lunch. Let's get the wives together and let's go to dinner. Let's get the families together and y'all come over. And increasingly that means we go somewhere and we experience a food together, but the most intimate time, the most special times are when people are invited over to the home. When you invite people into your home, there's a special care taken. You clean up the house. You let them know that you care about them, that they matter to you. You try to think of the special thing that they like, of the appetizer that they went nuts over the last time, of the dessert that you can remember in conversation that they said they like. If you're making steaks and there's somebody who doesn't like steak, you make sure and you have chicken to make them feel thought for and cared for. You make sure that there's something for their kids so that they know that their kid is important to you as well. There's this special power of hospitality, of welcoming people into our homes and expressing community in that way. And when the tradition of communion started, that's where it started. It started in someone's home as Jesus and the disciples sat around and broke bread together. They sat around and they were having a meal together. They were expressing community. It was the Passover supper. And you know, we observe communion in our churches. Most churches observe it like grace does. At grace, we do it once a month in the service. The elders stand on either side at the end of the sermon. I'll go through the story of communion and when it started and we'll have a particular thought that we go with. Then we spend some time in prayer and then we line up and we get we get the bread, and we dip it, and we go back to our seats, and it's an austere, respectful time, and that's right and good. But communion didn't start that way. Communion started in community. Communion started around a table. When Jesus took the bread, and he looked at the disciples, and and he broke it and he began to hand it out. And this was not an unusual practice. Every home didn't have a knife. The way that you serve bread was to take the loaf and tear off a portion of it and give it to your guests. So what Jesus did was not a new thing. This wasn't unusual to the disciples or anyone else who could have seen it. It was a ubiquitous, common part of the meal. And in this moment, Jesus takes the thing that we do every time we express community and he imbues it with purpose. And he says, every time you do this, do what? Line up in church and get in the line and tear off the bread and dip it in the wine and spend some time praying? No, not that. Every time you do this, every time you gather in community with me as your focus and you break bread, you serve the bread to the people who are in your house. This common activity that was mundane until this moment. Jesus says, every time you do this from now on, I want you to remember me. I want you to remember that I'm the bread, that I'm the bread of life, that my body was broken for you. Similarly, he takes the wine and he pours it. It's a totally common mundane activity. It happens in every dinner party ever where the host takes the glasses and pours the drink. And Jesus says, whenever you do this, whenever you do what? Gather in church and dip the bread in the wine? No, whenever you experience community together and when you serve the drinks, I want you to stop and remember me and feel that and see that as my blood that is poured out for you. Remember my crucifixion and that I am the tie that binds here and that I am what brings you in common with one another and that I am what reconciles you with the heavenly Father. Remember that. Communion didn't start in church buildings. It started at dinner tables. It started in community. And Jesus took these mundane expressions that are a part of every communal gathering around the table, and he said, from now on, when you do these things, don't just let them be a passive thing where you just serve the bread and you serve the drinks and you move on. I want you to stop and I want you to remember me. That's communion. Communion is always an expression of community. Communion always draws us into community and community should always focus on communion. So I think the challenge for us at Grace, who love community very much, we're real good at community. That's one of my favorite things about this church. We love having people over. We love getting together. But the challenge for us is when we do, when that bread is served and when it's broken, when the drinks are poured, it is right and good and obedient to pause and to pray and to say, Jesus, thank you that you are this bread. Thank you that you are this drink. Thank you that you make tonight possible and that you make our relationship with you possible. We're having fun here tonight, Jesus, but we want to pause and we want to say thank you for making this possible and we want to remember you because that's the instruction of communion. Not once a month when you're in church, come to the front and take the bread and dip it in the wine. That is a shadow. That is a mimicry of the actual communion. And it is right and good to do it in church. But it is forgetful and wrong if we don't do it together in community. So let the challenge be to grace as we commune, as we gather, as we express hospitality and we all begin to fling our doors back open and have people over. Can we please take a moment in those times and do things in remembrance of Christ and make communion more a part of our community. Finally, the seventh distinctive is that this church had a contagious joy. I want to read for you the last portion of scripture so that you kind of know what I'm talking about. It says, They gathered together every day. They invited people into their homes. It's not a stretch to think that they would just invite their neighbors in too because there's a meal and you should come have fun with us. They gathered in the temple courts. They pooled their resources and gave to anyone who had need. No doubt that brought people in who had need, who experienced this genuine community and love for the first time in their life. And then in all of that, as they met with glad and happy hearts, they praised their God and it said that they won favor with all the people. Not just the people of the church, but the people around them, which means that the people of Jerusalem at large began to take notice of this infectious community of joy that was the early church. And because they began to take notice of that, because they won favor with the people surrounding them simply by being an expression of the church and exuding that contagious joy, because people saw that, this passage ends with, and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Their contagious and infectious joy led to the salvation of souls. It's really interesting to me that two weeks ago I talked in Acts 2 about the fundamental and foundational repentance of the church. It's a confession that I've been wrong about who I thought Jesus was and I'm going to walk in the belief that he is who he says he is. And out of that confession and repentance, 3,000 people were added to that number. And now in Acts 2, 42 through 47, we see more people being added to their numbers. And the confession and repentance is what drew people in at the beginning, but now at this point in the church, what's now drawing people in? Now what's drawing people in is the favor that their infectious joy is winning with all people. Now what we're seeing is the church cranking on all cylinders. We're seeing the results of what happens when people are devoted to the apostles' teaching and are eager learners, when they're devoted to fellowship in Christ and their time together, when they're defined by community and communion, when they're known for their generosity, when they're experiencing joy, and all of that is working together to cause the people of Jerusalem to look at the church and go, what's going on over there? That's different. I want to be a part of that. That's why when we have Grace's big night out, whenever we can do that again, I cannot wait. I always tell Compass Rose where we have them. They say, do you want to just rent it out? Should we shut it down and just invite Grace people? I always say, no way. I want the other folks of Raleigh to see our community because I believe our community is infectious. This is how the church ought to work. This is how we draw people in. And I believe, Grace, I absolutely do, that even though we are in a time of trial right now because we can't meet together, that as soon as we can fling the doors open and as we move forward, I think grace is going to be stronger than it ever has. And I think if we will commit ourselves to these seven distinctives, that if we will be eager learners, that if we will devote ourselves to Christ-centered time together, that if we will be known for our generosity, committed to spiritual disciplines, if we will be committed to the gathering, if we will see the importance of community and communion, I think if we will do all those things, it will produce in us an infectious and contagious joy that the people of Raleigh will notice and come to. And I hope that's what we will be. I hope that we will be a church in the 21st century that embodies all the distinctives of the church of the first century. And I'm so excited to see where we get to go from here when this season of quarantine is over. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so good to us. We can't fathom how you love us. We can't fathom how you look out for us. We are collectively thrilled that we get to be participants in your church, in your kingdom, in your bride that you came to rescue. Thank you for Jesus, who is the tie that binds us together and reconciles us to you. God, I pray that we would be every bit as unflinchingly the church in the 21st century as they were in the first century. Give us boldness to go where you would have us go. Give us zeal and energy to get there. Give us a devotion to you to sustain us. Give us an infectious joy to draw others in. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Grace, this week there's a man named George Floyd who was killed by a police officer. George was a black man, and you can't help but think that his race was a white woman who, in a racially fueled fear, weaponized the black man's race against him in a threat. And those instances are the most recent that have come into the national conscience. But there are just more instances in a long string of events that have happened that have pointed to the fact that we live in a culture with simmering racial tension. We live in a place where racial inequality is real. And I didn't think it would be right to get up here and just start preaching about Acts as if those things hadn't happened this week. I didn't think it would be right to meet together as together as we can be on a Sunday morning now and not acknowledge those things and pray for the racial divide and the wounds in our country to heal. And I didn't think it would be right to start this Sunday as a church and not earnestly ask our God together, what can we do, what can grace do to be a part of healing this divide? What portions of it as a greatly and majorly lily-white congregation can we own? And how can we contribute to closing the divide that exists in our culture? So I wanted to take a minute as we begin and pray for George Floyd and his family and pray for the racial divide in our country and pray for wisdom, for grace, as we seek to find how the Lord would have us be an active part of the healing of these wounds. So would you please pray with me? Father, our hearts are broken that we live in a place where things like this happen. Our hearts are broken that these incidents are not isolated. They're just the ones that we see. We know that you see all the incidents. We know that you have seen all the injustice. And we know that your heart breaks over injustice far more than ours ever could. So Father, first we pray for your heart in the face of these things. Break ours with yours. Father, we pray for the family of George Floyd. We ask that you would bring a healing that only you could bring. We pray for the attitudes that underlie the fear of Amy Cooper. And ask that you would solve those and bring those to the fore so that we might confront them and deal with them with equanimity and with justice and with grace. And Father, we ask that you would guide the partners and the leadership of grace and show us how we are to contribute to closing this divide and healing these wounds. Show us the path forward as we grieve, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. This morning is part two of a sermon that I'm calling Early Church Distinctives. Last week was part one. Hopefully you have your notes and you've got them numbered one through three. This week is going to be four, five, six, and seven. And last week I opened up with a short fictional story, really a parable, about a boy that was firing arrows at a barn and the arrows would land in the midst of a sea of red and then he would walk up and paint a target around the arrow and go, look, I hit the bullseye. And we talked about how, you know, this happens and this is applicable in a lot of organizations and institutions. It's a good parable about the dangers of mission drift. And often we start things without even knowing what we're going for, without even knowing what the goal is, without even knowing what the target is. And so we are asking last week as a church, how do we know that we're hitting the target? Another way to think about it is if Jesus and Paul were to come into the church on a Sunday morning when that's allowed, would they look around grace and everything that we're doing and say, yeah, you guys are nailing it. This is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. This is the target that we painted for you. So last week we asked the question, how do we know that we're hitting that target? How do we know that what we're doing as Grace is right? That Sunday mornings and small groups and children's ministry and student ministry and the philanthropic ministries that we do, how do we know that all that is right and good? Well, in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, we have a seminal passage that defines the early church. It paints the target for us. It shows us these are the things that the early church was characterized by. What's going on in the passage is Jesus has gone into heaven. He's left the disciples with the keys to the kingdom. They've received the Holy Spirit. They went out and they preached to thousands of people this gospel of repentance. Repent of who you thought Jesus was when you killed him and accept and walk in faith in the fact that Jesus and when he challenged them to repentance, it says about 3,000 were added to their number. And then those 3,000 formed the church. And right after that, we get Acts 2, 42 through 47, and it tells us the very things that defined the church. So last week, we looked at the first three distinctives that we see as defining the early church. This week, I want to look at the next four, four, five, six, and seven. And we said last week, there's different ways to group these together. You could pull out four distinctives or nine, but we're doing seven. And so last week we talked about the fact that they were devoted to the apostles' teaching, meaning they were eager learners. They were devoted to fellowship, meaning they were devoted to Christ-centered time together, and they were devoted to prayers, meaning that they were committed to the spiritual disciplines that they expressed in that day. So this week, as we continue to ask, how do we know if we're doing it right? What does God expect of his church? I want to continue to look at these distinctives that define the early church. By way of review, I wanted to take a minute and read the breaking of bread at the prayers. This week I want to start out by looking at that phrase that they sold all that they had in common and gave to any who had need. And we want to sum that up by saying that the fourth distinctive, if you're keeping your list there, is that they were known for generosity. They were known for their generosity. And it's interesting what's happening in this passage because what's literally happening is as the church is formed, everybody is selling whatever they have and giving it to the church leadership and saying, here, this is for the greater good. You guys use it for whatever you need to use it for. Obviously, my family's going to have some needs, but we trust you to provide for those. Here's everything that we own. Please use it to provide for everyone here, which is a super high bar. That's really daunting. Can you imagine if when we had our new members class at Grace, when we did Discover Grace and we talked all about Grace and who we are, and then we got to the end of it and it was like, okay, if you want to be a partner, here are the requirements. You know, you need to commit to Sunday morning attendance. You should be a believer. We'd like to see you in a small group. Also, small thing, if you could just kind of sell everything that you have and write a check to the elders, we'll take it from here. That would be a pretty tough sell. That's a pretty tall order. But to understand what's happening here, we need to feel the freedom to apply the principle and not necessarily the practice, because the principle is far more important. First, we need to understand what's happening in ancient Israel, in Israel at the time of Christ. Israel is what we would think of as a third world country. There's lots of joblessness. There's lots of poverty. There's lots of hunger. There's lots of suffering. There's no medical system really to speak of. And so suffering and need and want in Jerusalem was great. And while it was great, there was no infrastructure to provide for those who had fallen through the cracks of society. And what we understand is that God has intentionally designed the institution of the church to undergird society as a safety net to catch those who have fallen through the cracks of familial care. God first assigns to care for others. He first assigns family to care for family. This is why over and over again in Scripture, God makes a point of saying that if you love me, if you want to express true religion, then you'll care for the widows and the orphans. We see this in James in the New Testament, that true religion is to care for the widows and the orphans. We see it in Isaiah in the Old Testament, where God says, if you really want to please me, then plead the cause of the fatherless and take up the case of the widow. And what he's saying there is, and even in Deuteronomy when he says, look out for the sojourners, for the aliens, for the ones that don't have a family and can't support themselves, what he's saying in all that is, the church needs to serve in society as a safety net to care for those who fall through the cracks of familial care. We're supposed to be there and be helping them. And when there is a need, we are supposed to meet it. God has designed the church as an institutional safety net for society. And so in that time, there was no government. There was no Medicare. There was no welfare. There was no food stamps. There was no health care. There was none of that. And so the church was the only hope for the person who didn't have a family and was in need and couldn't support themselves. But now in our culture, thankfully, we have another safety net, which is the government. We do have a societal infrastructure to watch out for people who fall through the cracks of familial care. But still, the church undergirds all of that, and people who cannot be cared for by their family and cannot be cared for by the government, God looks at us, the church, and says, now you, you care for them. So we're still there, and it's still our responsibility, which is why the point from this part of the passage is that we need to be generous. We need to be conduits of God's generosity. We need to have a grieving heart for those who hurt and reach out to help those who can't help themselves. We need to be glad providers for those that are not provided for by their family or provided for by the government. We need to rally around them and be generous in spirits and be conduits of God's generosity. Another way to think of it perhaps is like this. When I became a senior pastor, I learned eventually about a thing called a designated giving fund. I'd really never heard of that before. It might shock you guys to know that I'm not a financial titan. I don't really know all the ins and outs of all that stuff. It's all news to me. I just try to spend less than what I make. That's pretty much it. But I found out that there's these things called designated giving funds. And how this works is you have money and you give a portion of that money to this fund that a company or an individual manages. And a lot of people will give money to this individual and they manage all the money in a fund. And that money is earmarked for charitable donations, charitable causes. And whoever you give your money to, they just sit on it and they hold it for however long you want to. And then when something pricks your heart, when something touches you, when you see a need that you'd like to meet, you pick up the phone or you type the email and you let the person managing your money know, hey, I would like you to send this much money to this person because they need it. This matters to me. I'd like you to allocate my resources to that person or that institution for those people. That's how a designated giving fund works fundamentally. And what it's made me realize is that we're all God's designated giving funds. That's what stewardship is. We've heard about this idea of stewardship before, that everything we have is God's and not our own. We've heard about that. But the more I thought about it this week, I've realized we're all God's designated giving funds. He allocates a portion of money to us. He entrusts it to us. And every now and again, he picks up the phone or he writes the email and he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this thing matters to me. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to them. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to these people. That's the principle of what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, is they're expressing the Lord's generosity. And I think increasingly, and I know that that's a tall order, and I know that you may be very far away from viewing everything you have as really belonging to God. And that's, I think, a progressive revelation as we understand God. But I think one of the marks of spiritual maturity in a church and in an individual is when the church and when the person understands that we're really just designated giving funds for God. He's allocated a portion of his resources to us as individuals and to us as a church. And every now and again, he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this matters to me. I'd like you to shift some of those resources over there to them. And that's how we're to serve. It's the mark of the church to be generous. The fifth distinctive that I see in this text is that they were committed to gathering. It says they gathered day by day in the temple courts. It's this old school way of church. You know, when I grew up, we were there every time the doors were open. We went Sunday morning, we went Sunday night, we went Wednesday night, every week. That was the deal. The doors were open, we were there. That's kind of old school church. Now, increasingly, if someone is a regular church attender, it means they come to church maybe twice a month. But the early church was committed to the gathering. It mattered to them. It mattered to them to come together when they were able to be in the temple learning and praising and fellowshipping together. The early church intuitively and instinctively understood the power and efficacy of being around one another, the power and the efficacy of the gathering. This is why in Hebrews we're told to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together. Because there's something special about being in the same place. And if nothing else, that's what this time of pandemic and isolation has taught us. Across the board, across the country, almost universally, church engagement and virtual attendance is declining. And as we've talked about that as a staff, and I've talked about that with the elders, I've just made the point that, you know, online church, this ability to participate in church in our sweatpants and the comfort of our own home, that's been a thing for at least 15 years, maybe longer. And there's a reason why it hasn't taken off. There's a reason why it hasn't overtaken in-person church. Because even now in the 21st century, we understand that there's a power and an efficacy that's difficult to capture in simply being together, in experiencing the teaching together, in laughing together, in and worshiping together and sharing together in the lobby, we understand that that is important. It's why at Grace, if you do come to a Discover Grace class, that one of the things we do ask our partners to commit to is to prioritize Sunday morning service. Because we believe that the gathering matters. And I can't wait until we are able to gather again. It's a distinctive of the early church and it ought to define our church. The sixth distinctive is the one that, of all of them, probably fires me up the most. I get so excited about this, and I think that it defines the early church. They were defined by communion and community. They were defined by communion and community. We see in verse 42 that they were devoted to the breaking of bread. And then again in 46 that they gathered in one another's homes and they broke bread together. It happens two times. And then all throughout this passage, we see they, they, they, collective, collective, collective. It's always about others. And the church is a fundamentally communal institution. It is fundamentally involved with others. I've said often it is impossible to live out the Christian life on an island. It is impossible to grow closer to Jesus void of the influence of others in your life. We absolutely, our souls need to be surrounded by godly Christian community. That's why at Grace, our mission statement is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people because we believe that we cannot deepen our connection with Jesus void of connections with others. And I believe this so fervently that I would say to you, if you're listening this morning and you're not sure that you have Christian community in your life, ignore everything else that I'm saying. Put it all on the back burner. Just take it and set it aside for a later date and get Christian community in your life. Stop right now. Quit listening to me and pray that God would provide for you a community of faith who supports you, who love you, who have permission to tell you the truth about yourself and to tell you what Jesus says about you. We desperately need Christian community in our life. And the early church was a communal thing, and that persists to this day. But it wasn't just about community. It was about communion. We see that phrase, the breaking of bread, and we automatically think that this is an expression of community and hospitality, and it is. And for all of history, for all of history, that has been how we've expressed hospitality. Food has been the fundamental way that we've expressed community. Once you get to know somebody a little bit, maybe you have a common activity or something, but eventually you're going to say, hey, let's grab lunch. Let's get the wives together and let's go to dinner. Let's get the families together and y'all come over. And increasingly that means we go somewhere and we experience a food together, but the most intimate time, the most special times are when people are invited over to the home. When you invite people into your home, there's a special care taken. You clean up the house. You let them know that you care about them, that they matter to you. You try to think of the special thing that they like, of the appetizer that they went nuts over the last time, of the dessert that you can remember in conversation that they said they like. If you're making steaks and there's somebody who doesn't like steak, you make sure and you have chicken to make them feel thought for and cared for. You make sure that there's something for their kids so that they know that their kid is important to you as well. There's this special power of hospitality, of welcoming people into our homes and expressing community in that way. And when the tradition of communion started, that's where it started. It started in someone's home as Jesus and the disciples sat around and broke bread together. They sat around and they were having a meal together. They were expressing community. It was the Passover supper. And you know, we observe communion in our churches. Most churches observe it like grace does. At grace, we do it once a month in the service. The elders stand on either side at the end of the sermon. I'll go through the story of communion and when it started and we'll have a particular thought that we go with. Then we spend some time in prayer and then we line up and we get we get the bread, and we dip it, and we go back to our seats, and it's an austere, respectful time, and that's right and good. But communion didn't start that way. Communion started in community. Communion started around a table. When Jesus took the bread, and he looked at the disciples, and and he broke it and he began to hand it out. And this was not an unusual practice. Every home didn't have a knife. The way that you serve bread was to take the loaf and tear off a portion of it and give it to your guests. So what Jesus did was not a new thing. This wasn't unusual to the disciples or anyone else who could have seen it. It was a ubiquitous, common part of the meal. And in this moment, Jesus takes the thing that we do every time we express community and he imbues it with purpose. And he says, every time you do this, do what? Line up in church and get in the line and tear off the bread and dip it in the wine and spend some time praying? No, not that. Every time you do this, every time you gather in community with me as your focus and you break bread, you serve the bread to the people who are in your house. This common activity that was mundane until this moment. Jesus says, every time you do this from now on, I want you to remember me. I want you to remember that I'm the bread, that I'm the bread of life, that my body was broken for you. Similarly, he takes the wine and he pours it. It's a totally common mundane activity. It happens in every dinner party ever where the host takes the glasses and pours the drink. And Jesus says, whenever you do this, whenever you do what? Gather in church and dip the bread in the wine? No, whenever you experience community together and when you serve the drinks, I want you to stop and remember me and feel that and see that as my blood that is poured out for you. Remember my crucifixion and that I am the tie that binds here and that I am what brings you in common with one another and that I am what reconciles you with the heavenly Father. Remember that. Communion didn't start in church buildings. It started at dinner tables. It started in community. And Jesus took these mundane expressions that are a part of every communal gathering around the table, and he said, from now on, when you do these things, don't just let them be a passive thing where you just serve the bread and you serve the drinks and you move on. I want you to stop and I want you to remember me. That's communion. Communion is always an expression of community. Communion always draws us into community and community should always focus on communion. So I think the challenge for us at Grace, who love community very much, we're real good at community. That's one of my favorite things about this church. We love having people over. We love getting together. But the challenge for us is when we do, when that bread is served and when it's broken, when the drinks are poured, it is right and good and obedient to pause and to pray and to say, Jesus, thank you that you are this bread. Thank you that you are this drink. Thank you that you make tonight possible and that you make our relationship with you possible. We're having fun here tonight, Jesus, but we want to pause and we want to say thank you for making this possible and we want to remember you because that's the instruction of communion. Not once a month when you're in church, come to the front and take the bread and dip it in the wine. That is a shadow. That is a mimicry of the actual communion. And it is right and good to do it in church. But it is forgetful and wrong if we don't do it together in community. So let the challenge be to grace as we commune, as we gather, as we express hospitality and we all begin to fling our doors back open and have people over. Can we please take a moment in those times and do things in remembrance of Christ and make communion more a part of our community. Finally, the seventh distinctive is that this church had a contagious joy. I want to read for you the last portion of scripture so that you kind of know what I'm talking about. It says, They gathered together every day. They invited people into their homes. It's not a stretch to think that they would just invite their neighbors in too because there's a meal and you should come have fun with us. They gathered in the temple courts. They pooled their resources and gave to anyone who had need. No doubt that brought people in who had need, who experienced this genuine community and love for the first time in their life. And then in all of that, as they met with glad and happy hearts, they praised their God and it said that they won favor with all the people. Not just the people of the church, but the people around them, which means that the people of Jerusalem at large began to take notice of this infectious community of joy that was the early church. And because they began to take notice of that, because they won favor with the people surrounding them simply by being an expression of the church and exuding that contagious joy, because people saw that, this passage ends with, and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Their contagious and infectious joy led to the salvation of souls. It's really interesting to me that two weeks ago I talked in Acts 2 about the fundamental and foundational repentance of the church. It's a confession that I've been wrong about who I thought Jesus was and I'm going to walk in the belief that he is who he says he is. And out of that confession and repentance, 3,000 people were added to that number. And now in Acts 2, 42 through 47, we see more people being added to their numbers. And the confession and repentance is what drew people in at the beginning, but now at this point in the church, what's now drawing people in? Now what's drawing people in is the favor that their infectious joy is winning with all people. Now what we're seeing is the church cranking on all cylinders. We're seeing the results of what happens when people are devoted to the apostles' teaching and are eager learners, when they're devoted to fellowship in Christ and their time together, when they're defined by community and communion, when they're known for their generosity, when they're experiencing joy, and all of that is working together to cause the people of Jerusalem to look at the church and go, what's going on over there? That's different. I want to be a part of that. That's why when we have Grace's big night out, whenever we can do that again, I cannot wait. I always tell Compass Rose where we have them. They say, do you want to just rent it out? Should we shut it down and just invite Grace people? I always say, no way. I want the other folks of Raleigh to see our community because I believe our community is infectious. This is how the church ought to work. This is how we draw people in. And I believe, Grace, I absolutely do, that even though we are in a time of trial right now because we can't meet together, that as soon as we can fling the doors open and as we move forward, I think grace is going to be stronger than it ever has. And I think if we will commit ourselves to these seven distinctives, that if we will be eager learners, that if we will devote ourselves to Christ-centered time together, that if we will be known for our generosity, committed to spiritual disciplines, if we will be committed to the gathering, if we will see the importance of community and communion, I think if we will do all those things, it will produce in us an infectious and contagious joy that the people of Raleigh will notice and come to. And I hope that's what we will be. I hope that we will be a church in the 21st century that embodies all the distinctives of the church of the first century. And I'm so excited to see where we get to go from here when this season of quarantine is over. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so good to us. We can't fathom how you love us. We can't fathom how you look out for us. We are collectively thrilled that we get to be participants in your church, in your kingdom, in your bride that you came to rescue. Thank you for Jesus, who is the tie that binds us together and reconciles us to you. God, I pray that we would be every bit as unflinchingly the church in the 21st century as they were in the first century. Give us boldness to go where you would have us go. Give us zeal and energy to get there. Give us a devotion to you to sustain us. Give us an infectious joy to draw others in. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. You guys have packed it out. I thought for a second that you guys were excited about church in June, which is wonderful. But what I've realized is inflation has hit all of us. We're too poor for vacations. So it's going to be a great summer for church. Before I get started, as one of the pastors, I get the opportunity to meet with folks who are new to the church sometimes. And this week I had the opportunity to grab brunch with a couple that's been visiting for a couple of weeks. And they shared with me that on their very first, they were going to look at a bunch of churches, but on their very first visit with Grace, that they struck up a conversation with another couple in the lobby that approached them. And that conversation went so well that they just invited them to lunch. So on their very first visit at Grace, they got invited to lunch and made friends. And I thought that was fantastic. So just sharing that with you, let's be that kind of church, Grace. Now there's a couple of people here for the first time and they're like, but don't, don't be that kind this week. All right. We don't, we would like to go to our own lunch. I'm sure it makes sense in the conversation, but when good things happen, I like to share them with you guys. Last week, we launched into this series called Idols and we looked at kind of how much more given to idolatry in our life we are than we might think we are or might have thought we were. And we talked about this idea that idols can't bear the weight of our worship. And I spent a lot of time saying we shouldn't idolize our children, our families, our spouses, and our communities, different things like that. And I just want to be clear. I meant to say this last week and I didn't say it and I should have. I just forgot. Those are good priorities. It's good to prioritize family and spouse and marriage and even career. That's fine to do that. But they make terrible gods because they can't carry the weight of our worship. And then at the end, I kind of told you what the rest of the series was going to be about. I had somebody tell me before the service started this morning, she was like, I caught up online. I was serving in children's last week and you got to the end about the four source idols, the four invisible idols. And once I listened to that, I did not want to hear the rest of the series. It's like, I was tracking with you on the other ones. Those are fine. I got those in check. And then I talked about the four source idols of power, control, approval, and comfort. And she was like, no thanks. Don't need to hear that. It's going to be too convicting. But it's this idea that there are surface idols. We idolize money. We idolize success. We idolize friends. We idolize whatever. But that idolizing is fueled by a source idol of one of those four things I just mentioned. So we're going to spend the next four weeks, including this week, looking at those different source idols, how they show up in our lives, and what we can do to invite the Holy Spirit into our life to make some space to root those idols out. Five or six years ago, I went with Jen, my wife, to Washington, D.C. with some friends of ours, Heath and Ashley. They flew into Raleigh, and then we drove up together. It was a really great trip. We stayed in an Airbnb. The first night we were there, we looked out the window, and there's this little bar-pub situation going on across the street. And so we said, let's just go over there. It'll be simple. It looks fine. So we walk over there. It was crowded. There was a little bit of a wait. And so I find one of the servers, and I say, hey, how long is the wait, and can we put our name in? And he says, oh, no, we don't do that. It's just first come, first serve. I said, like, free for all? Just, like, grab a table when someone gets up? And he goes, yep. All right. And I found out later it was trivia night. So it was a busy night. So we're kind of standing there waiting for something to pop open. And I excuse myself. I'm going to walk back to the restaurant. I'm going to go use the restroom. In the restroom. Not just in the back of the restaurant. So I'm going'm walking through and I look over and there's this high top table party of three and they're starting to get up there's four seats at the table I'm like perfect so I say are you guys about to get up and they go yeah and I said I'm running to the restroom would you mind waiting when I come back y'all get up we'll take your table and they go that's fine so that's what I did I come back and they see me and they start to get up. As they start to get up, I can see two dudes from either corner of the bar start to center in on this table. Right. So as that guy's, as the dad is getting up, I'm like, thanks very much. And I'll just kind of sit down like there's stuff still on it. They're putting on their jackets. They get their stuff. They move. These two dudes come to my table. And one of them, right off the bat, aggressively says, you can't sit there. That's not your table. That's our table. And I didn't like that. I didn't like that. And so I looked at him, and I said, that's funny, because it looks looks like my table because I'm sitting here. And he said, we've been here. I've watched you walk in. We've been here 30 minutes longer than you waiting for a table. This was the next table up. The right thing to do is to get up and give us this table. So get up. And I said, I don't think so, man. And I'm kind of motioning at my party to come sit down like for in a million years Jen's walking into that situation because I'm trying to tough guy this thing these two dudes are way bigger than me if this goes down it's not going to go well for me and then as I'm doing that they're still giving me lip then the server comes over and he starts clearing off the table. And the guy that was being aggressive says, hey, tell this, words I can't say in church. He said, tell this guy that this is our table. He needs to get up. And the guy said, I don't really get involved with that. Just kind of backs away. He was like, you boys got to figure this out. So he keeps at me. And I said, listen, man, I can acknowledge that you were here before me. I can acknowledge that you probably deserve this table more than I do. And I'll be happy to give it to you if you ask me nicely and say, please. And he said, excuse me and threatened me one more time. And I said, all you got to do is be a nice guy and say, please, and I'll give you this table. And finally, his buddy goes, dude, just say please. And he goes, he goes, all right, would you, would you mind giving us this table, please? And I said, sure, that'd be great. Here you go. Happy to give it to you. Walked off. Jen's shaking her head. Now, now listen, if you listen to that story and your internal monologue was, God, I don't really know if that's how a pastor should be acting. That's kind of, probably should have just had the grace in the moment to get over being slightly offended and let that person have the seat and maybe, you know, like be a grown up. If that's your internal monologue, that there was a better way to handle that, you're right. There was. And I agree with you. I do think, I can admit that story is funny. I am not proud of it. I wished I would have handled it differently. I do not think anyone is listening to that thinking, and through Nate would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ in that particular instance. If you listen to that story and you loved it, and you were like, yeah, tell them, don't move, make them say please, make them pay you for the table. If you're thinking about what you would have done in that situation and you would have been equally upset, you need to pay attention this morning as we explore the idol of power in our lives. This idol of power, I told you last week I had to admit that it was mine. I didn't want to admit it. Because it sounds like you want to be in charge of everything all the time. And that's really not what it is. That's part of what it is. But what it's really about is we just don't want to be told what to do. Just don't tell me what to do. If you know anything about me, you know I do not want to be told what to do. Karen Lotta got me a mug. I drink out of it at least once a week that says, I was going to do that. And then you told me to. All right. If that's you, then like me, you struggle with the idolatry of power, of being in charge, of being the guy, of being respected. It doesn't mean you have to be the boss everywhere you go, but there's certain pockets in certain places where you're just not going to put up with it. And here's how you can really tell if power is the idol with which you struggle deeply. The manifesting sin of power is anger. The manifesting sin of power is being angry, is having these flashes of anger that cause you to do and say things that you wish you could take back. I acted that way in that restaurant in D.C. because I was made angry, because he had the guts to tell me what to do. And until he acknowledged who had the power, I was not going to back down. It was immature and gross, but that's what was happening there. The besetting sin of power is to be someone who is angry whenever that power and that license and that freedom is threatened. And anger, we know, is a terrible thing to have festering in our lives. If you are someone who struggles like I do with being more angry than we should be sometimes, then you know experientially and intuitively that what James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16, is true. When James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16 is true. When James says, my dear brothers and sisters, take note of this. Everyone, oh 19, everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. And then in the next verse, he tells you why. Because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Now listen, most of you in this room, because I know you, I know that you've been Christians for a while. And so a lot of the big sins, the big stuff that we shouldn't do, you've got that in check, and that's good. But for some of you in the room, maybe even most of us, if I were to ask you, what moments in the last month or two do you wish you could get back? What moments in the last year or two or decade do you wish you could have back and redo them and get again and do them right? If I were to ask you that question and you go to those moments that you wish you had back, I'd be willing to bet that for most of us, what flashed in those moments was anger that we didn't handle well. For most of us, what happened in that was we became angry and then we acted out in a way that we wish we could go take back and have a more level head about. I know that that's the case for me. And see, here's the thing about anger, and this is why we're told to avoid it at all costs. Because unchecked anger will unravel your life. Unchecked anger that you are not dealing with. Listen to me, if you are a person who is prone to anger, who just snaps, and you'll snap at your kids, you'll snap at your co- coworkers, you'll snap at your spouse, you'll snap at the guy driving down the road, and you'll stop singing a praise song to cuss at that person. If that's you, you deal with anger. And I know because I am one, and I have to keep a check on this. But let me tell you something. If you deal with anger in your life, unchecked anger that we don't allow the Holy Spirit to root out of our life will absolutely cause our lives to unravel. How many of us know a dude, it's almost always a dude, who has a power idol that manifests itself in anger? And because that anger is always brimming under the surface, his kids have distanced themselves from him. His wife has distanced herself from him. His coworkers or his employees do not trust him. And sometimes that unravels into alcoholism to mitigate the anger. Sometimes that unravels into divorce or separation. How many of us can tell a story of a life that unraveled because there was unchecked anger there? So if this is us, if this is our besetting sin, we need to listen and pay attention. I think there is no better example of an angry life unraveling in Scripture than that of King Saul. So if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to open to 1 Samuel 18. We're going to be in 1 Samuel 18, 19, 22, and 28. We're going to hit some highlights here. So if you have a Bible, be flipping with me so as I give a little bit of context, you can see that context as well. If you're a note taker, there is a point in your notes before the verses start. I'm just going to move that point down below the verses. So we'll get to it. We'll jump back and fill that out. Don't freak out. But let's look at the life of Saul. Now Saul is one of the most tragic figures in the Bible, I think. Because Saul was the first king of Israel. He was anointed by God through the prophet Samuel. And he had the whole world at his feet. If you really think about it, it should be the star of Saul flying over Israel now. It's not. It's David. It could have been the throne of Saul that Jesus would ascend to. It's not. It's David's. Because Saul's life unraveled. And I would contend with you that it unraveled because of anger produced by his idolizing power. So we pick up the story in chapter 18. Chapter 17 is David slaying Goliath. Then the story kind of picks up and people have started to really like David. He's coming to national prominence. And Saul one day hears this song. Saul has slayed his thousands. David has slayed his tens of thousands. It's always a joke. I'm sure in Hebrew it flows better than that. But that was the song. And this really angered Saul. And here's his reaction and he hurled it saying to himself I'll pin David to the wall, but David eluded him twice Saul was afraid of David. What else could he take but my kingdom? This is my kingdom. This is my identity. I'm in charge here. That's disrespectful to me. This is mine, mine, mine. David is not going to come tell me what to do in my kingdom. I will not give up this rule. I have to protect my power. You see? And so he tries in a fit of rage to kill David. Doesn't work. David eludes him twice. And then he does what kings have done for millennia. He kind of exiles him for a period of time. Leaders of countries have been doing this for centuries. Someone upsets them. Someone in their court is causing too much trouble or noise. You're now the ambassador of Croatia. Go have fun. Get away from court. You're now going to lead these troops in this far-flung territory where we will forget about you. Go. And so his anger caused him to exile David to remove the problem. Well, the problem was David kept having success. And so we see the next highlight in chapter 19, verses 9 and 10. Saul has decided by now he's going to kill David. Jonathan, Saul's son, the heir apparent, is very good friends with David and talks Saul out of trying to kill David. David's a good man, don't kill him. And Saul says, I promise that I won't. But then this happens in verse 9 when David comes back. But an evil spirit from the Lord 20, you see that Saul becomes determined to kill David. Now it's a cold-blooded plot to kill him. It's not in the heat of the moment. It's not just, I'm so mad right now. It's no, no, no. I am going to end this threat to my reign and to my power. And so he begins to pursue David through the wilderness. In chapter 20, what we see is that Jonathan and David have worked out this scheme where Jonathan's going to give David an indication, you have to flee. My father is dead set on killing you. And so David flees and he goes. And in this fleeing, Saul spends the rest of his adult life pursuing David. We're talking about a 10, 15, 20 year period of time where Saul's rage and anger is fueling his life. He is on a singular quest to kill David. It's like one of those dumb movies with Liam Neeson where something bad happens to his family, and the rest of the movie is just rage-filled revenge. He said, this is bad and actually happened. So he's chasing David all through the countryside. And at one point, David goes into this temple, and the priest at the temple helps David and his men, feeds him with the bread that was supposed to be given to God, but it was okay in that instance. I won't get into why. And then he gives David Goliath's sword, and they move on. Well, Saul is hot on the trail of David, and he goes in there, and he finds out that this priest has been helping him. And you can imagine how he responds in chapter 22 verses 16 and 17. But the king said, you will surely die Ahimelech, you and your whole family. Ahimelech was the head priest in this particular temple. Then the king ordered the guards at his side, turn and kill the priests of the Lord because they too have sided with David. They knew he was fleeing, yet they did not tell me. If you keep reading, what you see is that the king's officials didn't want to have anything to do with that. They did not want to kill these defenseless priests. So Saul turns to someone who would, apparently, Doeg the Edomite. If you're pregnant, you're looking for a boy name, Doeg. Great. Doeg, I don't know, kills in cold blood 85 priests at the word and the bidding of Saul. His rage has now spilled over where he's killing 85 innocent men because they sided with his enemy. And we can see his life spiraling towards unraveling. And then in 28, we have one of the most curious conversations in scripture where Saul goes to see the witch of Endor, a medium, and somehow or another has a conversation with the soul of Samuel. Now, what I'd like to do is spend the next 12 minutes explaining to you exactly what happened and that I understand it. I'm kidding. I have no idea. I don't understand this chapter. I don't know how we talk to mediums and how he's talking to the soul of Samuel. But this is what happens. And's this powerful king. He goes to see a witch, and he's laying prostrate on the ground with nothing left in him, so much so that his men worry about him and have to carry him out. The next day, he dies on the battlefield along with his sons, just like Samuel said he would. It is a picture of a life completely unraveled because he allowed his anger to exist in him unchecked. And what I want you to see from the story of Saul that we can relate to is when power is our idol. Being the king of our kingdom becomes our identity. When power is our idol, when you will respect my authority, you will respect who I am, you will not tell me what to do. When power is our idol, we take on the identity as the king of our small kingdom or the queen of our small kingdom. And so when someone comes into your workplace and they threaten your expertise, they question you. They think you don't know what you're doing. No, no, this is my kingdom, and now we're mad because you're threatening me. When someone's hired and you think they're going to take your position, and so you become adversarial with them, that's you being the king of your kingdom. If you run a business, you have employees, and one of them gets out of line with you and you take personal offense at that. It could be you just being angry because you're the king of your own kingdom. And we see and saw what he was really mad about was David was threatening his identity. He was threatening who he thought he was. And when you have a power idol, when people question you in your kingdom, that really makes you mad. Let me tell you how I know this is true. This has been something for me and parenthood that's become so important. So parents, if you're in the thick of it right now, if you have children in your home, I'm speaking specifically to you. I would like to share with you something I've learned about my anger and frustration towards my children. There are times when your children say disrespectful things to you. Things that you don't deserve. They say things in anger. They flash hot. They lash out. They disrespect. In southern terms, they show their tail. And let me just tell you, when my kids get mouthy with me and start saying stuff that I would never say to my parents, I get real hot, real fast. I start to do the, hey, uh-uh. You will not talk to me that way in my house. What does that even mean? In my house. Oh, tough guy. It's the banks, dude. For like 27 more years. To come off it. But I flash hot. And I get mad. And I put them back in line. And I think back to my childhood. Because in our house, we don't spank. Maybe I'll regret that choice. But we don't do that. We just try to go about things in other ways. But growing up, they did not share that policy. And if I said some of the stuff that my kids say to me, to my dad, my tail would have been worn out. My dad was the, he was, he perfected the slap and grab in the four seat car. The no look, slap and grab right on my thigh, slap it, squeeze it as hard as you could. I'm writhing in pain. And you know what I did? I shut up, is what I did. It's masterful. But here's what I would ask you, parents. When your kid says something disrespectful to you, bosses, when your employees say something disrespectful to you, and you get hot, you get angry. What's fueling that anger? Is what's fueling that, because for me, when Lily says something to me that she shouldn't say, and I get hot, I'm not angry because, oh, baby girl, I just want you to grow up to be better than that and manage your emotions, and I've told you this so many times, and I really want to help you manage your big emotions. I know you have big feelings, but you've got to learn to manage those. And it's fueling my anger because I'm just so frustrated with watching you trip over yourself like this and you don't have to do that anymore and there's a better way. Is that what's fueling my anger? No. What's fueling my anger is you better get right because I'm the boss here. You're not. My voice is louder than yours. You want to find out? I'll make it. Parents, how hypocritical is it of us to yell at our children for not managing their emotions well? What the heck are you doing? You verbal bully. That's what I do. When anger flashes like that, it's really helpful to stop and go, where is this coming from? Am I angry because I want them to do better or am I angry because I've been disrespected in my kingdom? And if it's the second, grow up. Get over it. Give grace. Let them have the table. When you're an employer and an employee says something to you that you don't care for, are you upset because they had the audacity to question your authority at work? Probably so. And that's not good. That's us protecting our kingdom. When your spouse asks you a question and you flash hot at them, a lot of times it's because they're questioning us and we don't care for it in our kingdom. And so if that's you, if this is something that you struggle with, if anger is a part of who you are, what do we do? How do we allow the Holy Spirit to begin to remove this idol of power in our life? I think it's as we can't just say, hey, just stop being mad. That's not going to help. So what do we need to do? How do we think about things? I think we think about it like this. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. You don't have to be the king of any kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of the kingdom. Just acknowledge it's not yours anyways. You don't have one, and you're never dead. And when you die, poof, it's gone. His kingdom exists for all eternity. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom and you gleefully serve Jesus. You humbly serve Jesus. Can you imagine? Imagine the different story that is written with Saul's life if he simply would have done that. Let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. And understood, Israel's not mine. It doesn't belong to me. It didn't belong to me when I was born. It will not belong to me when I die. And if Jesus wants to give his kingdom over to another person, fine. It's his. I'm here to serve. And what's remarkable about that is that was the attitude of his son. There's a part in the narrative where Saul says, don't you know he's going to take the kingdom from you? And Jonathan's essentially like, I think that's great. David's a great guy. He's going to make a good king. That's awesome. Can you imagine how much different the story is that is written with the life of Saul if he simply would have let Jesus be the king of Jesus' kingdom. Moms and dads, especially dads, you're not the kings of your house. Jesus is. Let him be the king of it. Your authority doesn't need to go unquestioned all the time. It's not your job to keep everybody in line. It's your job to point everybody to Christ. And when we respond, dads, in anger that's unwarranted, then the only way that's left to point our children to Christ after that is to go humbly apologize for not pointing them to Christ in the first place. Try to do better the next time. Bosses. Where you work, your department, your company, that's not your kingdom. That's Jesus's. You let him worry about that stuff. You're his servant there. If we would simply let Jesus be the king of his own kingdom and acknowledge that it's not ours, how much different will you handle the disrespect of your children? How much differently, how much more grace will you give your spouse? How much more grace will you give your coworkers, your employees, your boss, if you'll just acknowledge this isn't mine anyways? I think if we can bring ourselves back to this thought, just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. That we can allow the Holy Spirit to begin to slowly chip away and show us where we hold these idols of power in our life that are manifesting themselves in unchecked anger. So I would encourage my angry brothers and sisters, the ones of you who really liked that opening story, let anger be a warning light that flashes in your life. And when it happens, take a step back and ask yourself, am I angry because Jesus' kingdom has been threatened or am I angry because mine has? And then remind yourself, I just need to let Jesus sit on his own throne and I'm gleefully here to serve him. Let's pray. Father, give us open eyes, minds, and hearts. Let us see how these different idols and really sources of sin work their way into and manifest themselves in our lives. Help us see ourselves as you see us, as broken, sinful, but yet loved and clothed in your righteousness and value. Help us understand, God, that our power is pretty useless when we don't have a kingdom we're worried about protecting. And God, remind us as we go through our days and our weeks and our months that all we need to do instead of trying to protect our kingdom and our identity is to find our identity in you and to simply let you sit on your own throne. God, I pray that we would do that and I pray that for those of us who are prone to become angry, God, I pray that we would know that, we would acknowledge that, we would take steps to keep that in check so that you might bring about in us the righteous life that you do desire. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. You guys have packed it out. I thought for a second that you guys were excited about church in June, which is wonderful. But what I've realized is inflation has hit all of us. We're too poor for vacations. So it's going to be a great summer for church. Before I get started, as one of the pastors, I get the opportunity to meet with folks who are new to the church sometimes. And this week I had the opportunity to grab brunch with a couple that's been visiting for a couple of weeks. And they shared with me that on their very first, they were going to look at a bunch of churches, but on their very first visit with Grace, that they struck up a conversation with another couple in the lobby that approached them. And that conversation went so well that they just invited them to lunch. So on their very first visit at Grace, they got invited to lunch and made friends. And I thought that was fantastic. So just sharing that with you, let's be that kind of church, Grace. Now there's a couple of people here for the first time and they're like, but don't, don't be that kind this week. All right. We don't, we would like to go to our own lunch. I'm sure it makes sense in the conversation, but when good things happen, I like to share them with you guys. Last week, we launched into this series called Idols and we looked at kind of how much more given to idolatry in our life we are than we might think we are or might have thought we were. And we talked about this idea that idols can't bear the weight of our worship. And I spent a lot of time saying we shouldn't idolize our children, our families, our spouses, and our communities, different things like that. And I just want to be clear. I meant to say this last week and I didn't say it and I should have. I just forgot. Those are good priorities. It's good to prioritize family and spouse and marriage and even career. That's fine to do that. But they make terrible gods because they can't carry the weight of our worship. And then at the end, I kind of told you what the rest of the series was going to be about. I had somebody tell me before the service started this morning, she was like, I caught up online. I was serving in children's last week and you got to the end about the four source idols, the four invisible idols. And once I listened to that, I did not want to hear the rest of the series. It's like, I was tracking with you on the other ones. Those are fine. I got those in check. And then I talked about the four source idols of power, control, approval, and comfort. And she was like, no thanks. Don't need to hear that. It's going to be too convicting. But it's this idea that there are surface idols. We idolize money. We idolize success. We idolize friends. We idolize whatever. But that idolizing is fueled by a source idol of one of those four things I just mentioned. So we're going to spend the next four weeks, including this week, looking at those different source idols, how they show up in our lives, and what we can do to invite the Holy Spirit into our life to make some space to root those idols out. Five or six years ago, I went with Jen, my wife, to Washington, D.C. with some friends of ours, Heath and Ashley. They flew into Raleigh, and then we drove up together. It was a really great trip. We stayed in an Airbnb. The first night we were there, we looked out the window, and there's this little bar-pub situation going on across the street. And so we said, let's just go over there. It'll be simple. It looks fine. So we walk over there. It was crowded. There was a little bit of a wait. And so I find one of the servers, and I say, hey, how long is the wait, and can we put our name in? And he says, oh, no, we don't do that. It's just first come, first serve. I said, like, free for all? Just, like, grab a table when someone gets up? And he goes, yep. All right. And I found out later it was trivia night. So it was a busy night. So we're kind of standing there waiting for something to pop open. And I excuse myself. I'm going to walk back to the restaurant. I'm going to go use the restroom. In the restroom. Not just in the back of the restaurant. So I'm going'm walking through and I look over and there's this high top table party of three and they're starting to get up there's four seats at the table I'm like perfect so I say are you guys about to get up and they go yeah and I said I'm running to the restroom would you mind waiting when I come back y'all get up we'll take your table and they go that's fine so that's what I did I come back and they see me and they start to get up. As they start to get up, I can see two dudes from either corner of the bar start to center in on this table. Right. So as that guy's, as the dad is getting up, I'm like, thanks very much. And I'll just kind of sit down like there's stuff still on it. They're putting on their jackets. They get their stuff. They move. These two dudes come to my table. And one of them, right off the bat, aggressively says, you can't sit there. That's not your table. That's our table. And I didn't like that. I didn't like that. And so I looked at him, and I said, that's funny, because it looks looks like my table because I'm sitting here. And he said, we've been here. I've watched you walk in. We've been here 30 minutes longer than you waiting for a table. This was the next table up. The right thing to do is to get up and give us this table. So get up. And I said, I don't think so, man. And I'm kind of motioning at my party to come sit down like for in a million years Jen's walking into that situation because I'm trying to tough guy this thing these two dudes are way bigger than me if this goes down it's not going to go well for me and then as I'm doing that they're still giving me lip then the server comes over and he starts clearing off the table. And the guy that was being aggressive says, hey, tell this, words I can't say in church. He said, tell this guy that this is our table. He needs to get up. And the guy said, I don't really get involved with that. Just kind of backs away. He was like, you boys got to figure this out. So he keeps at me. And I said, listen, man, I can acknowledge that you were here before me. I can acknowledge that you probably deserve this table more than I do. And I'll be happy to give it to you if you ask me nicely and say, please. And he said, excuse me and threatened me one more time. And I said, all you got to do is be a nice guy and say, please, and I'll give you this table. And finally, his buddy goes, dude, just say please. And he goes, he goes, all right, would you, would you mind giving us this table, please? And I said, sure, that'd be great. Here you go. Happy to give it to you. Walked off. Jen's shaking her head. Now, now listen, if you listen to that story and your internal monologue was, God, I don't really know if that's how a pastor should be acting. That's kind of, probably should have just had the grace in the moment to get over being slightly offended and let that person have the seat and maybe, you know, like be a grown up. If that's your internal monologue, that there was a better way to handle that, you're right. There was. And I agree with you. I do think, I can admit that story is funny. I am not proud of it. I wished I would have handled it differently. I do not think anyone is listening to that thinking, and through Nate would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ in that particular instance. If you listen to that story and you loved it, and you were like, yeah, tell them, don't move, make them say please, make them pay you for the table. If you're thinking about what you would have done in that situation and you would have been equally upset, you need to pay attention this morning as we explore the idol of power in our lives. This idol of power, I told you last week I had to admit that it was mine. I didn't want to admit it. Because it sounds like you want to be in charge of everything all the time. And that's really not what it is. That's part of what it is. But what it's really about is we just don't want to be told what to do. Just don't tell me what to do. If you know anything about me, you know I do not want to be told what to do. Karen Lotta got me a mug. I drink out of it at least once a week that says, I was going to do that. And then you told me to. All right. If that's you, then like me, you struggle with the idolatry of power, of being in charge, of being the guy, of being respected. It doesn't mean you have to be the boss everywhere you go, but there's certain pockets in certain places where you're just not going to put up with it. And here's how you can really tell if power is the idol with which you struggle deeply. The manifesting sin of power is anger. The manifesting sin of power is being angry, is having these flashes of anger that cause you to do and say things that you wish you could take back. I acted that way in that restaurant in D.C. because I was made angry, because he had the guts to tell me what to do. And until he acknowledged who had the power, I was not going to back down. It was immature and gross, but that's what was happening there. The besetting sin of power is to be someone who is angry whenever that power and that license and that freedom is threatened. And anger, we know, is a terrible thing to have festering in our lives. If you are someone who struggles like I do with being more angry than we should be sometimes, then you know experientially and intuitively that what James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16, is true. When James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16 is true. When James says, my dear brothers and sisters, take note of this. Everyone, oh 19, everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. And then in the next verse, he tells you why. Because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Now listen, most of you in this room, because I know you, I know that you've been Christians for a while. And so a lot of the big sins, the big stuff that we shouldn't do, you've got that in check, and that's good. But for some of you in the room, maybe even most of us, if I were to ask you, what moments in the last month or two do you wish you could get back? What moments in the last year or two or decade do you wish you could have back and redo them and get again and do them right? If I were to ask you that question and you go to those moments that you wish you had back, I'd be willing to bet that for most of us, what flashed in those moments was anger that we didn't handle well. For most of us, what happened in that was we became angry and then we acted out in a way that we wish we could go take back and have a more level head about. I know that that's the case for me. And see, here's the thing about anger, and this is why we're told to avoid it at all costs. Because unchecked anger will unravel your life. Unchecked anger that you are not dealing with. Listen to me, if you are a person who is prone to anger, who just snaps, and you'll snap at your kids, you'll snap at your co- coworkers, you'll snap at your spouse, you'll snap at the guy driving down the road, and you'll stop singing a praise song to cuss at that person. If that's you, you deal with anger. And I know because I am one, and I have to keep a check on this. But let me tell you something. If you deal with anger in your life, unchecked anger that we don't allow the Holy Spirit to root out of our life will absolutely cause our lives to unravel. How many of us know a dude, it's almost always a dude, who has a power idol that manifests itself in anger? And because that anger is always brimming under the surface, his kids have distanced themselves from him. His wife has distanced herself from him. His coworkers or his employees do not trust him. And sometimes that unravels into alcoholism to mitigate the anger. Sometimes that unravels into divorce or separation. How many of us can tell a story of a life that unraveled because there was unchecked anger there? So if this is us, if this is our besetting sin, we need to listen and pay attention. I think there is no better example of an angry life unraveling in Scripture than that of King Saul. So if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to open to 1 Samuel 18. We're going to be in 1 Samuel 18, 19, 22, and 28. We're going to hit some highlights here. So if you have a Bible, be flipping with me so as I give a little bit of context, you can see that context as well. If you're a note taker, there is a point in your notes before the verses start. I'm just going to move that point down below the verses. So we'll get to it. We'll jump back and fill that out. Don't freak out. But let's look at the life of Saul. Now Saul is one of the most tragic figures in the Bible, I think. Because Saul was the first king of Israel. He was anointed by God through the prophet Samuel. And he had the whole world at his feet. If you really think about it, it should be the star of Saul flying over Israel now. It's not. It's David. It could have been the throne of Saul that Jesus would ascend to. It's not. It's David's. Because Saul's life unraveled. And I would contend with you that it unraveled because of anger produced by his idolizing power. So we pick up the story in chapter 18. Chapter 17 is David slaying Goliath. Then the story kind of picks up and people have started to really like David. He's coming to national prominence. And Saul one day hears this song. Saul has slayed his thousands. David has slayed his tens of thousands. It's always a joke. I'm sure in Hebrew it flows better than that. But that was the song. And this really angered Saul. And here's his reaction and he hurled it saying to himself I'll pin David to the wall, but David eluded him twice Saul was afraid of David. What else could he take but my kingdom? This is my kingdom. This is my identity. I'm in charge here. That's disrespectful to me. This is mine, mine, mine. David is not going to come tell me what to do in my kingdom. I will not give up this rule. I have to protect my power. You see? And so he tries in a fit of rage to kill David. Doesn't work. David eludes him twice. And then he does what kings have done for millennia. He kind of exiles him for a period of time. Leaders of countries have been doing this for centuries. Someone upsets them. Someone in their court is causing too much trouble or noise. You're now the ambassador of Croatia. Go have fun. Get away from court. You're now going to lead these troops in this far-flung territory where we will forget about you. Go. And so his anger caused him to exile David to remove the problem. Well, the problem was David kept having success. And so we see the next highlight in chapter 19, verses 9 and 10. Saul has decided by now he's going to kill David. Jonathan, Saul's son, the heir apparent, is very good friends with David and talks Saul out of trying to kill David. David's a good man, don't kill him. And Saul says, I promise that I won't. But then this happens in verse 9 when David comes back. But an evil spirit from the Lord 20, you see that Saul becomes determined to kill David. Now it's a cold-blooded plot to kill him. It's not in the heat of the moment. It's not just, I'm so mad right now. It's no, no, no. I am going to end this threat to my reign and to my power. And so he begins to pursue David through the wilderness. In chapter 20, what we see is that Jonathan and David have worked out this scheme where Jonathan's going to give David an indication, you have to flee. My father is dead set on killing you. And so David flees and he goes. And in this fleeing, Saul spends the rest of his adult life pursuing David. We're talking about a 10, 15, 20 year period of time where Saul's rage and anger is fueling his life. He is on a singular quest to kill David. It's like one of those dumb movies with Liam Neeson where something bad happens to his family, and the rest of the movie is just rage-filled revenge. He said, this is bad and actually happened. So he's chasing David all through the countryside. And at one point, David goes into this temple, and the priest at the temple helps David and his men, feeds him with the bread that was supposed to be given to God, but it was okay in that instance. I won't get into why. And then he gives David Goliath's sword, and they move on. Well, Saul is hot on the trail of David, and he goes in there, and he finds out that this priest has been helping him. And you can imagine how he responds in chapter 22 verses 16 and 17. But the king said, you will surely die Ahimelech, you and your whole family. Ahimelech was the head priest in this particular temple. Then the king ordered the guards at his side, turn and kill the priests of the Lord because they too have sided with David. They knew he was fleeing, yet they did not tell me. If you keep reading, what you see is that the king's officials didn't want to have anything to do with that. They did not want to kill these defenseless priests. So Saul turns to someone who would, apparently, Doeg the Edomite. If you're pregnant, you're looking for a boy name, Doeg. Great. Doeg, I don't know, kills in cold blood 85 priests at the word and the bidding of Saul. His rage has now spilled over where he's killing 85 innocent men because they sided with his enemy. And we can see his life spiraling towards unraveling. And then in 28, we have one of the most curious conversations in scripture where Saul goes to see the witch of Endor, a medium, and somehow or another has a conversation with the soul of Samuel. Now, what I'd like to do is spend the next 12 minutes explaining to you exactly what happened and that I understand it. I'm kidding. I have no idea. I don't understand this chapter. I don't know how we talk to mediums and how he's talking to the soul of Samuel. But this is what happens. And's this powerful king. He goes to see a witch, and he's laying prostrate on the ground with nothing left in him, so much so that his men worry about him and have to carry him out. The next day, he dies on the battlefield along with his sons, just like Samuel said he would. It is a picture of a life completely unraveled because he allowed his anger to exist in him unchecked. And what I want you to see from the story of Saul that we can relate to is when power is our idol. Being the king of our kingdom becomes our identity. When power is our idol, when you will respect my authority, you will respect who I am, you will not tell me what to do. When power is our idol, we take on the identity as the king of our small kingdom or the queen of our small kingdom. And so when someone comes into your workplace and they threaten your expertise, they question you. They think you don't know what you're doing. No, no, this is my kingdom, and now we're mad because you're threatening me. When someone's hired and you think they're going to take your position, and so you become adversarial with them, that's you being the king of your kingdom. If you run a business, you have employees, and one of them gets out of line with you and you take personal offense at that. It could be you just being angry because you're the king of your own kingdom. And we see and saw what he was really mad about was David was threatening his identity. He was threatening who he thought he was. And when you have a power idol, when people question you in your kingdom, that really makes you mad. Let me tell you how I know this is true. This has been something for me and parenthood that's become so important. So parents, if you're in the thick of it right now, if you have children in your home, I'm speaking specifically to you. I would like to share with you something I've learned about my anger and frustration towards my children. There are times when your children say disrespectful things to you. Things that you don't deserve. They say things in anger. They flash hot. They lash out. They disrespect. In southern terms, they show their tail. And let me just tell you, when my kids get mouthy with me and start saying stuff that I would never say to my parents, I get real hot, real fast. I start to do the, hey, uh-uh. You will not talk to me that way in my house. What does that even mean? In my house. Oh, tough guy. It's the banks, dude. For like 27 more years. To come off it. But I flash hot. And I get mad. And I put them back in line. And I think back to my childhood. Because in our house, we don't spank. Maybe I'll regret that choice. But we don't do that. We just try to go about things in other ways. But growing up, they did not share that policy. And if I said some of the stuff that my kids say to me, to my dad, my tail would have been worn out. My dad was the, he was, he perfected the slap and grab in the four seat car. The no look, slap and grab right on my thigh, slap it, squeeze it as hard as you could. I'm writhing in pain. And you know what I did? I shut up, is what I did. It's masterful. But here's what I would ask you, parents. When your kid says something disrespectful to you, bosses, when your employees say something disrespectful to you, and you get hot, you get angry. What's fueling that anger? Is what's fueling that, because for me, when Lily says something to me that she shouldn't say, and I get hot, I'm not angry because, oh, baby girl, I just want you to grow up to be better than that and manage your emotions, and I've told you this so many times, and I really want to help you manage your big emotions. I know you have big feelings, but you've got to learn to manage those. And it's fueling my anger because I'm just so frustrated with watching you trip over yourself like this and you don't have to do that anymore and there's a better way. Is that what's fueling my anger? No. What's fueling my anger is you better get right because I'm the boss here. You're not. My voice is louder than yours. You want to find out? I'll make it. Parents, how hypocritical is it of us to yell at our children for not managing their emotions well? What the heck are you doing? You verbal bully. That's what I do. When anger flashes like that, it's really helpful to stop and go, where is this coming from? Am I angry because I want them to do better or am I angry because I've been disrespected in my kingdom? And if it's the second, grow up. Get over it. Give grace. Let them have the table. When you're an employer and an employee says something to you that you don't care for, are you upset because they had the audacity to question your authority at work? Probably so. And that's not good. That's us protecting our kingdom. When your spouse asks you a question and you flash hot at them, a lot of times it's because they're questioning us and we don't care for it in our kingdom. And so if that's you, if this is something that you struggle with, if anger is a part of who you are, what do we do? How do we allow the Holy Spirit to begin to remove this idol of power in our life? I think it's as we can't just say, hey, just stop being mad. That's not going to help. So what do we need to do? How do we think about things? I think we think about it like this. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. You don't have to be the king of any kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of the kingdom. Just acknowledge it's not yours anyways. You don't have one, and you're never dead. And when you die, poof, it's gone. His kingdom exists for all eternity. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom and you gleefully serve Jesus. You humbly serve Jesus. Can you imagine? Imagine the different story that is written with Saul's life if he simply would have done that. Let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. And understood, Israel's not mine. It doesn't belong to me. It didn't belong to me when I was born. It will not belong to me when I die. And if Jesus wants to give his kingdom over to another person, fine. It's his. I'm here to serve. And what's remarkable about that is that was the attitude of his son. There's a part in the narrative where Saul says, don't you know he's going to take the kingdom from you? And Jonathan's essentially like, I think that's great. David's a great guy. He's going to make a good king. That's awesome. Can you imagine how much different the story is that is written with the life of Saul if he simply would have let Jesus be the king of Jesus' kingdom. Moms and dads, especially dads, you're not the kings of your house. Jesus is. Let him be the king of it. Your authority doesn't need to go unquestioned all the time. It's not your job to keep everybody in line. It's your job to point everybody to Christ. And when we respond, dads, in anger that's unwarranted, then the only way that's left to point our children to Christ after that is to go humbly apologize for not pointing them to Christ in the first place. Try to do better the next time. Bosses. Where you work, your department, your company, that's not your kingdom. That's Jesus's. You let him worry about that stuff. You're his servant there. If we would simply let Jesus be the king of his own kingdom and acknowledge that it's not ours, how much different will you handle the disrespect of your children? How much differently, how much more grace will you give your spouse? How much more grace will you give your coworkers, your employees, your boss, if you'll just acknowledge this isn't mine anyways? I think if we can bring ourselves back to this thought, just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. That we can allow the Holy Spirit to begin to slowly chip away and show us where we hold these idols of power in our life that are manifesting themselves in unchecked anger. So I would encourage my angry brothers and sisters, the ones of you who really liked that opening story, let anger be a warning light that flashes in your life. And when it happens, take a step back and ask yourself, am I angry because Jesus' kingdom has been threatened or am I angry because mine has? And then remind yourself, I just need to let Jesus sit on his own throne and I'm gleefully here to serve him. Let's pray. Father, give us open eyes, minds, and hearts. Let us see how these different idols and really sources of sin work their way into and manifest themselves in our lives. Help us see ourselves as you see us, as broken, sinful, but yet loved and clothed in your righteousness and value. Help us understand, God, that our power is pretty useless when we don't have a kingdom we're worried about protecting. And God, remind us as we go through our days and our weeks and our months that all we need to do instead of trying to protect our kingdom and our identity is to find our identity in you and to simply let you sit on your own throne. God, I pray that we would do that and I pray that for those of us who are prone to become angry, God, I pray that we would know that, we would acknowledge that, we would take steps to keep that in check so that you might bring about in us the righteous life that you do desire. In Jesus' name, amen.

This morning, we are still in the middle of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus is the greatest storyteller to ever live. And he actually employed stories called parables in his teaching throughout his ministry. And we'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story used to make a moral point. And it's important this morning that we remember that these are fictional because this one that we're going to focus on this morning is maybe the most mysterious, most layered. It conjures up more questions probably than any other parable. In this parable is a reference to paradise and a reference to Hades and what life is going to look like in eternity. And a lot of people try to read into this parable what eternity must look like and what Jesus was saying about eternity. But what I would say to that before we even jump into the parable found in Luke chapter 16 is that that's not the point that Jesus is trying to make. Jesus isn't trying to paint a picture of eternity in this parable. He's trying to make a larger point that I want us to get to today. And I'm actually talking about this up front because Scripture does have a place where it talks about eternity, where it does fill in some of the blanks on what that's going to look like in heaven and in hell, being with God and being separated from God and what it's going to look like at the end of time. And we find that in the book of Revelation. I've been going back and forth in my own head and in my own heart about whether that was something I wanted to dive into as a church. So I want to invite you this week in your small groups, on your Zoom calls, in your check-ins, discuss this with your small group leader. And I'm going to be getting with the small group leaders and asking for feedback from them. And if Revelation is something that we want to go through as a church sometime in the not-too-distant future, then I would love to do that with you. But I just want to kind of gauge the interest level before we dive into that together because it's quite the undertaking. With that as an aside, we're going to set eternity and what this parable implicates about eternity aside today so that we can see the main focus of the parable. We can find it, like I said, in Luke chapter 16. If you have a Bible there at home, I hope that you'll open it up and go through the text with me. I'm going to read some verses, some of them, like always, I'll summarize. And I love it when you have your Bible open and you're making sure that I'm following along with the story correctly and you're not giving me the benefit of infallibility. I would also encourage, if you're watching this as a family, if you have kids with you, what a cool time to open up mom or dad's Bible and have them gather around and go through and consume and look at the text together. What a great time as a family to be able to gather around one Bible, God's Word, and consume that together. So grab a Bible if you have it and open up to Luke chapter 16. We're going to be in verses 19 through 31. It's in those verses that you'll find the parable of Abraham's bosom. And this is how was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. So that's how Jesus sets the stage. There's a rich man who had all he wanted every day. He feasted sumptuously, which sounds a little bit like me in quarantine, but this is what he did every day. That's how he lived. And at his gate, there was a poor man named Lazarus who begged, who ate the scraps off of his table. And the implication is that the rich man really didn't pay much attention to him. And Lazarus was so hard up that the dogs would come and lick his sores. I can't imagine the poverty or the sickness that would render you, that would put you in a place where you just said, you know what? Go to town, dogs. That's fine. It breaks my heart to think about someone living like that. And so these are the two characters. These are the two men, the rich man and then the poor man, Lazarus. And they both died at the same time. And in eternity, it says that Lazarus, the poor man, was in Abraham's bosom. Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people. That was being with him in eternity is acknowledged as being in paradise. And then there was a chasm, and on the other side of the chasm was Hades. And Hades is always associated with fire and separation from God and suffering. And the rich man was in Hades. And the rich man looks across the chasm and he sees Abraham and he cries out and he requests, Father Abraham, can Lazarus come across this chasm, across this divide, dip his finger in water and just give me a drop of water? I'm burning and I'm thirsty. And what's interesting there, if you look at the text, is Jesus chose very intentionally to have the rich man say, Father Abraham. What he's indicating there in that language is that the rich man was a Jew. The rich man looked to Abraham as his forefather. The Jewish culture at that time very much saw their eternity wrapped up in their lineage. He thought that because he was from the line of Abraham, because God made some promises to Abraham, that those promises applied to him, and simply by birthright, simply because of who he was and how he had lived his life, that he was going to spend eternity in paradise with Abraham and with God. And so what Jesus is saying there, it's one of the layers of this very layered parable, is that this man was a Jew and he thought that his lineage and his heritage was going to get him into heaven for eternity. And it didn't. And now he's having to face that reality. And it's a stark parallel because often to me in the New Testament, I find that there's a parallel between the expectant Jewish community and the expectant church community in the United States in the 21st century. We have plenty of people who are cultural Christians who grow up in church, who because their grandparents were believers, because their parents were believers, because they've always grown up in church, they just think they're automatically going to go to heaven. Even though maybe we've never articulated a faith, there's no evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in our life or that that faith and that love has taken hold of us. We haven't allowed God to come in and radically reprioritize our lives. Christianity remains just kind of a sliver of our life instead of our whole life. And it's entirely possible, we see in this parable, to go through our life expectant because of who we are and where we come from that one day we'll be in eternity because it just works out for us. And this rich man found out, no, that's not how it goes. And we would be wise to acknowledge that if we've been church people our whole life, that's not what gets us into heaven. That's not what allows us to spend eternity with God. What allows us to spend eternity with God is falling on our face and saying, I fall short and Jesus closes the gap and I need him more than anything else. He is the only way to the Father and so I need Jesus in my life and I submit to his lordship in my life. It's to acknowledge that we are sinners in need of a Savior. But the rich man cries out, Father Abraham, can Lazarus please just come across and give me a drop of water? And Abraham explains to the rich man, I'm sorry, man, that's not how this works. This chasm is too deep. It's too wide. It was intentionally placed here so that nobody could go from paradise to Hades and come back. And no one can come from Hades to paradise. It cannot be crossed, so Lazarus can't bring you any water. And the rich man, in response to this, asks what I believe is a heart-wrenching question. He says, okay, fine. Can Lazarus, can you send him back to my father's house? I have five brothers and they need to know about this. They need to know that this is true. They need to know that eternity is not some old wives' tale, that this is actually taking place. They need to know that there is suffering waiting on them, that they are on a path to where I am, and I don't want to be here. Can you please send Lazarus back so that my family doesn't have to suffer like I'm suffering? It's a heart-wrenching question. It's a very human request. It's this realization by the rich man, oh my goodness, all those teachings I heard over the course of my life, they're true. And my brothers are like me. They don't believe them either. Can we please send Lazarus back to prevent them from experiencing what I'm experiencing? I want to know that they're going to be in paradise. I don't want them to put up with this to endure this. But Abraham's response is tough. Look what another reason why I say it's a layered parable because the end of it, he says, if they didn't believe Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe Lazarus. They're not even going to believe it if someone were to rise from the dead. Jesus is saying to this Jewish crowd that's listening to him, without them even realizing it, in a few weeks, I'm going to die and I'm going to conquer death and raise myself from the dead. And even then, some of you won't believe. He's foreshadowing his own death at the end of this parable. And Abraham's response is tough. The rich man says, please, can Lazarus go and share this message with my brothers to prevent them from coming here. And Abraham says, they have Moses and the prophets. They have what we understand to be the Old Testament. They have the scriptures. They have the Bible. God has spoken to them. And he says, no, no, no, just send Lazarus back. They'll listen to Lazarus. And Abraham says, even if someone is resurrected from the dead, they still will not. If they won't listen to Moses and the prophets, they won't listen to them. And it's this stark message. Your brothers are stubborn. Your other rich brothers are stubborn. They've been exposed to the message. God has been speaking to them. We've told you over and over and over again. Since you were a young boy, you all, your family, had the messages of Moses and of the prophets and of the Old Testament, and God's Word breathed into your life, and you have all chosen not to believe it and not to repent and not to submit to God and there's no other voices that are going to help. The message from this parable that we don't want to miss is that if we think God isn't speaking to us, we probably just aren't listening. If we think God's not speaking to us, if we're having a hard time hearing the voice of God and we're going, God, why don't you say something? Why don't you make your will more clear? Why don't you make yourself more clear? It's probably not that he's not speaking to us. It's far more likely that we're just not listening. It's not that the rich man and his brothers weren't getting spoken to by God. They had the Bible. They had Moses. They grew up in a culture that was designed fundamentally to point them to the Father. But they missed it. And they didn't miss it because God wasn't speaking to them. They missed it because they weren't listening. And haven't we seen this happen in our lives? Haven't we seen this happen in the lives of the people around us? I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years with people who are skeptical of the faith. And they'll say something like, you know, if God is real, why doesn't he just make himself more evident? Why does he make it so hard to find him? If God is real, why doesn't he just like show himself front and center? And listen, I don't want to demean or sweep away those questions because they come from a sincere place. They really do. And questions like that make sense to me. But whenever I hear a question like that, I'm just convinced that we're not listening. Because when someone says, if God's real, why doesn't he just come and put himself right in front of us? I think to myself, do you mean Jesus of Nazareth that lived for 33 years and then historically died and was resurrected? Do you mean like that? Or when somebody says, if God's real, why doesn't he make himself evident? I think, do you mean like in nature? Do you mean that God should make himself more evident in his creation? That that's the way that he's chosen to reveal himself to us? Romans 1 says that God has revealed himself to us in nature so that no man is without excuse. When people say, I wonder why God doesn't make himself more evident, I wonder to myself, have you ever looked at the grandeur of a mountain range? Have you ever sat on the peaceful beach and just behold the beauty of a sunset or a sunrise? Have you ever looked at a painting in the sky and not thought, man, God, you nailed that one? Have you ever not sat in the peace and the grandeur of the plains? Have you gone out west and looked at how big and open and wide everything is? Have you been to the Caribbean and seen how crystal blue the waters are? Have you been in the hills and the east coast of the United States and looked at the lush greenery? How do you look at those things and not think, wow, there must be an author to this? Scripture tells us that even if man refuses to praise God, that the rocks cry out, that the heavens declare the glory of God. How can we say that God doesn't make himself more evident when all we have to do is literally step outside and look at his evidence all around us? How can we say that God hasn't made himself evident when we've had the gift of holding a child that we created? One of the things that I marvel at when people say, why doesn't God make himself more evident? I think of this idea of just the size and the scope of the universe. Do you understand that we still haven't found the smallest thing? We still can't find the smallest thing that God created. Years ago, 100 years ago, we thought it was a cell. We thought that a single cell was probably the smallest possible building block of life. And then we developed microscopes and we did some research and we went, oh man, we were way off. There's things that are a lot smaller than this. And then we discovered the atom. We were like, okay, that's got to be the smallest thing. And then we went, oh, that's not the smallest thing. There's like electrons. Those are tiny. And then we went to electrons and we're like, oh my gosh, there's a whole universe of things inside electrons. And no matter how much research we do, we still can't find the smallest, most fundamental thing that all of nature is based on. The universe that God created is infinitesimally small, yet it's unfathomably large. If we zoom out from the smallest thing and look at the largest thing, we still can't comprehend the universe. We still don't understand how it all dances together and hangs there. Science still can't explain the origin of it. Even if we can trace it back through history, through all the different experiments and reading and research that we have, we still don't know how it came into creation besides a creator God. Even Einstein, as he searched for a theory of relativity to stitch together the universe and understand all the things at play here God exists. And we don't just do this with our belief in God, but sometimes we do it circumstantially. Sometimes we're in different circumstances and we'll think to ourselves, why won't God tell me what I should do here? Why can't I hear his voice? I think of an example from several years ago when I was at my previous church. There was a guy who was a good guy, great character, one of my small group leaders. I was a small group pastor, and he and I worked together a fair amount. He came to me and he said, hey, I feel like God has laid on my heart that I need to plant a church. What do you think I should do? And I had to tell him. I'm not one to pull many punches in situations like this. So I had to tell him, listen, man, I don't think you're ready. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think your family's where it needs to be. I don't think where you need to be. I think you should, that's a good goal. But the timing's probably off. It's probably not the right time. And he said, okay, I hear you, but I think I'm gonna talk to the pastor about this. I said, all right. So he goes and he sits down with our lead pastor and he says, hey, I think the Lord wants me to plant a church. And our lead pastor said the same thing I did. Gosh, it's a good goal. It just doesn't feel like the right time. I really don't think I would support that. And the guy said, okay, I'm going to talk to the elders then. So he goes and he sits in front of the elders and he says, hey, I think God wants me to plant a church and I'd really love you guys to support this. And they unanimously and quickly said, we don't think that's a good idea. And after hearing all of that advice, he went home and he told his wife he was no longer going to plant a church and he was a faithful small group leader for years. No, that's never how that story goes. He went, okay, I hear you guys, but God's leading me in another way. And he went and he left us and he went and he planted a church. And sure enough, within a year and a half, two years, that church didn't exist and he had to figure out life again. And he may be tempted at the end of that road to say, God, where were you? Why weren't you speaking to me? And the truth of it was, God was speaking to him the whole time in a cacophony of voices that he invited into his life as spiritual authorities that he just refused to listen to. It wasn't that God wasn't speaking to him, it's that he wasn't listening. And I believe we all do this. I believe we all search for the voice of God. God, what would you have me do here? God, why don't you show up in this situation? God, why don't you make yourself more evident? When God the whole time has been speaking to us. When God the whole time has put voices in our life, has put his word in our life, has put a church in our life, has put family members in our life to guide us, to serve as his voices, and yet we say we can't hear him. So to me, that's the main point. That if we can't hear God, it's not because he's not speaking, it's because we're not listening. But the interesting question that comes out of that message is, what is it that's preventing us from hearing the voice of God? Why sometimes do we struggle so mightily to hear something that's being spoken so clearly? And I think to find the answer to this, we should examine the contemporaries of Jesus. I think if we look at the religious establishment, at the Pharisees and the religious leaders and the majority of the Jewish people at the time of the life of Christ, who did not believe that Jesus was who he said he was, who were not listening to the message of God. I think if we look to them and try to figure out why was it that they couldn't hear the voice of God, that we may be able to figure out why we can't hear the voice of God. And so as I thought about that question this week, why was it that the religious leaders at the time of Christ couldn't understand what he was saying? What was prohibiting them from hearing Jesus, from hearing the message of God? I came to the conclusion that they couldn't hear God because of their own deafening expectations. They had these expectations playing in their ears that were so deafening that they were drowning out the message that God was trying to communicate to them. I kind of think of it like this. For Christmas, I got maybe the greatest gift that's ever been given, AirPods, for Christmas this year. And AirPods have this great technology in them. It's noise canceling technology so that when you put them in your ears, they begin to actively work to cancel out all the noise in your area. So you can literally turn down the volume of an entire room simply by having these in your ears. It's magical. If you have a four-year-old or a Kyle, I highly recommend these. And then when you partner their noise canceling ability with a song that you may be choosing to play from your phone, you can't hear anything. It's magical. Jen, my wife, hates these things because when they're in, I can't hear anything going on around me. I'm in my own little universe. And the truth of it is that when these are in my ear, I can only hear what I want to hear. I can only hear things that are coming through my phone, things that I have intentionally chosen and told my phone, had these expectations playing in their ear that made them completely unable to hear anything else that God was trying to say to them. Those expectations were deafening. Their expectations of Jesus were that he came to be a physical king. They expected him to be a king, to literally come and sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem, to overthrow Herod, to overthrow Roman rule, to rise Israel to national prominence, to literally take over the whole world and sit in a righteous and glorious divine reign over the planet with the Messiah Jesus on the throne. They expected a physical kingdom. They expected that Jesus was going to come from Jerusalem, not Nazareth, not the country, not be a poor carpenter or probably a stonemason if you really get into the technicalities of the words. They didn't expect that Jesus would be a poor stonemason from Nazareth, from the north of the country. They expected that he would come from Jerusalem, that he would be a member of the religious elite, that he would come up through their institutions, through their religious structure and hierarchy. They envisioned that he would be the high priest, that he would cater to them. They did not think he would carouse with sinners. They did not think he would be friends with prostitutes. They did not think that he would associate himself with people who were not amongst the elite. And what they didn't realize is Jesus came to save sinners. He came to seek the lost. He came to interact with the broken. He came to build a church. He didn't come to establish a physical kingdom and sit on a physical throne. That is too small of a kingdom for our Messiah. He came to earth to establish an eternal spiritual kingdom whose throne is in heaven that he will sit next to his Father and reign on for all of eternity. And we as the church and everyone who becomes a believer is a part of the spiritual kingdom that Jesus came to establish. And all of the Old Testament points to that reality, but because they had their own deafening expectations in their ear, they couldn't hear that message from God, and so they rejected it. Their own deafening expectations caused them to reject the Messiah when he showed up in front of them because they could no longer hear his message. And if that's true of them, it makes me wonder about our expectations. I wonder what expectations we have that are prohibiting us from hearing the message of God. A very easy one is the message of prosperity. There are some men and women who are peddlers of the false gospel of prosperity who teach people that to be a believer means that you will be prosperous, that if you have enough faith, God will give you material blessing. There was actually a televangelist at the beginning of this COVID nonsense who told people in his TV audience that even if you lose your job, if you give your last paycheck to this ministry, God is gonna flourish you. The Bible's very clear that guy's gonna get his, just so we all know. But that's a false gospel. It builds an expectation that to become a believer means I will be prosperous. It means I'm gonna close close the business deal. It means I'm going to get the car. It means I'm going to have the wealth. And it's an incredibly damaging belief because people who are in poverty and subject to that kind of false optimism sign up for faith with the expectation that God is going to make them prosperous. And then when he doesn't, it leaves them shipwrecked on the side of the road with no faith and no hope in a God that they should have never believed in in the first place. It's a false gospel. And that expectation built up that because I'm a believer, God is going to prosper me is a false expectation, and when it doesn't come to fruition, it shipwrecks their faith. And I don't know where we're getting that in the Bible because Jesus himself was poor. He says, He said, He said, He didn't have a lot of extra money to throw together. A lot of times their meals came down to just the amount of bread that they had. Nowhere in the Bible does it state that if we are believers that we will be prosperous, yet that expectation exists and persists and wrecks people's faith along the way. One that we are probably more susceptible to in our crowd and in our culture, and I've seen this over and over again in the lives of people, is the expectation that to be a believer means that God is going to prevent pain. That if I'm a believer, if I'm walking with God, if I'm walking faithfully, if I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, then he is going to allow me to dodge the raindrops of tragedy in my life. That if we'll just dot our I's and cross our T's and mind our business and do what God asks us to do, then we're not going to get the tough diagnosis and neither is anyone that we love. We're not going to experience that loss and neither will anyone in our immediate circle. That to be a believer is an insurance policy that God is going to protect me against pain. A lot of us have that expectation. We might not say it that way, but it exists. And we know it exists because I've seen so many people who have a solid faith who experience loss or tragedy for the first time, and that faith is shaken to its core. Do you know why it's shaken to its core? Because part of the foundation of that faith was an expectation that my God will prevent me from pain and tragedy when God does not claim that in Scripture anywhere. Sometimes it's built on poor teaching on verses like Romans 8.28 that teach, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. And some people want to apply that to this life right now, saying that no matter what happens, it's going to work out for our good. When really what that verse means is God is orchestrating everything to bring us nearer to him in eternity, that everything will work out for those who love him, for their ultimate good, for eternity in paradise. It might not work out in this life, but it will always work out in the next life. But when we have this expectation that to be a believer is to prevent us from pain, we will inevitably experience pain that runs contrary to that expectation. And I don't know how we got this idea because all through the Bible are people who suffer for God. When God speaks to a prophet named Ananias, he tells him that Saul is his chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. And get this, he will show him how much he must suffer for his name. That same Saul becomes Paul and details at the end of his life, all the ways he suffered for God through the years. Even Jesus himself, we don't talk about this a lot, but by the end of Jesus' life, Joseph, his earthly father, is not on the scene anymore. So it's entirely possible that somewhere in Jesus' adolescence, his mother became a single mom. It's entirely possible that Jesus experienced part of adolescence. The Son of God experienced life, potentially, as someone who lost his earthly father in a single-parent home. Does that sound like God protects people from suffering all the time? James tells us whenever we endure trials to consider it pure joy. Not if we endure them, but when we do. If we want to have a healthy, accurate, vibrant understanding of God, we have to move away from the expectation that to be walking with him means that we get to dodge the raindrops of pain. That's not a scriptural teaching. And that expectation leaves our faith shipwrecked. Another one, another expectation that I see is the expectation that God's going to make sense. The expectation that we'll be able to understand the almighty, infinite creator God. That if I just read enough books, if I can just systematize it enough, if I can just ask the right questions, if I can just seek out the right answers, then one day everything will tie up in this nice, neat little bow when theologically and experientially and philosophically I'll be able to understand God in a way that is satisfactory to me. When Romans 11 says His ways are higher than our ways. When Psalms says that His ways are unsearchable and unknowable and inscrutable. How can we expect to know an infinite creator God who knows good and well what the smallest thing is because He created it and He knows how big the universe is and how it hangs in place because he created it. How can we think that that massive God can be tucked into a little, tight, neat box so that my human understanding can grasp it and explain it to others all the time? It's unreasonable. And then sometimes when we can't make sense of some of the things that God says or does because we can't fit it into our human box of understanding, we walk away from him because of this false expectation that we should be able to understand him all the time. When the Bible doesn't advocate that, it doesn't tell us that we can. We can understand bits and pieces. We can know him, but we won't fully know him until we are in eternity. The last expectation that I would point out to you this morning is the false expectation that the morality of God would mirror the morality of our culture. I've been alive for 39 years. And in those 39 years, I've watched the needle on certain topics move. I've watched our culture say that in one decade, this behavior is unacceptable. And in another decade, say no longer is it not unacceptable, but it is embraceable. And if you don't, then you're wrong. I've watched that needle move where this behavior was wrong and now it is right, where this was something that we don't even really speak about because it's uncouth and now we embrace it and we support it. And sometimes those shifts are good. Sometimes they're good and necessary evolutionary shifts in how we understand Scripture and how we understand our culture. But sometimes the morality needle moves in our culture, and we take the Bible and we rush to squeeze it in and say, oh, this certainly is what God would encourage as well. This certainly is what God is teaching as well. We have to have misunderstood the scriptures in the past. They have to mean this now because this is what our culture thinks and dictates, and certainly that makes the most sense. And instead of taking the morality of our culture and viewing it through the lens of eternal and inerrant Scripture. We take Scripture and we view it through the lens of malleable, constantly changing, argumentative cultural morality, and we try to make God's eternal Word fit into that. And when we can't do it, we throw out the Bible and we say, I guess it can't be trusted because it didn't meet our expectation that God's morality would mirror the morality of our culture. Over and over again, you can probably think of more. We have these expectations of God that he never claimed, that he never gave us, that he never affirmed. And yet because God isn't meeting those expectations, we can't hear him. We have our AirPods in and we can't hear anything except for what we want to hear. And the whole time, God has been speaking to us. God has been calling out to us. God has been making himself evident to us. God has been offering us gentle, unobtrusive guidance through his scriptures and to the people in our life who love him and love us. But we have a hard time hearing him because our deafening expectations are drowning his voice out. And so it makes me want to leave you with this question to think about as you go throughout your week, hopefully to talk about in our small groups if we've developed enough trust to be this vulnerable with one another. Certainly you can see ways that your expectations have potentially damaged your ability to hear God. I know that I have mine. I would even venture to say what I've found in my own life is when God doesn't make sense or when I'm having a hard time with faith or when I don't feel like I'm in sync with him, normally it's a time when I need to sit down and say, God, what am I expecting you to do that isn't a fair expectation of you? And I'll realize it's my own bad thinking and poor beliefs about God that are keeping me from walking in faith with him. It's not his voice. It's not his teaching. It's not what he's doing. So as we wrap up, I would ask you to consider this. What expectations do we need to remove from our ears so that we can hear what God has been saying to us all along? What things have we been clinging to? What beliefs do we have that, like the religious community and the life of Christ, are playing in our ears so loudly that we can't see Jesus when he's standing right in front of us? What expectations do we need to remove so that we can finally hear the voice of God with crystal clarity? I hope you'll do that this week. I hope we'll walk with a more clear understanding of who God is and what he wants for us. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We know you are good. We know you love us. We know you are consistent and you are immutable and you are unchangeable and you are steadfast. We know that you are faithful when we are faithless. God, help us grope our way to faith. Help us see the things in our life, the expectations that we've placed on you that you didn't place on yourself. Help us to humbly admit those and remove them from the equation so that we might finally hear you with clarity. Help me hear you with clarity as you root out the expectations and the untrue beliefs that I have of you in my own life and in my own heart, Father. Be with us in our families and in our friends and in our peer groups even this week. Help us see with clarity who you are and what you never claim to be. And help us walk with a more crystal clear faith, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

This morning, we are still in the middle of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus is the greatest storyteller to ever live. And he actually employed stories called parables in his teaching throughout his ministry. And we'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story used to make a moral point. And it's important this morning that we remember that these are fictional because this one that we're going to focus on this morning is maybe the most mysterious, most layered. It conjures up more questions probably than any other parable. In this parable is a reference to paradise and a reference to Hades and what life is going to look like in eternity. And a lot of people try to read into this parable what eternity must look like and what Jesus was saying about eternity. But what I would say to that before we even jump into the parable found in Luke chapter 16 is that that's not the point that Jesus is trying to make. Jesus isn't trying to paint a picture of eternity in this parable. He's trying to make a larger point that I want us to get to today. And I'm actually talking about this up front because Scripture does have a place where it talks about eternity, where it does fill in some of the blanks on what that's going to look like in heaven and in hell, being with God and being separated from God and what it's going to look like at the end of time. And we find that in the book of Revelation. I've been going back and forth in my own head and in my own heart about whether that was something I wanted to dive into as a church. So I want to invite you this week in your small groups, on your Zoom calls, in your check-ins, discuss this with your small group leader. And I'm going to be getting with the small group leaders and asking for feedback from them. And if Revelation is something that we want to go through as a church sometime in the not-too-distant future, then I would love to do that with you. But I just want to kind of gauge the interest level before we dive into that together because it's quite the undertaking. With that as an aside, we're going to set eternity and what this parable implicates about eternity aside today so that we can see the main focus of the parable. We can find it, like I said, in Luke chapter 16. If you have a Bible there at home, I hope that you'll open it up and go through the text with me. I'm going to read some verses, some of them, like always, I'll summarize. And I love it when you have your Bible open and you're making sure that I'm following along with the story correctly and you're not giving me the benefit of infallibility. I would also encourage, if you're watching this as a family, if you have kids with you, what a cool time to open up mom or dad's Bible and have them gather around and go through and consume and look at the text together. What a great time as a family to be able to gather around one Bible, God's Word, and consume that together. So grab a Bible if you have it and open up to Luke chapter 16. We're going to be in verses 19 through 31. It's in those verses that you'll find the parable of Abraham's bosom. And this is how was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. So that's how Jesus sets the stage. There's a rich man who had all he wanted every day. He feasted sumptuously, which sounds a little bit like me in quarantine, but this is what he did every day. That's how he lived. And at his gate, there was a poor man named Lazarus who begged, who ate the scraps off of his table. And the implication is that the rich man really didn't pay much attention to him. And Lazarus was so hard up that the dogs would come and lick his sores. I can't imagine the poverty or the sickness that would render you, that would put you in a place where you just said, you know what? Go to town, dogs. That's fine. It breaks my heart to think about someone living like that. And so these are the two characters. These are the two men, the rich man and then the poor man, Lazarus. And they both died at the same time. And in eternity, it says that Lazarus, the poor man, was in Abraham's bosom. Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people. That was being with him in eternity is acknowledged as being in paradise. And then there was a chasm, and on the other side of the chasm was Hades. And Hades is always associated with fire and separation from God and suffering. And the rich man was in Hades. And the rich man looks across the chasm and he sees Abraham and he cries out and he requests, Father Abraham, can Lazarus come across this chasm, across this divide, dip his finger in water and just give me a drop of water? I'm burning and I'm thirsty. And what's interesting there, if you look at the text, is Jesus chose very intentionally to have the rich man say, Father Abraham. What he's indicating there in that language is that the rich man was a Jew. The rich man looked to Abraham as his forefather. The Jewish culture at that time very much saw their eternity wrapped up in their lineage. He thought that because he was from the line of Abraham, because God made some promises to Abraham, that those promises applied to him, and simply by birthright, simply because of who he was and how he had lived his life, that he was going to spend eternity in paradise with Abraham and with God. And so what Jesus is saying there, it's one of the layers of this very layered parable, is that this man was a Jew and he thought that his lineage and his heritage was going to get him into heaven for eternity. And it didn't. And now he's having to face that reality. And it's a stark parallel because often to me in the New Testament, I find that there's a parallel between the expectant Jewish community and the expectant church community in the United States in the 21st century. We have plenty of people who are cultural Christians who grow up in church, who because their grandparents were believers, because their parents were believers, because they've always grown up in church, they just think they're automatically going to go to heaven. Even though maybe we've never articulated a faith, there's no evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in our life or that that faith and that love has taken hold of us. We haven't allowed God to come in and radically reprioritize our lives. Christianity remains just kind of a sliver of our life instead of our whole life. And it's entirely possible, we see in this parable, to go through our life expectant because of who we are and where we come from that one day we'll be in eternity because it just works out for us. And this rich man found out, no, that's not how it goes. And we would be wise to acknowledge that if we've been church people our whole life, that's not what gets us into heaven. That's not what allows us to spend eternity with God. What allows us to spend eternity with God is falling on our face and saying, I fall short and Jesus closes the gap and I need him more than anything else. He is the only way to the Father and so I need Jesus in my life and I submit to his lordship in my life. It's to acknowledge that we are sinners in need of a Savior. But the rich man cries out, Father Abraham, can Lazarus please just come across and give me a drop of water? And Abraham explains to the rich man, I'm sorry, man, that's not how this works. This chasm is too deep. It's too wide. It was intentionally placed here so that nobody could go from paradise to Hades and come back. And no one can come from Hades to paradise. It cannot be crossed, so Lazarus can't bring you any water. And the rich man, in response to this, asks what I believe is a heart-wrenching question. He says, okay, fine. Can Lazarus, can you send him back to my father's house? I have five brothers and they need to know about this. They need to know that this is true. They need to know that eternity is not some old wives' tale, that this is actually taking place. They need to know that there is suffering waiting on them, that they are on a path to where I am, and I don't want to be here. Can you please send Lazarus back so that my family doesn't have to suffer like I'm suffering? It's a heart-wrenching question. It's a very human request. It's this realization by the rich man, oh my goodness, all those teachings I heard over the course of my life, they're true. And my brothers are like me. They don't believe them either. Can we please send Lazarus back to prevent them from experiencing what I'm experiencing? I want to know that they're going to be in paradise. I don't want them to put up with this to endure this. But Abraham's response is tough. Look what another reason why I say it's a layered parable because the end of it, he says, if they didn't believe Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe Lazarus. They're not even going to believe it if someone were to rise from the dead. Jesus is saying to this Jewish crowd that's listening to him, without them even realizing it, in a few weeks, I'm going to die and I'm going to conquer death and raise myself from the dead. And even then, some of you won't believe. He's foreshadowing his own death at the end of this parable. And Abraham's response is tough. The rich man says, please, can Lazarus go and share this message with my brothers to prevent them from coming here. And Abraham says, they have Moses and the prophets. They have what we understand to be the Old Testament. They have the scriptures. They have the Bible. God has spoken to them. And he says, no, no, no, just send Lazarus back. They'll listen to Lazarus. And Abraham says, even if someone is resurrected from the dead, they still will not. If they won't listen to Moses and the prophets, they won't listen to them. And it's this stark message. Your brothers are stubborn. Your other rich brothers are stubborn. They've been exposed to the message. God has been speaking to them. We've told you over and over and over again. Since you were a young boy, you all, your family, had the messages of Moses and of the prophets and of the Old Testament, and God's Word breathed into your life, and you have all chosen not to believe it and not to repent and not to submit to God and there's no other voices that are going to help. The message from this parable that we don't want to miss is that if we think God isn't speaking to us, we probably just aren't listening. If we think God's not speaking to us, if we're having a hard time hearing the voice of God and we're going, God, why don't you say something? Why don't you make your will more clear? Why don't you make yourself more clear? It's probably not that he's not speaking to us. It's far more likely that we're just not listening. It's not that the rich man and his brothers weren't getting spoken to by God. They had the Bible. They had Moses. They grew up in a culture that was designed fundamentally to point them to the Father. But they missed it. And they didn't miss it because God wasn't speaking to them. They missed it because they weren't listening. And haven't we seen this happen in our lives? Haven't we seen this happen in the lives of the people around us? I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years with people who are skeptical of the faith. And they'll say something like, you know, if God is real, why doesn't he just make himself more evident? Why does he make it so hard to find him? If God is real, why doesn't he just like show himself front and center? And listen, I don't want to demean or sweep away those questions because they come from a sincere place. They really do. And questions like that make sense to me. But whenever I hear a question like that, I'm just convinced that we're not listening. Because when someone says, if God's real, why doesn't he just come and put himself right in front of us? I think to myself, do you mean Jesus of Nazareth that lived for 33 years and then historically died and was resurrected? Do you mean like that? Or when somebody says, if God's real, why doesn't he make himself evident? I think, do you mean like in nature? Do you mean that God should make himself more evident in his creation? That that's the way that he's chosen to reveal himself to us? Romans 1 says that God has revealed himself to us in nature so that no man is without excuse. When people say, I wonder why God doesn't make himself more evident, I wonder to myself, have you ever looked at the grandeur of a mountain range? Have you ever sat on the peaceful beach and just behold the beauty of a sunset or a sunrise? Have you ever looked at a painting in the sky and not thought, man, God, you nailed that one? Have you ever not sat in the peace and the grandeur of the plains? Have you gone out west and looked at how big and open and wide everything is? Have you been to the Caribbean and seen how crystal blue the waters are? Have you been in the hills and the east coast of the United States and looked at the lush greenery? How do you look at those things and not think, wow, there must be an author to this? Scripture tells us that even if man refuses to praise God, that the rocks cry out, that the heavens declare the glory of God. How can we say that God doesn't make himself more evident when all we have to do is literally step outside and look at his evidence all around us? How can we say that God hasn't made himself evident when we've had the gift of holding a child that we created? One of the things that I marvel at when people say, why doesn't God make himself more evident? I think of this idea of just the size and the scope of the universe. Do you understand that we still haven't found the smallest thing? We still can't find the smallest thing that God created. Years ago, 100 years ago, we thought it was a cell. We thought that a single cell was probably the smallest possible building block of life. And then we developed microscopes and we did some research and we went, oh man, we were way off. There's things that are a lot smaller than this. And then we discovered the atom. We were like, okay, that's got to be the smallest thing. And then we went, oh, that's not the smallest thing. There's like electrons. Those are tiny. And then we went to electrons and we're like, oh my gosh, there's a whole universe of things inside electrons. And no matter how much research we do, we still can't find the smallest, most fundamental thing that all of nature is based on. The universe that God created is infinitesimally small, yet it's unfathomably large. If we zoom out from the smallest thing and look at the largest thing, we still can't comprehend the universe. We still don't understand how it all dances together and hangs there. Science still can't explain the origin of it. Even if we can trace it back through history, through all the different experiments and reading and research that we have, we still don't know how it came into creation besides a creator God. Even Einstein, as he searched for a theory of relativity to stitch together the universe and understand all the things at play here God exists. And we don't just do this with our belief in God, but sometimes we do it circumstantially. Sometimes we're in different circumstances and we'll think to ourselves, why won't God tell me what I should do here? Why can't I hear his voice? I think of an example from several years ago when I was at my previous church. There was a guy who was a good guy, great character, one of my small group leaders. I was a small group pastor, and he and I worked together a fair amount. He came to me and he said, hey, I feel like God has laid on my heart that I need to plant a church. What do you think I should do? And I had to tell him. I'm not one to pull many punches in situations like this. So I had to tell him, listen, man, I don't think you're ready. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think your family's where it needs to be. I don't think where you need to be. I think you should, that's a good goal. But the timing's probably off. It's probably not the right time. And he said, okay, I hear you, but I think I'm gonna talk to the pastor about this. I said, all right. So he goes and he sits down with our lead pastor and he says, hey, I think the Lord wants me to plant a church. And our lead pastor said the same thing I did. Gosh, it's a good goal. It just doesn't feel like the right time. I really don't think I would support that. And the guy said, okay, I'm going to talk to the elders then. So he goes and he sits in front of the elders and he says, hey, I think God wants me to plant a church and I'd really love you guys to support this. And they unanimously and quickly said, we don't think that's a good idea. And after hearing all of that advice, he went home and he told his wife he was no longer going to plant a church and he was a faithful small group leader for years. No, that's never how that story goes. He went, okay, I hear you guys, but God's leading me in another way. And he went and he left us and he went and he planted a church. And sure enough, within a year and a half, two years, that church didn't exist and he had to figure out life again. And he may be tempted at the end of that road to say, God, where were you? Why weren't you speaking to me? And the truth of it was, God was speaking to him the whole time in a cacophony of voices that he invited into his life as spiritual authorities that he just refused to listen to. It wasn't that God wasn't speaking to him, it's that he wasn't listening. And I believe we all do this. I believe we all search for the voice of God. God, what would you have me do here? God, why don't you show up in this situation? God, why don't you make yourself more evident? When God the whole time has been speaking to us. When God the whole time has put voices in our life, has put his word in our life, has put a church in our life, has put family members in our life to guide us, to serve as his voices, and yet we say we can't hear him. So to me, that's the main point. That if we can't hear God, it's not because he's not speaking, it's because we're not listening. But the interesting question that comes out of that message is, what is it that's preventing us from hearing the voice of God? Why sometimes do we struggle so mightily to hear something that's being spoken so clearly? And I think to find the answer to this, we should examine the contemporaries of Jesus. I think if we look at the religious establishment, at the Pharisees and the religious leaders and the majority of the Jewish people at the time of the life of Christ, who did not believe that Jesus was who he said he was, who were not listening to the message of God. I think if we look to them and try to figure out why was it that they couldn't hear the voice of God, that we may be able to figure out why we can't hear the voice of God. And so as I thought about that question this week, why was it that the religious leaders at the time of Christ couldn't understand what he was saying? What was prohibiting them from hearing Jesus, from hearing the message of God? I came to the conclusion that they couldn't hear God because of their own deafening expectations. They had these expectations playing in their ears that were so deafening that they were drowning out the message that God was trying to communicate to them. I kind of think of it like this. For Christmas, I got maybe the greatest gift that's ever been given, AirPods, for Christmas this year. And AirPods have this great technology in them. It's noise canceling technology so that when you put them in your ears, they begin to actively work to cancel out all the noise in your area. So you can literally turn down the volume of an entire room simply by having these in your ears. It's magical. If you have a four-year-old or a Kyle, I highly recommend these. And then when you partner their noise canceling ability with a song that you may be choosing to play from your phone, you can't hear anything. It's magical. Jen, my wife, hates these things because when they're in, I can't hear anything going on around me. I'm in my own little universe. And the truth of it is that when these are in my ear, I can only hear what I want to hear. I can only hear things that are coming through my phone, things that I have intentionally chosen and told my phone, had these expectations playing in their ear that made them completely unable to hear anything else that God was trying to say to them. Those expectations were deafening. Their expectations of Jesus were that he came to be a physical king. They expected him to be a king, to literally come and sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem, to overthrow Herod, to overthrow Roman rule, to rise Israel to national prominence, to literally take over the whole world and sit in a righteous and glorious divine reign over the planet with the Messiah Jesus on the throne. They expected a physical kingdom. They expected that Jesus was going to come from Jerusalem, not Nazareth, not the country, not be a poor carpenter or probably a stonemason if you really get into the technicalities of the words. They didn't expect that Jesus would be a poor stonemason from Nazareth, from the north of the country. They expected that he would come from Jerusalem, that he would be a member of the religious elite, that he would come up through their institutions, through their religious structure and hierarchy. They envisioned that he would be the high priest, that he would cater to them. They did not think he would carouse with sinners. They did not think he would be friends with prostitutes. They did not think that he would associate himself with people who were not amongst the elite. And what they didn't realize is Jesus came to save sinners. He came to seek the lost. He came to interact with the broken. He came to build a church. He didn't come to establish a physical kingdom and sit on a physical throne. That is too small of a kingdom for our Messiah. He came to earth to establish an eternal spiritual kingdom whose throne is in heaven that he will sit next to his Father and reign on for all of eternity. And we as the church and everyone who becomes a believer is a part of the spiritual kingdom that Jesus came to establish. And all of the Old Testament points to that reality, but because they had their own deafening expectations in their ear, they couldn't hear that message from God, and so they rejected it. Their own deafening expectations caused them to reject the Messiah when he showed up in front of them because they could no longer hear his message. And if that's true of them, it makes me wonder about our expectations. I wonder what expectations we have that are prohibiting us from hearing the message of God. A very easy one is the message of prosperity. There are some men and women who are peddlers of the false gospel of prosperity who teach people that to be a believer means that you will be prosperous, that if you have enough faith, God will give you material blessing. There was actually a televangelist at the beginning of this COVID nonsense who told people in his TV audience that even if you lose your job, if you give your last paycheck to this ministry, God is gonna flourish you. The Bible's very clear that guy's gonna get his, just so we all know. But that's a false gospel. It builds an expectation that to become a believer means I will be prosperous. It means I'm gonna close close the business deal. It means I'm going to get the car. It means I'm going to have the wealth. And it's an incredibly damaging belief because people who are in poverty and subject to that kind of false optimism sign up for faith with the expectation that God is going to make them prosperous. And then when he doesn't, it leaves them shipwrecked on the side of the road with no faith and no hope in a God that they should have never believed in in the first place. It's a false gospel. And that expectation built up that because I'm a believer, God is going to prosper me is a false expectation, and when it doesn't come to fruition, it shipwrecks their faith. And I don't know where we're getting that in the Bible because Jesus himself was poor. He says, He said, He said, He didn't have a lot of extra money to throw together. A lot of times their meals came down to just the amount of bread that they had. Nowhere in the Bible does it state that if we are believers that we will be prosperous, yet that expectation exists and persists and wrecks people's faith along the way. One that we are probably more susceptible to in our crowd and in our culture, and I've seen this over and over again in the lives of people, is the expectation that to be a believer means that God is going to prevent pain. That if I'm a believer, if I'm walking with God, if I'm walking faithfully, if I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, then he is going to allow me to dodge the raindrops of tragedy in my life. That if we'll just dot our I's and cross our T's and mind our business and do what God asks us to do, then we're not going to get the tough diagnosis and neither is anyone that we love. We're not going to experience that loss and neither will anyone in our immediate circle. That to be a believer is an insurance policy that God is going to protect me against pain. A lot of us have that expectation. We might not say it that way, but it exists. And we know it exists because I've seen so many people who have a solid faith who experience loss or tragedy for the first time, and that faith is shaken to its core. Do you know why it's shaken to its core? Because part of the foundation of that faith was an expectation that my God will prevent me from pain and tragedy when God does not claim that in Scripture anywhere. Sometimes it's built on poor teaching on verses like Romans 8.28 that teach, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. And some people want to apply that to this life right now, saying that no matter what happens, it's going to work out for our good. When really what that verse means is God is orchestrating everything to bring us nearer to him in eternity, that everything will work out for those who love him, for their ultimate good, for eternity in paradise. It might not work out in this life, but it will always work out in the next life. But when we have this expectation that to be a believer is to prevent us from pain, we will inevitably experience pain that runs contrary to that expectation. And I don't know how we got this idea because all through the Bible are people who suffer for God. When God speaks to a prophet named Ananias, he tells him that Saul is his chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. And get this, he will show him how much he must suffer for his name. That same Saul becomes Paul and details at the end of his life, all the ways he suffered for God through the years. Even Jesus himself, we don't talk about this a lot, but by the end of Jesus' life, Joseph, his earthly father, is not on the scene anymore. So it's entirely possible that somewhere in Jesus' adolescence, his mother became a single mom. It's entirely possible that Jesus experienced part of adolescence. The Son of God experienced life, potentially, as someone who lost his earthly father in a single-parent home. Does that sound like God protects people from suffering all the time? James tells us whenever we endure trials to consider it pure joy. Not if we endure them, but when we do. If we want to have a healthy, accurate, vibrant understanding of God, we have to move away from the expectation that to be walking with him means that we get to dodge the raindrops of pain. That's not a scriptural teaching. And that expectation leaves our faith shipwrecked. Another one, another expectation that I see is the expectation that God's going to make sense. The expectation that we'll be able to understand the almighty, infinite creator God. That if I just read enough books, if I can just systematize it enough, if I can just ask the right questions, if I can just seek out the right answers, then one day everything will tie up in this nice, neat little bow when theologically and experientially and philosophically I'll be able to understand God in a way that is satisfactory to me. When Romans 11 says His ways are higher than our ways. When Psalms says that His ways are unsearchable and unknowable and inscrutable. How can we expect to know an infinite creator God who knows good and well what the smallest thing is because He created it and He knows how big the universe is and how it hangs in place because he created it. How can we think that that massive God can be tucked into a little, tight, neat box so that my human understanding can grasp it and explain it to others all the time? It's unreasonable. And then sometimes when we can't make sense of some of the things that God says or does because we can't fit it into our human box of understanding, we walk away from him because of this false expectation that we should be able to understand him all the time. When the Bible doesn't advocate that, it doesn't tell us that we can. We can understand bits and pieces. We can know him, but we won't fully know him until we are in eternity. The last expectation that I would point out to you this morning is the false expectation that the morality of God would mirror the morality of our culture. I've been alive for 39 years. And in those 39 years, I've watched the needle on certain topics move. I've watched our culture say that in one decade, this behavior is unacceptable. And in another decade, say no longer is it not unacceptable, but it is embraceable. And if you don't, then you're wrong. I've watched that needle move where this behavior was wrong and now it is right, where this was something that we don't even really speak about because it's uncouth and now we embrace it and we support it. And sometimes those shifts are good. Sometimes they're good and necessary evolutionary shifts in how we understand Scripture and how we understand our culture. But sometimes the morality needle moves in our culture, and we take the Bible and we rush to squeeze it in and say, oh, this certainly is what God would encourage as well. This certainly is what God is teaching as well. We have to have misunderstood the scriptures in the past. They have to mean this now because this is what our culture thinks and dictates, and certainly that makes the most sense. And instead of taking the morality of our culture and viewing it through the lens of eternal and inerrant Scripture. We take Scripture and we view it through the lens of malleable, constantly changing, argumentative cultural morality, and we try to make God's eternal Word fit into that. And when we can't do it, we throw out the Bible and we say, I guess it can't be trusted because it didn't meet our expectation that God's morality would mirror the morality of our culture. Over and over again, you can probably think of more. We have these expectations of God that he never claimed, that he never gave us, that he never affirmed. And yet because God isn't meeting those expectations, we can't hear him. We have our AirPods in and we can't hear anything except for what we want to hear. And the whole time, God has been speaking to us. God has been calling out to us. God has been making himself evident to us. God has been offering us gentle, unobtrusive guidance through his scriptures and to the people in our life who love him and love us. But we have a hard time hearing him because our deafening expectations are drowning his voice out. And so it makes me want to leave you with this question to think about as you go throughout your week, hopefully to talk about in our small groups if we've developed enough trust to be this vulnerable with one another. Certainly you can see ways that your expectations have potentially damaged your ability to hear God. I know that I have mine. I would even venture to say what I've found in my own life is when God doesn't make sense or when I'm having a hard time with faith or when I don't feel like I'm in sync with him, normally it's a time when I need to sit down and say, God, what am I expecting you to do that isn't a fair expectation of you? And I'll realize it's my own bad thinking and poor beliefs about God that are keeping me from walking in faith with him. It's not his voice. It's not his teaching. It's not what he's doing. So as we wrap up, I would ask you to consider this. What expectations do we need to remove from our ears so that we can hear what God has been saying to us all along? What things have we been clinging to? What beliefs do we have that, like the religious community and the life of Christ, are playing in our ears so loudly that we can't see Jesus when he's standing right in front of us? What expectations do we need to remove so that we can finally hear the voice of God with crystal clarity? I hope you'll do that this week. I hope we'll walk with a more clear understanding of who God is and what he wants for us. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We know you are good. We know you love us. We know you are consistent and you are immutable and you are unchangeable and you are steadfast. We know that you are faithful when we are faithless. God, help us grope our way to faith. Help us see the things in our life, the expectations that we've placed on you that you didn't place on yourself. Help us to humbly admit those and remove them from the equation so that we might finally hear you with clarity. Help me hear you with clarity as you root out the expectations and the untrue beliefs that I have of you in my own life and in my own heart, Father. Be with us in our families and in our friends and in our peer groups even this week. Help us see with clarity who you are and what you never claim to be. And help us walk with a more crystal clear faith, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

This morning, we are still in the middle of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus is the greatest storyteller to ever live. And he actually employed stories called parables in his teaching throughout his ministry. And we'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story used to make a moral point. And it's important this morning that we remember that these are fictional because this one that we're going to focus on this morning is maybe the most mysterious, most layered. It conjures up more questions probably than any other parable. In this parable is a reference to paradise and a reference to Hades and what life is going to look like in eternity. And a lot of people try to read into this parable what eternity must look like and what Jesus was saying about eternity. But what I would say to that before we even jump into the parable found in Luke chapter 16 is that that's not the point that Jesus is trying to make. Jesus isn't trying to paint a picture of eternity in this parable. He's trying to make a larger point that I want us to get to today. And I'm actually talking about this up front because Scripture does have a place where it talks about eternity, where it does fill in some of the blanks on what that's going to look like in heaven and in hell, being with God and being separated from God and what it's going to look like at the end of time. And we find that in the book of Revelation. I've been going back and forth in my own head and in my own heart about whether that was something I wanted to dive into as a church. So I want to invite you this week in your small groups, on your Zoom calls, in your check-ins, discuss this with your small group leader. And I'm going to be getting with the small group leaders and asking for feedback from them. And if Revelation is something that we want to go through as a church sometime in the not-too-distant future, then I would love to do that with you. But I just want to kind of gauge the interest level before we dive into that together because it's quite the undertaking. With that as an aside, we're going to set eternity and what this parable implicates about eternity aside today so that we can see the main focus of the parable. We can find it, like I said, in Luke chapter 16. If you have a Bible there at home, I hope that you'll open it up and go through the text with me. I'm going to read some verses, some of them, like always, I'll summarize. And I love it when you have your Bible open and you're making sure that I'm following along with the story correctly and you're not giving me the benefit of infallibility. I would also encourage, if you're watching this as a family, if you have kids with you, what a cool time to open up mom or dad's Bible and have them gather around and go through and consume and look at the text together. What a great time as a family to be able to gather around one Bible, God's Word, and consume that together. So grab a Bible if you have it and open up to Luke chapter 16. We're going to be in verses 19 through 31. It's in those verses that you'll find the parable of Abraham's bosom. And this is how was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. So that's how Jesus sets the stage. There's a rich man who had all he wanted every day. He feasted sumptuously, which sounds a little bit like me in quarantine, but this is what he did every day. That's how he lived. And at his gate, there was a poor man named Lazarus who begged, who ate the scraps off of his table. And the implication is that the rich man really didn't pay much attention to him. And Lazarus was so hard up that the dogs would come and lick his sores. I can't imagine the poverty or the sickness that would render you, that would put you in a place where you just said, you know what? Go to town, dogs. That's fine. It breaks my heart to think about someone living like that. And so these are the two characters. These are the two men, the rich man and then the poor man, Lazarus. And they both died at the same time. And in eternity, it says that Lazarus, the poor man, was in Abraham's bosom. Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people. That was being with him in eternity is acknowledged as being in paradise. And then there was a chasm, and on the other side of the chasm was Hades. And Hades is always associated with fire and separation from God and suffering. And the rich man was in Hades. And the rich man looks across the chasm and he sees Abraham and he cries out and he requests, Father Abraham, can Lazarus come across this chasm, across this divide, dip his finger in water and just give me a drop of water? I'm burning and I'm thirsty. And what's interesting there, if you look at the text, is Jesus chose very intentionally to have the rich man say, Father Abraham. What he's indicating there in that language is that the rich man was a Jew. The rich man looked to Abraham as his forefather. The Jewish culture at that time very much saw their eternity wrapped up in their lineage. He thought that because he was from the line of Abraham, because God made some promises to Abraham, that those promises applied to him, and simply by birthright, simply because of who he was and how he had lived his life, that he was going to spend eternity in paradise with Abraham and with God. And so what Jesus is saying there, it's one of the layers of this very layered parable, is that this man was a Jew and he thought that his lineage and his heritage was going to get him into heaven for eternity. And it didn't. And now he's having to face that reality. And it's a stark parallel because often to me in the New Testament, I find that there's a parallel between the expectant Jewish community and the expectant church community in the United States in the 21st century. We have plenty of people who are cultural Christians who grow up in church, who because their grandparents were believers, because their parents were believers, because they've always grown up in church, they just think they're automatically going to go to heaven. Even though maybe we've never articulated a faith, there's no evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in our life or that that faith and that love has taken hold of us. We haven't allowed God to come in and radically reprioritize our lives. Christianity remains just kind of a sliver of our life instead of our whole life. And it's entirely possible, we see in this parable, to go through our life expectant because of who we are and where we come from that one day we'll be in eternity because it just works out for us. And this rich man found out, no, that's not how it goes. And we would be wise to acknowledge that if we've been church people our whole life, that's not what gets us into heaven. That's not what allows us to spend eternity with God. What allows us to spend eternity with God is falling on our face and saying, I fall short and Jesus closes the gap and I need him more than anything else. He is the only way to the Father and so I need Jesus in my life and I submit to his lordship in my life. It's to acknowledge that we are sinners in need of a Savior. But the rich man cries out, Father Abraham, can Lazarus please just come across and give me a drop of water? And Abraham explains to the rich man, I'm sorry, man, that's not how this works. This chasm is too deep. It's too wide. It was intentionally placed here so that nobody could go from paradise to Hades and come back. And no one can come from Hades to paradise. It cannot be crossed, so Lazarus can't bring you any water. And the rich man, in response to this, asks what I believe is a heart-wrenching question. He says, okay, fine. Can Lazarus, can you send him back to my father's house? I have five brothers and they need to know about this. They need to know that this is true. They need to know that eternity is not some old wives' tale, that this is actually taking place. They need to know that there is suffering waiting on them, that they are on a path to where I am, and I don't want to be here. Can you please send Lazarus back so that my family doesn't have to suffer like I'm suffering? It's a heart-wrenching question. It's a very human request. It's this realization by the rich man, oh my goodness, all those teachings I heard over the course of my life, they're true. And my brothers are like me. They don't believe them either. Can we please send Lazarus back to prevent them from experiencing what I'm experiencing? I want to know that they're going to be in paradise. I don't want them to put up with this to endure this. But Abraham's response is tough. Look what another reason why I say it's a layered parable because the end of it, he says, if they didn't believe Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe Lazarus. They're not even going to believe it if someone were to rise from the dead. Jesus is saying to this Jewish crowd that's listening to him, without them even realizing it, in a few weeks, I'm going to die and I'm going to conquer death and raise myself from the dead. And even then, some of you won't believe. He's foreshadowing his own death at the end of this parable. And Abraham's response is tough. The rich man says, please, can Lazarus go and share this message with my brothers to prevent them from coming here. And Abraham says, they have Moses and the prophets. They have what we understand to be the Old Testament. They have the scriptures. They have the Bible. God has spoken to them. And he says, no, no, no, just send Lazarus back. They'll listen to Lazarus. And Abraham says, even if someone is resurrected from the dead, they still will not. If they won't listen to Moses and the prophets, they won't listen to them. And it's this stark message. Your brothers are stubborn. Your other rich brothers are stubborn. They've been exposed to the message. God has been speaking to them. We've told you over and over and over again. Since you were a young boy, you all, your family, had the messages of Moses and of the prophets and of the Old Testament, and God's Word breathed into your life, and you have all chosen not to believe it and not to repent and not to submit to God and there's no other voices that are going to help. The message from this parable that we don't want to miss is that if we think God isn't speaking to us, we probably just aren't listening. If we think God's not speaking to us, if we're having a hard time hearing the voice of God and we're going, God, why don't you say something? Why don't you make your will more clear? Why don't you make yourself more clear? It's probably not that he's not speaking to us. It's far more likely that we're just not listening. It's not that the rich man and his brothers weren't getting spoken to by God. They had the Bible. They had Moses. They grew up in a culture that was designed fundamentally to point them to the Father. But they missed it. And they didn't miss it because God wasn't speaking to them. They missed it because they weren't listening. And haven't we seen this happen in our lives? Haven't we seen this happen in the lives of the people around us? I can't tell you how many conversations I've had over the years with people who are skeptical of the faith. And they'll say something like, you know, if God is real, why doesn't he just make himself more evident? Why does he make it so hard to find him? If God is real, why doesn't he just like show himself front and center? And listen, I don't want to demean or sweep away those questions because they come from a sincere place. They really do. And questions like that make sense to me. But whenever I hear a question like that, I'm just convinced that we're not listening. Because when someone says, if God's real, why doesn't he just come and put himself right in front of us? I think to myself, do you mean Jesus of Nazareth that lived for 33 years and then historically died and was resurrected? Do you mean like that? Or when somebody says, if God's real, why doesn't he make himself evident? I think, do you mean like in nature? Do you mean that God should make himself more evident in his creation? That that's the way that he's chosen to reveal himself to us? Romans 1 says that God has revealed himself to us in nature so that no man is without excuse. When people say, I wonder why God doesn't make himself more evident, I wonder to myself, have you ever looked at the grandeur of a mountain range? Have you ever sat on the peaceful beach and just behold the beauty of a sunset or a sunrise? Have you ever looked at a painting in the sky and not thought, man, God, you nailed that one? Have you ever not sat in the peace and the grandeur of the plains? Have you gone out west and looked at how big and open and wide everything is? Have you been to the Caribbean and seen how crystal blue the waters are? Have you been in the hills and the east coast of the United States and looked at the lush greenery? How do you look at those things and not think, wow, there must be an author to this? Scripture tells us that even if man refuses to praise God, that the rocks cry out, that the heavens declare the glory of God. How can we say that God doesn't make himself more evident when all we have to do is literally step outside and look at his evidence all around us? How can we say that God hasn't made himself evident when we've had the gift of holding a child that we created? One of the things that I marvel at when people say, why doesn't God make himself more evident? I think of this idea of just the size and the scope of the universe. Do you understand that we still haven't found the smallest thing? We still can't find the smallest thing that God created. Years ago, 100 years ago, we thought it was a cell. We thought that a single cell was probably the smallest possible building block of life. And then we developed microscopes and we did some research and we went, oh man, we were way off. There's things that are a lot smaller than this. And then we discovered the atom. We were like, okay, that's got to be the smallest thing. And then we went, oh, that's not the smallest thing. There's like electrons. Those are tiny. And then we went to electrons and we're like, oh my gosh, there's a whole universe of things inside electrons. And no matter how much research we do, we still can't find the smallest, most fundamental thing that all of nature is based on. The universe that God created is infinitesimally small, yet it's unfathomably large. If we zoom out from the smallest thing and look at the largest thing, we still can't comprehend the universe. We still don't understand how it all dances together and hangs there. Science still can't explain the origin of it. Even if we can trace it back through history, through all the different experiments and reading and research that we have, we still don't know how it came into creation besides a creator God. Even Einstein, as he searched for a theory of relativity to stitch together the universe and understand all the things at play here God exists. And we don't just do this with our belief in God, but sometimes we do it circumstantially. Sometimes we're in different circumstances and we'll think to ourselves, why won't God tell me what I should do here? Why can't I hear his voice? I think of an example from several years ago when I was at my previous church. There was a guy who was a good guy, great character, one of my small group leaders. I was a small group pastor, and he and I worked together a fair amount. He came to me and he said, hey, I feel like God has laid on my heart that I need to plant a church. What do you think I should do? And I had to tell him. I'm not one to pull many punches in situations like this. So I had to tell him, listen, man, I don't think you're ready. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think your family's where it needs to be. I don't think where you need to be. I think you should, that's a good goal. But the timing's probably off. It's probably not the right time. And he said, okay, I hear you, but I think I'm gonna talk to the pastor about this. I said, all right. So he goes and he sits down with our lead pastor and he says, hey, I think the Lord wants me to plant a church. And our lead pastor said the same thing I did. Gosh, it's a good goal. It just doesn't feel like the right time. I really don't think I would support that. And the guy said, okay, I'm going to talk to the elders then. So he goes and he sits in front of the elders and he says, hey, I think God wants me to plant a church and I'd really love you guys to support this. And they unanimously and quickly said, we don't think that's a good idea. And after hearing all of that advice, he went home and he told his wife he was no longer going to plant a church and he was a faithful small group leader for years. No, that's never how that story goes. He went, okay, I hear you guys, but God's leading me in another way. And he went and he left us and he went and he planted a church. And sure enough, within a year and a half, two years, that church didn't exist and he had to figure out life again. And he may be tempted at the end of that road to say, God, where were you? Why weren't you speaking to me? And the truth of it was, God was speaking to him the whole time in a cacophony of voices that he invited into his life as spiritual authorities that he just refused to listen to. It wasn't that God wasn't speaking to him, it's that he wasn't listening. And I believe we all do this. I believe we all search for the voice of God. God, what would you have me do here? God, why don't you show up in this situation? God, why don't you make yourself more evident? When God the whole time has been speaking to us. When God the whole time has put voices in our life, has put his word in our life, has put a church in our life, has put family members in our life to guide us, to serve as his voices, and yet we say we can't hear him. So to me, that's the main point. That if we can't hear God, it's not because he's not speaking, it's because we're not listening. But the interesting question that comes out of that message is, what is it that's preventing us from hearing the voice of God? Why sometimes do we struggle so mightily to hear something that's being spoken so clearly? And I think to find the answer to this, we should examine the contemporaries of Jesus. I think if we look at the religious establishment, at the Pharisees and the religious leaders and the majority of the Jewish people at the time of the life of Christ, who did not believe that Jesus was who he said he was, who were not listening to the message of God. I think if we look to them and try to figure out why was it that they couldn't hear the voice of God, that we may be able to figure out why we can't hear the voice of God. And so as I thought about that question this week, why was it that the religious leaders at the time of Christ couldn't understand what he was saying? What was prohibiting them from hearing Jesus, from hearing the message of God? I came to the conclusion that they couldn't hear God because of their own deafening expectations. They had these expectations playing in their ears that were so deafening that they were drowning out the message that God was trying to communicate to them. I kind of think of it like this. For Christmas, I got maybe the greatest gift that's ever been given, AirPods, for Christmas this year. And AirPods have this great technology in them. It's noise canceling technology so that when you put them in your ears, they begin to actively work to cancel out all the noise in your area. So you can literally turn down the volume of an entire room simply by having these in your ears. It's magical. If you have a four-year-old or a Kyle, I highly recommend these. And then when you partner their noise canceling ability with a song that you may be choosing to play from your phone, you can't hear anything. It's magical. Jen, my wife, hates these things because when they're in, I can't hear anything going on around me. I'm in my own little universe. And the truth of it is that when these are in my ear, I can only hear what I want to hear. I can only hear things that are coming through my phone, things that I have intentionally chosen and told my phone, had these expectations playing in their ear that made them completely unable to hear anything else that God was trying to say to them. Those expectations were deafening. Their expectations of Jesus were that he came to be a physical king. They expected him to be a king, to literally come and sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem, to overthrow Herod, to overthrow Roman rule, to rise Israel to national prominence, to literally take over the whole world and sit in a righteous and glorious divine reign over the planet with the Messiah Jesus on the throne. They expected a physical kingdom. They expected that Jesus was going to come from Jerusalem, not Nazareth, not the country, not be a poor carpenter or probably a stonemason if you really get into the technicalities of the words. They didn't expect that Jesus would be a poor stonemason from Nazareth, from the north of the country. They expected that he would come from Jerusalem, that he would be a member of the religious elite, that he would come up through their institutions, through their religious structure and hierarchy. They envisioned that he would be the high priest, that he would cater to them. They did not think he would carouse with sinners. They did not think he would be friends with prostitutes. They did not think that he would associate himself with people who were not amongst the elite. And what they didn't realize is Jesus came to save sinners. He came to seek the lost. He came to interact with the broken. He came to build a church. He didn't come to establish a physical kingdom and sit on a physical throne. That is too small of a kingdom for our Messiah. He came to earth to establish an eternal spiritual kingdom whose throne is in heaven that he will sit next to his Father and reign on for all of eternity. And we as the church and everyone who becomes a believer is a part of the spiritual kingdom that Jesus came to establish. And all of the Old Testament points to that reality, but because they had their own deafening expectations in their ear, they couldn't hear that message from God, and so they rejected it. Their own deafening expectations caused them to reject the Messiah when he showed up in front of them because they could no longer hear his message. And if that's true of them, it makes me wonder about our expectations. I wonder what expectations we have that are prohibiting us from hearing the message of God. A very easy one is the message of prosperity. There are some men and women who are peddlers of the false gospel of prosperity who teach people that to be a believer means that you will be prosperous, that if you have enough faith, God will give you material blessing. There was actually a televangelist at the beginning of this COVID nonsense who told people in his TV audience that even if you lose your job, if you give your last paycheck to this ministry, God is gonna flourish you. The Bible's very clear that guy's gonna get his, just so we all know. But that's a false gospel. It builds an expectation that to become a believer means I will be prosperous. It means I'm gonna close close the business deal. It means I'm going to get the car. It means I'm going to have the wealth. And it's an incredibly damaging belief because people who are in poverty and subject to that kind of false optimism sign up for faith with the expectation that God is going to make them prosperous. And then when he doesn't, it leaves them shipwrecked on the side of the road with no faith and no hope in a God that they should have never believed in in the first place. It's a false gospel. And that expectation built up that because I'm a believer, God is going to prosper me is a false expectation, and when it doesn't come to fruition, it shipwrecks their faith. And I don't know where we're getting that in the Bible because Jesus himself was poor. He says, He said, He said, He didn't have a lot of extra money to throw together. A lot of times their meals came down to just the amount of bread that they had. Nowhere in the Bible does it state that if we are believers that we will be prosperous, yet that expectation exists and persists and wrecks people's faith along the way. One that we are probably more susceptible to in our crowd and in our culture, and I've seen this over and over again in the lives of people, is the expectation that to be a believer means that God is going to prevent pain. That if I'm a believer, if I'm walking with God, if I'm walking faithfully, if I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, then he is going to allow me to dodge the raindrops of tragedy in my life. That if we'll just dot our I's and cross our T's and mind our business and do what God asks us to do, then we're not going to get the tough diagnosis and neither is anyone that we love. We're not going to experience that loss and neither will anyone in our immediate circle. That to be a believer is an insurance policy that God is going to protect me against pain. A lot of us have that expectation. We might not say it that way, but it exists. And we know it exists because I've seen so many people who have a solid faith who experience loss or tragedy for the first time, and that faith is shaken to its core. Do you know why it's shaken to its core? Because part of the foundation of that faith was an expectation that my God will prevent me from pain and tragedy when God does not claim that in Scripture anywhere. Sometimes it's built on poor teaching on verses like Romans 8.28 that teach, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. And some people want to apply that to this life right now, saying that no matter what happens, it's going to work out for our good. When really what that verse means is God is orchestrating everything to bring us nearer to him in eternity, that everything will work out for those who love him, for their ultimate good, for eternity in paradise. It might not work out in this life, but it will always work out in the next life. But when we have this expectation that to be a believer is to prevent us from pain, we will inevitably experience pain that runs contrary to that expectation. And I don't know how we got this idea because all through the Bible are people who suffer for God. When God speaks to a prophet named Ananias, he tells him that Saul is his chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. And get this, he will show him how much he must suffer for his name. That same Saul becomes Paul and details at the end of his life, all the ways he suffered for God through the years. Even Jesus himself, we don't talk about this a lot, but by the end of Jesus' life, Joseph, his earthly father, is not on the scene anymore. So it's entirely possible that somewhere in Jesus' adolescence, his mother became a single mom. It's entirely possible that Jesus experienced part of adolescence. The Son of God experienced life, potentially, as someone who lost his earthly father in a single-parent home. Does that sound like God protects people from suffering all the time? James tells us whenever we endure trials to consider it pure joy. Not if we endure them, but when we do. If we want to have a healthy, accurate, vibrant understanding of God, we have to move away from the expectation that to be walking with him means that we get to dodge the raindrops of pain. That's not a scriptural teaching. And that expectation leaves our faith shipwrecked. Another one, another expectation that I see is the expectation that God's going to make sense. The expectation that we'll be able to understand the almighty, infinite creator God. That if I just read enough books, if I can just systematize it enough, if I can just ask the right questions, if I can just seek out the right answers, then one day everything will tie up in this nice, neat little bow when theologically and experientially and philosophically I'll be able to understand God in a way that is satisfactory to me. When Romans 11 says His ways are higher than our ways. When Psalms says that His ways are unsearchable and unknowable and inscrutable. How can we expect to know an infinite creator God who knows good and well what the smallest thing is because He created it and He knows how big the universe is and how it hangs in place because he created it. How can we think that that massive God can be tucked into a little, tight, neat box so that my human understanding can grasp it and explain it to others all the time? It's unreasonable. And then sometimes when we can't make sense of some of the things that God says or does because we can't fit it into our human box of understanding, we walk away from him because of this false expectation that we should be able to understand him all the time. When the Bible doesn't advocate that, it doesn't tell us that we can. We can understand bits and pieces. We can know him, but we won't fully know him until we are in eternity. The last expectation that I would point out to you this morning is the false expectation that the morality of God would mirror the morality of our culture. I've been alive for 39 years. And in those 39 years, I've watched the needle on certain topics move. I've watched our culture say that in one decade, this behavior is unacceptable. And in another decade, say no longer is it not unacceptable, but it is embraceable. And if you don't, then you're wrong. I've watched that needle move where this behavior was wrong and now it is right, where this was something that we don't even really speak about because it's uncouth and now we embrace it and we support it. And sometimes those shifts are good. Sometimes they're good and necessary evolutionary shifts in how we understand Scripture and how we understand our culture. But sometimes the morality needle moves in our culture, and we take the Bible and we rush to squeeze it in and say, oh, this certainly is what God would encourage as well. This certainly is what God is teaching as well. We have to have misunderstood the scriptures in the past. They have to mean this now because this is what our culture thinks and dictates, and certainly that makes the most sense. And instead of taking the morality of our culture and viewing it through the lens of eternal and inerrant Scripture. We take Scripture and we view it through the lens of malleable, constantly changing, argumentative cultural morality, and we try to make God's eternal Word fit into that. And when we can't do it, we throw out the Bible and we say, I guess it can't be trusted because it didn't meet our expectation that God's morality would mirror the morality of our culture. Over and over again, you can probably think of more. We have these expectations of God that he never claimed, that he never gave us, that he never affirmed. And yet because God isn't meeting those expectations, we can't hear him. We have our AirPods in and we can't hear anything except for what we want to hear. And the whole time, God has been speaking to us. God has been calling out to us. God has been making himself evident to us. God has been offering us gentle, unobtrusive guidance through his scriptures and to the people in our life who love him and love us. But we have a hard time hearing him because our deafening expectations are drowning his voice out. And so it makes me want to leave you with this question to think about as you go throughout your week, hopefully to talk about in our small groups if we've developed enough trust to be this vulnerable with one another. Certainly you can see ways that your expectations have potentially damaged your ability to hear God. I know that I have mine. I would even venture to say what I've found in my own life is when God doesn't make sense or when I'm having a hard time with faith or when I don't feel like I'm in sync with him, normally it's a time when I need to sit down and say, God, what am I expecting you to do that isn't a fair expectation of you? And I'll realize it's my own bad thinking and poor beliefs about God that are keeping me from walking in faith with him. It's not his voice. It's not his teaching. It's not what he's doing. So as we wrap up, I would ask you to consider this. What expectations do we need to remove from our ears so that we can hear what God has been saying to us all along? What things have we been clinging to? What beliefs do we have that, like the religious community and the life of Christ, are playing in our ears so loudly that we can't see Jesus when he's standing right in front of us? What expectations do we need to remove so that we can finally hear the voice of God with crystal clarity? I hope you'll do that this week. I hope we'll walk with a more clear understanding of who God is and what he wants for us. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We know you are good. We know you love us. We know you are consistent and you are immutable and you are unchangeable and you are steadfast. We know that you are faithful when we are faithless. God, help us grope our way to faith. Help us see the things in our life, the expectations that we've placed on you that you didn't place on yourself. Help us to humbly admit those and remove them from the equation so that we might finally hear you with clarity. Help me hear you with clarity as you root out the expectations and the untrue beliefs that I have of you in my own life and in my own heart, Father. Be with us in our families and in our friends and in our peer groups even this week. Help us see with clarity who you are and what you never claim to be. And help us walk with a more crystal clear faith, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to be here with you in this way again. I'm so excited for August the 16th when we resume our in-person gatherings. On August the 16th, we're going to have the opportunity to participate in church in our home or yours. So for those of you who want to come and experience live church and see your church family and socially distance from the people that you've missed so much. I know that some of you have young kids and you really do want to come and you really do want to be a part of things, but we're also not able to offer children's ministry yet. So you kind of love the idea of coming and seeing folks and participating in worship, but might not feel great about trying to entertain a three or four or five-year-old during a boring sermon. And I totally get that. We have a four-year-old of our own. So if you want to come, bring your family, participate in worship, see your church family that you've missed so much, and then head home once the sermon starts, I just want you to know that's not going to hurt my feelings. I totally understand that. And if that helps you participate in the 16th and that's something you'd like to do, then we want to make that a possibility. So if that's something you want to do, please don't feel bad about that. I encourage that. I can't wait to see everybody who's willing to come on the 16th. And for those who are willing to wait, or feel they need to wait, I totally understand that, respect that, and look forward to seeing you whenever you feel comfortable venturing out. This morning we jump into the second part of our series called The Time of Kings. We're going to look at a story about the fourth king of Israel, a man named Rehoboam, that I love. If you read the Grace Vine, I said this week that this is another one of those sermons that I've wanted to preach for years. I love this lesson of the mistake of Rehoboam and how easily applicable it is to our lives today. By the way, if you just thought, man, I didn't get the Grace Vine, I don't see that, please let us know. Email me or email info at graceralee.org and we will get you on that email distribution list. But like I said, I've been looking forward to preaching this sermon. And for a little bit of context, as we just dive into scripture, we're going to end up in 1 Kings chapter 12. This is when we're introduced to Rehoboam. So if you have a Bible there at home, I hope that you'll grab that and open it up. Again, if you have folks around you, particularly kids, open up the Scripture and look at that text together. I can't tell you enough how important it is to go through text, to interact with Scripture as a family. Rehoboam comes after King Solomon. So the context for where we see this story is, last week we talked about Israel clamoring for a king. They wanted a king. God said it was a bad idea. They rejected God, and God said, just go ahead, Samuel, and give them a king. So they appointed a king named Saul. Saul was an egomaniac. He made it all about him and his kingdom and his wealth, and so God took his kingdom from him. He said, I regret making Saul king. And then he named Jesse, the son of David, the king over Israel. David, to this day, is the greatest king that Israel has ever had. The second greatest king, without hesitation, that Israel has ever had is David's son, King Solomon. Solomon, you'll know, is, according to the Bible, the wisest man to ever live. He wrote a bulk of the wisdom books that we find in the Old Testament. He wrote Proverbs and Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. I love the book of Proverbs that was written by Solomon as a letter to his son of just short snippets of wisdom. And as a matter of fact, as an aside, if you're someone who thinks, you know, I would love to read the Bible more. If you've heard me say before that there's no greater habit, there's no more important habit than anyone can develop in their life than to get up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. And you think to yourself, man, I need to do that. I would love to do that, but I don't know where to start. The Bible is really difficult to understand. It's 66 books. It spans thousands of years. It's a really difficult document to understand, and it's difficult to just drop parachute into a portion of it and know everything that's going on around us. So sometimes when we decide that we want to read the Bible, we dive into it and we don't understand it, and so then we put it away because it becomes frustrating. If that's your story, let me encourage you to start reading in Proverbs. Proverbs has 31 chapters. You can read whatever chapter corresponds with the date of that day. Just open it up, read a chapter, put it down. Proverbs is great because if you're skeptical about faith, if you don't know if you can trust the Bible or not, Proverbs is a great thing to pick up, to read, and to try to apply to your life. Is this truth going to work for me? If I do this, am I going to find out that it's true? It's a way to put the Bible to the test. It's also a book that doesn't require context. You can just jump right into it and start to read, and things are going to make sense to you without having to know the context of the rest of Scripture. So if you have a hard time reading the Bible, if you don't know where to start, Proverbs is a great place to start. If you have people in your life who want to read the Bible and they're asking you, where should I start? That's where I tell everybody to start is the book of Proverbs. And Solomon wrote that. And we think of Solomon, rightly so, as a righteous man because he wrote books of the Bible. He prayed to God. He prayed for wisdom when he could have had anything that he wanted. But it's also worth noting that later in Solomon's life, in many ways, he turned away from God. He took many hundred wives, he took a thousand concubines, he married for political reasons. Later in his life, he built an army. He built the first large standing army that Israel ever had, and he did that by taxing the people heavily. He built monuments and public works, and he did that by enslaving the people harshly. And so later in his life, Solomon became a really harsh king. To live in Israel under the reign of Solomon was not a pleasurable experience. History smiles on Solomon for his contributions, but if you were one of his subjects during his reign, you would not have enjoyed the reign of Solomon. So when Solomon dies, the mantle of the role of king goes to Rehoboam. It passes to Rehoboam. And when he's named king, you'll see in chapter 12, the people of Israel come to Rehoboam and they clamor for him. And they say, please take it easier on us. Your dad was so harsh on us. He was so ruthless. He taxed us heavily. He enslaved our children and us. Please don't do that to us. Can you please be a kinder, gentler king? And Rehoboam's response to them is telling. Rehoboam said, give me three days. Let me think about it. To which I kind of feel like that's your first indicator that Rehoboam's not really thinking very clearly. That seems to be a no-brainer, doesn't it? A group of people comes to you and they say, hey, can you please try to not be a tyrannical dictator? Can you please like lower the taxes so that we can experience some wealth and pour that back into the country? Can you please do that for us? Can you please like not take us as slaves? It should be a no-brainer to go, yeah, okay, that seems reasonable. But Rehoboam says, let me take three days and go think about this. So during those three days, he assembles his dad's old advisors, basically the cabinet of King Solomon. And he goes to them and he says, the people have asked me to take it easy on them. What do you think I should do? And Solomon's advisors give him good, wise, sound advice, the same advice that you would likely give that I would likely give to Rehoboam. And they tell him, you should listen to the people. If you will ease up on them just a little bit, man, I'm telling you, they're going to love you forever. You should heed their desires. Do what they're asking. Be gentle with them. Be kind to them. Be softer with them. You don't have to be as hard as your dad. You can be a different kind of king, Rehoboam. Listen to us. And listen, these are the men who walked through the fires with Solomon. These are the men who were right next to Solomon and watched him become ruthless and watched him become authoritarian and watched what it did to the people around him. They had led through the nuances of leadership. They understood everything that hung in the balance. And this is like easy leadership decision. Take it easy on the people and we can see, hindsight's 20-20, you can see as well as I can, that if Rehoboam would have just been kind to them, if he would have just said, yeah, okay, I'm going to be nice. I'm not going to be the kind of king that my dad was. That those people would have loved him. Those people would have served him. They would have run through a wall for him. But this was the advice of the old guard. This was the advice of his dad's advisors. And clearly it wasn't the advice that he was looking for. Because after receiving this advice, Rehoboam goes to his friends, the guys that he grew up with. And this is what they tell him. Look in 1 Kings 12. I'm going to begin reading in verse 8. Verse 8 says, but he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him. So the old man said, take it easy on him, be nice to him, be the king that they want and that they need, and he abandoned that. He said, no, I'm not interested, and so he goes to his young friends and he asked, what do you guys think I should do? And he said to them, My little finger is thicker than my father's thighs. And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. Which, by the way, as an aside, this week I learned that scorpions are worse than whips. I would not have thought that 10 days ago, but now I understand that's actually worse. He goes to his friends. He receives the counsel from the old men who say, be the king that they need. And his friends go, no way. Don't tell them that. You need to go tell those people that your little finger is thicker than your father's thigh, that you have more power and more authority in your little finger than he did in his whole body. You need to go tell them that if they were scared of your dad, they need to be terrified of you. Your dad disciplined with whips. You're coming at them with scorpions. Your dad enslaved this many. You're going to enslave this many. Your dad pushed them this hard. You're going to push them harder. You need Rehoboam to go strike fear into their hearts and into their minds and let them know that you are not a king to be trifled with. They built up his ego. He said, go tell them you're a bad dude, man. And Rehoboam, who grew up watching his dad, who was a young man, and as we know, young men feel this desperation to make their mark and to stake their claim and to gain the respect of everyone. And so he clumsily forced it, and he goes back to the people after three days, and he says exactly what his friends told him to say. Forget you guys. You want me to go easy on you? I'm not going to. You think my dad was bad? Get a load of this. You see the slaves my dad took? I'm going to take more. You see how hard my dad worked you? I'm going to work you harder. And he just set up from the very beginning this ruthless, tyrannical dictatorship where he said, I'm the man and you can't mess with me. And what Rehoboam failed to consider is that there was another guy named Jeroboam. Jeroboam was a rival of his dad and rose up at one point to overthrow Solomon and when that wasn't successful, fled to Egypt. And when Solomon died, Jeroboam comes back to Israel and listens to Rehoboam say this. And after he says that, Jeroboam knows that he's going to have enough support for what a jerk Rehoboam is, that he can garner a military and take over part of the kingdom. And as a result of Rehoboam's pride and selfishness and short-sightedness and refusal to listen to wisdom, Jeroboam took 90% of his kingdom from him. And like I said last week, within four kings, Israel descends into a civil war, the result of which we now have the northern kingdoms that are led by Jeroboam and the southern kingdoms that are led by Rehoboam. The northern kingdom had 10 tribes in it. The southern kingdom had two. Rehoboam loses 90% of his kingdom because he made a selfish, egotistical decision. And I've always loved this story because it stands out as a stark warning to avoid the folly of Rehoboam, to avoid this big mistake. So when we planned out this series, and I was flipping through the books of 1 and 2 Kings, wondering what am I going to teach to grace, and I came across this story, I knew I was going to teach it. I knew that I had to highlight it. And so as I sat down this week and began to interact with it, the question becomes, well, what's the point? What do we take away from this? What's the application to us in our lives here in 2020? What's the application to grace? And, you know, I've always taken this as a warning to listen to the older voices in your life. For most of my ministry career, I've thought of myself as young. I realize that those days are fleeting now. Just this week, Lily put her hand on my stomach and she said, Daddy, you have a fat, fat belly and you have a lot of gray hair in your beard. You look like a grandpa, Daddy. So clearly my young days are behind me. But in my young days, I would look at this and I would think, this is a warning to heed the older voices in your life. And it is. But I don't think that those are the only voices that we should listen to. And so then I thought, well, this is a warning to heed the advice, to listen to the voices that God places in your life. And you have this juxtaposition, this comparing and contrasting between the old guard that God placed in his life and the friends that he chose to put in his own life. But you know, honestly, I believe that God puts friends in our lives that we should listen to, and so I would never tell us not to listen to our godly friends. And so the more I thought about it, what's the lesson from this mistake, from this episode in the life of Rehoboam? I realized that the overarching message here is to listen to wisdom. Listen to wisdom. And I know this is not an earth-shattering point for a sermon. I'm aware of this. That's why we have it in all caps there at the bottom of the screen, to make fun of me for making this the point of the sermon. But it is. It's the point. It's what comes out of the story of Rehoboam. You know what we should do when we read this story and we look at this mistake that he made and we see what it costed him? You know what we should take away from this? We should take away from this that we should listen to godly wisdom. But even as I say that, it's not a shocker that a pastor would say in a sermon that we should listen to wisdom. That's a pretty simple thing. We know that. You know that. And Rehoboam knew that. And because of that, because we all know that we should listen to wisdom, we all know that the wise way is the best way, the more interesting discussion becomes, why do we have such a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom? If we all know that we should listen to wisdom, if we all know that we should obey the Bible, let's just put it down to brass tacks. If we all know that we should do the things that this book tells us to do, and we should not do the things that this book tells us not to do, but we keep not doing the things we should do, and we keep doing the things that we shouldn't do, what that means is we have a problem listening to wisdom. And so the question becomes, why is it that we have such a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom? If we all know that we should listen to it, if we all know that we should obey what God says in his word, if we all know that there are voices in our life that tend to tell us the right thing even when it's the hard thing, why is it that we continue to have a hard time hearing that wisdom and heeding that wisdom and abiding by it in our own life? And I think that this is a fair question to ask of Rehoboam, because if there's anybody who knew that they should value wisdom, it's Rehoboam. If there's anyone ever in the history of the world that was poised to be a good king and to learn to listen to wisdom, to be able to hear it and heed it, it was Rehoboam. Think about it. Rehoboam's granddad was David, the guy who wrote Psalms. The guy who penned Psalm chapter 1, one of the most famous Psalms, maybe just behind Psalm chapter 23, where he warns people. In this case, his grandson. Do not sit in the seat of mockers or stand in the way of scorners. Do not associate with unwise people. But he says, Raybaum knows that, just like you know that. Rehoboam's dad was Solomon, who wrote the quintessential book of wisdom and addressed it to his son. I don't know if he addressed it directly to Rehoboam, but I know that Rehoboam was his son and took over as king, so it would make sense to think that Rehoboam had read it. And if you open up Proverbs and you read it, the first four chapters, all it says over and over again is get wisdom. No matter what you do, pursue wisdom. Foolish people throw off wisdom. Smart people accept wisdom. Get wisdom. Cherish it. Value it. It is greater than gold. It is greater than wealth. Get wisdom with everything that you do. This is what's poured into Rehoboam. And yet at the crucial moment, when more than any other time in his life he needed to listen to wisdom, to hear it and to heed it, he ignores it. And I think if we can look at why Rehoboam chose to ignore this wisdom in his life, what we'll find is that we can relate to those answers too. And that the same reasons that Rehoboam rejected wisdom in his life are the same reasons that we often reject wisdom in our life. So I'm going to give you three. This morning, there are more reasons than this than we have a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom. But these are the ones I think we can pull out of this story in 1 Kings chapter 12. The first reason why we often struggle to hear and heed wisdom is because wisdom doesn't care about our ego. Wisdom is wholly unconcerned with your ego. Rehoboam goes to the old guard and he says, the people want me to take it easy on them. What do you think I should do? And they told him to be the kind of king you don't want to be. He said, be gentle, man. Be loving. Be considerate. What they're really asking him to do is in your very first decision, in your very first my way or the highway moment, give in. Just give in. Just don't choose your way. Just let them have this one. You don't have to win everything. Be who they want you to be, not who you want to be. Let that respect come in a different way. Don't demand it of them. And then he went to his friends. And what did his friends do? They appealed to his ego. I got more strength in my finger than my father did in his whole body. If you thought he was tough, wait until you get a load of me. It was all ego. It was just being young and dumb and wanting to make a name for himself and being blinded by this appeal to his ego. And wisdom never cares about your ego. I remember a while back I was doing a wedding. And I was at the rehearsal in the rehearsal there's a little bit of a squabble between the husband and the bride-to-be. The husband wanted somebody else in his wedding party and the bride said that couldn't happen because that would be an odd number of people and it would throw off the entrance and the pictures and the whole deal and it was I mean, the bride's clearly right. It was a bad scene. And so they're frustrated at each other, and we're off to the side. I'm standing there with the groom and his best man, who happens to be his brother. And right before we're about to start the rehearsal, they're kind of fired up about it, and the groom's brother looks at him and he says, man, you just need to tell her. You just need to go right now. You go over there and you tell her that you're the man. This is your marriage. You're the man in this marriage. You make more money than she does and it's going to be your way and this person's going to be in your wedding. And I wasn't going to be disrespectful to the brother. But I had done some counseling with this couple, and I knew this guy well enough that I just kind of stood there quietly, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and I just went, that's terrible advice. Terrible advice for tons of reasons. But what it was on its face was an appeal to his ego. Foolishness appeals to our ego. You go be a man and you go be tough. No, that's stupid. That's not manly or tough. That's Neanderthalic. Don't do that. It's not going to help you do anything. Wisdom never comes in a package that appeals to our ego. It's always going to push us to do the kind thing. It's always going to push us to do the patient thing. It's always going to push us to take a back seat. Some of us with big egos have a hard time with wisdom because it doesn't kowtow to that. It just tells us the truth and we have to have the guts to walk in it. That's why Jesus says, when someone hits you, you should turn the other cheek. That's why we're told that a soft answer turns away wrath. That's why we're told in James that we should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry. That doesn't appeal to our ego, but that's the right thing to do. I think often we have a hard time heeding wisdom because it never comes in a package that strokes our ego. And for some of us, that's a thing that we have to get over. Rehoboam couldn't get over it, and so he made the wrong choice. Another reason that Rehoboam had a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom that I think we can relate to is that wisdom is rarely efficient. It's rarely efficient. Rehoboam wanted to get things done. He saw the works that his dad did. He saw the army that his dad did, and he wanted to do that too. He wanted to make a bigger army. He wanted to construct bigger things. And to do that right away within the next five to ten years, I've got to tax the people more heavily so I can make a bigger army. I've got to enslave more people so I can build bigger things. I've got to charge more taxes so I can get my things done. I can't let them off the hook, old guard, because if I do, then I can't accomplish the things that I want to accomplish. Wisdom often seems inefficient. It reminds me of one of my favorite Proverbs. In Proverbs 25, verse 15, it says, Sometimes in conflict. We just want to jump in with two feet and just make it happen and say all the things and give vent to everything that we're feeling and try to win the day when really a soft tongue breaks bones. Isn't this true in our marriages? When our spouse does something that bothers us? Sometimes we just want to jump on them with two feet. Hey, why'd you do that? I didn't deserve that. That's not fair. You shouldn't do that to me. You shouldn't treat me like that. You shouldn't expect that of me. When our husband or our wife bothers us, sometimes we just want to jump on them with two feet because we feel like we have every right to. But that's probably not what's wise. What's wise is to probably wait and to bite our tongue and to wonder what's motivating that choice. What's going on in their day and in their week and in their life? Let me just wait and see if they do it again. And then if they do, I'm going to approach this in a way that maybe can be helpful to everyone. But we live in a culture that just wants everything right now. And so we often throw off wisdom because it doesn't seem efficient. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this in the spiritual development of others and even in myself. Somebody comes to faith or gets reignited in their faith and they want to understand scripture. They want to be able to lead Bible studies. They want to be able to teach other people. And it's hard to accept that this takes a long time to learn. It's hard to accept that knowing the character of God, that knowing how to pray, that knowing how to hear the voice of God, that having a heart that beats with God, that having an understanding of the breadth of Scripture and how it all ties together and what's going on in Galatians that reaches back into the Old Testament that you need to understand so that you can understand Paul's letters and the things that Jesus says that are quotes of prophecies that he is fulfilling. It takes a long time to tie all of those together. It takes a long time to drop into the book of Romans and understand what it is that Paul is talking about and why it is such a radical gospel. But we live in a culture that wants everything right away. And I've seen so many people become believers, get ignited in their faith, start to read scripture or listen to a podcast or go to a Bible study or become more committed in their attendance for church. And they don't understand it like somebody over there understands it. It doesn't matter that that person has been walking with the Lord for 30 years. They don't understand it like that person understands it. And so they get discouraged and they walk away. And I think what we fail to realize is that this kind of wisdom is never efficient. If you come across someone who knows how to pray, when you pray with them or when you hear them pray or when they talk about their prayer life, it feels like they are literally at the throne of God, that they have this seasoned voice that you just don't have. You have to know that comes from a lifetime of prayer. That comes from worn knees and worn carpets. That comes from beating their head against the wall, wondering if these prayers are even leaving this room. That is a lifetime prayer. If you meet someone who knows the intricacies of the Bible, who knows how it weaves together, who knows which stories are talking about which person and which books are referring to which other books and how it all ties together, if you meet someone who you think has a mastery of Scripture, you have got to know that comes from a lifetime of diligent study. Spiritual growth is hard work. It is rarely efficient. But wisdom is found in that perseverance. Wisdom is interested not in short-term gain, but in long-term fruit. This is why the Bible over and over and over again encourages us to persevere and prizes perseverance as this thing that ought to be honored. Because true wisdom takes time and true wisdom will always push us towards future fruit rather than present gain. Rehoboam had a hard time with that. So he couldn't hear or heed that wisdom in his life. The last reason, and this one's my favorite, the last reason Rehoboam had a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom and the same reason that we have a difficult time sometimes hearing and heeding wisdom is that wisdom is often dumber than us. Come on. Come on, egomaniacs. Come on, guys. Those of you who understand me, it takes one to know one. Wisdom is often dumber than you, isn't it? It often comes in a package that you don't respect. If you're not sure if you're an egomaniac, here's a good test. If you've ever been in a room full of other people that you respect and had an opinion and tried to win the room over to your opinion and you left that room and no one agreed with you and you still thought you were right, then you and me are friends. Because I've done that before too. But that's a pretty good indicator that for one reason or another we're not accepting wisdom because we think that wisdom is dumber than us. We think we're smarter than the room. And sometimes that arrogance comes in the form of defiance, of loud defiance. Nope, y'all are all wrong and I'm right. Sometimes, though, it comes in the form of sweet, quiet stubbornness, of just sitting on it and thinking, I'm still not going to do all the things you want me to do. Sometimes it comes in this stubborn refusal to receive help. No, I still have it all together. It's all the same thing. It's all the same ego. It's us thinking we're the smartest ones in the room. It's us thinking I know better than these people that are telling me this thing. And Rehoboam's problem was that he was told truth. He was given wisdom, but he didn't respect the package that it came in. He thought you bunch of old men. You don't know what you're talking about. I watched you advise my dad. He probably took pot shots at their leadership, which is way easier to do when you're not the one making decisions. And he said, I'm not gonna listen to you guys. And Rehoboam very easily and swiftly sidestepped the wisdom because he didn't respect the package that it came in. And how often in our lives do we reject wisdom because we don't respect the package that it comes in? I remember when I first started writing sermons back at my previous church when they started asking me to preach. I would spend days coming up with a sermon. I would look at a text. I would think, what are the points here? What can we do? How do I want to approach this? What's the point that I want to make? And then once I felt like I had that, I would go to Jen. I would go to my wife and I would say, hey, here's the text. Here's the way I think I want to approach it. Here's the points that I think I want to make. What do you think of this? And most of the time she would go, I think that sounds really great. You do that. That sounds good. I'm looking forward to hearing this. But every now and again, she would say, uh, that's, uh, I don't think that's very good. She would say, I know that you think that's the point that the text is making. I got to tell you, I don't see it. She would say, I think you might want to take another go at that. I'm not sure that that's super good. And at the time, all I was interested in was her telling me, that's great. This is going to be the best sermon ever. I can't believe you're smart enough to come up with these things on your own. How do you do it? But instead, she says, you may want to go back to the starting board on that one. And I remember in my arrogance, thinking to myself, what do you know? You don't preach sermons. You've never had to do this before. You didn't go to preaching school like I did. You haven't been through seminary. You don't work at a church. Why am I asking you anyways? And I would go away mad at her that she didn't believe in me and get back into the text and try to write the sermon and keep butting my head up against a brick wall. And then one day it would dawn on me a week later, I think Jen was probably right. Maybe this isn't such a good sermon. And my arrogance in that situation, I didn't have respect for the package that the wisdom came in. Now, when she tells me a sermon isn't good, I'm like, well then, we can just slide this one over here. I don't think I need to do that one anymore because I've learned that I can trust her. I've learned that I respect her and her opinion. But often when wisdom comes packaged in a way that we don't respect, in a way that we don't look up to, we reject it. We reject the message because we don't trust the messenger. Isn't this what people do with faith? A lot of people who have a hard time accepting this is true think to themselves, this was written 2,000 years ago. How does it apply to me? Jesus taught these things to an ancient crowd that didn't have the nuanced understanding of life in the universe like we do. What did he know that I don't know? And we find ways to discount what's in the Bible in ways that we shouldn't really listen to Jesus in this instance or Paul in that instance. And I think what we'll find often when we are rejecting wisdom is that we're rejecting it because we don't respect the vessel. And if we'll stop doing that and just listen to the message and get over ourselves, we will learn lessons a lot more quickly and a lot less painfully. If I would have just listened to Jen and gotten over myself, which should have been really easy to do because I wasn't that impressive of a person and I'm still not, I would have had a lot easier time writing those sermons. If Rehoboam would just get over himself, he would have had a lot easier time being king. I wonder how many times in our own life if we would just get over ourselves and accept the wisdom or accept the help or accept the advice, how much better it would go for us. This morning, the lesson that we take away from Rehoboam's mistake that cost him the kingdom is that we should listen to wisdom. And I want us to acknowledge that often we have a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom because wisdom doesn't care anything about our ego. Wisdom is often inefficient, often choosing the fruits of the future rather than the gains of the present. And that sometimes God and his goodness packages wisdom in a vessel that we don't respect and we have to get over ourselves and hear it anyways. And I hope that we will listen to this lesson, to the wisdom coming out of the story of Rehoboam through the centuries and heed it in our own lives. And that this summer, this year, in this difficult time, we can be people who hear and heed wisdom. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. You are patient with us. Lord, with those of us who have voices in our life right now that are giving us good wisdom, would you please give us the strength to hear it? Would you please give us the courage to enact it? If our egos are getting in the way of lessons that we should be learning and voices that we should be hearing, would you sweep those aside? Father, if we're rejecting a message because in our arrogance we don't trust the messenger, would you help us see ourselves more accurately and the vessels that you've placed in our life more accurately? Lord, would you make us a people who hear and recognize and heed and obey your wisdom in our lives? In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to be here with you in this way again. I'm so excited for August the 16th when we resume our in-person gatherings. On August the 16th, we're going to have the opportunity to participate in church in our home or yours. So for those of you who want to come and experience live church and see your church family and socially distance from the people that you've missed so much. I know that some of you have young kids and you really do want to come and you really do want to be a part of things, but we're also not able to offer children's ministry yet. So you kind of love the idea of coming and seeing folks and participating in worship, but might not feel great about trying to entertain a three or four or five-year-old during a boring sermon. And I totally get that. We have a four-year-old of our own. So if you want to come, bring your family, participate in worship, see your church family that you've missed so much, and then head home once the sermon starts, I just want you to know that's not going to hurt my feelings. I totally understand that. And if that helps you participate in the 16th and that's something you'd like to do, then we want to make that a possibility. So if that's something you want to do, please don't feel bad about that. I encourage that. I can't wait to see everybody who's willing to come on the 16th. And for those who are willing to wait, or feel they need to wait, I totally understand that, respect that, and look forward to seeing you whenever you feel comfortable venturing out. This morning we jump into the second part of our series called The Time of Kings. We're going to look at a story about the fourth king of Israel, a man named Rehoboam, that I love. If you read the Grace Vine, I said this week that this is another one of those sermons that I've wanted to preach for years. I love this lesson of the mistake of Rehoboam and how easily applicable it is to our lives today. By the way, if you just thought, man, I didn't get the Grace Vine, I don't see that, please let us know. Email me or email info at graceralee.org and we will get you on that email distribution list. But like I said, I've been looking forward to preaching this sermon. And for a little bit of context, as we just dive into scripture, we're going to end up in 1 Kings chapter 12. This is when we're introduced to Rehoboam. So if you have a Bible there at home, I hope that you'll grab that and open it up. Again, if you have folks around you, particularly kids, open up the Scripture and look at that text together. I can't tell you enough how important it is to go through text, to interact with Scripture as a family. Rehoboam comes after King Solomon. So the context for where we see this story is, last week we talked about Israel clamoring for a king. They wanted a king. God said it was a bad idea. They rejected God, and God said, just go ahead, Samuel, and give them a king. So they appointed a king named Saul. Saul was an egomaniac. He made it all about him and his kingdom and his wealth, and so God took his kingdom from him. He said, I regret making Saul king. And then he named Jesse, the son of David, the king over Israel. David, to this day, is the greatest king that Israel has ever had. The second greatest king, without hesitation, that Israel has ever had is David's son, King Solomon. Solomon, you'll know, is, according to the Bible, the wisest man to ever live. He wrote a bulk of the wisdom books that we find in the Old Testament. He wrote Proverbs and Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. I love the book of Proverbs that was written by Solomon as a letter to his son of just short snippets of wisdom. And as a matter of fact, as an aside, if you're someone who thinks, you know, I would love to read the Bible more. If you've heard me say before that there's no greater habit, there's no more important habit than anyone can develop in their life than to get up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. And you think to yourself, man, I need to do that. I would love to do that, but I don't know where to start. The Bible is really difficult to understand. It's 66 books. It spans thousands of years. It's a really difficult document to understand, and it's difficult to just drop parachute into a portion of it and know everything that's going on around us. So sometimes when we decide that we want to read the Bible, we dive into it and we don't understand it, and so then we put it away because it becomes frustrating. If that's your story, let me encourage you to start reading in Proverbs. Proverbs has 31 chapters. You can read whatever chapter corresponds with the date of that day. Just open it up, read a chapter, put it down. Proverbs is great because if you're skeptical about faith, if you don't know if you can trust the Bible or not, Proverbs is a great thing to pick up, to read, and to try to apply to your life. Is this truth going to work for me? If I do this, am I going to find out that it's true? It's a way to put the Bible to the test. It's also a book that doesn't require context. You can just jump right into it and start to read, and things are going to make sense to you without having to know the context of the rest of Scripture. So if you have a hard time reading the Bible, if you don't know where to start, Proverbs is a great place to start. If you have people in your life who want to read the Bible and they're asking you, where should I start? That's where I tell everybody to start is the book of Proverbs. And Solomon wrote that. And we think of Solomon, rightly so, as a righteous man because he wrote books of the Bible. He prayed to God. He prayed for wisdom when he could have had anything that he wanted. But it's also worth noting that later in Solomon's life, in many ways, he turned away from God. He took many hundred wives, he took a thousand concubines, he married for political reasons. Later in his life, he built an army. He built the first large standing army that Israel ever had, and he did that by taxing the people heavily. He built monuments and public works, and he did that by enslaving the people harshly. And so later in his life, Solomon became a really harsh king. To live in Israel under the reign of Solomon was not a pleasurable experience. History smiles on Solomon for his contributions, but if you were one of his subjects during his reign, you would not have enjoyed the reign of Solomon. So when Solomon dies, the mantle of the role of king goes to Rehoboam. It passes to Rehoboam. And when he's named king, you'll see in chapter 12, the people of Israel come to Rehoboam and they clamor for him. And they say, please take it easier on us. Your dad was so harsh on us. He was so ruthless. He taxed us heavily. He enslaved our children and us. Please don't do that to us. Can you please be a kinder, gentler king? And Rehoboam's response to them is telling. Rehoboam said, give me three days. Let me think about it. To which I kind of feel like that's your first indicator that Rehoboam's not really thinking very clearly. That seems to be a no-brainer, doesn't it? A group of people comes to you and they say, hey, can you please try to not be a tyrannical dictator? Can you please like lower the taxes so that we can experience some wealth and pour that back into the country? Can you please do that for us? Can you please like not take us as slaves? It should be a no-brainer to go, yeah, okay, that seems reasonable. But Rehoboam says, let me take three days and go think about this. So during those three days, he assembles his dad's old advisors, basically the cabinet of King Solomon. And he goes to them and he says, the people have asked me to take it easy on them. What do you think I should do? And Solomon's advisors give him good, wise, sound advice, the same advice that you would likely give that I would likely give to Rehoboam. And they tell him, you should listen to the people. If you will ease up on them just a little bit, man, I'm telling you, they're going to love you forever. You should heed their desires. Do what they're asking. Be gentle with them. Be kind to them. Be softer with them. You don't have to be as hard as your dad. You can be a different kind of king, Rehoboam. Listen to us. And listen, these are the men who walked through the fires with Solomon. These are the men who were right next to Solomon and watched him become ruthless and watched him become authoritarian and watched what it did to the people around him. They had led through the nuances of leadership. They understood everything that hung in the balance. And this is like easy leadership decision. Take it easy on the people and we can see, hindsight's 20-20, you can see as well as I can, that if Rehoboam would have just been kind to them, if he would have just said, yeah, okay, I'm going to be nice. I'm not going to be the kind of king that my dad was. That those people would have loved him. Those people would have served him. They would have run through a wall for him. But this was the advice of the old guard. This was the advice of his dad's advisors. And clearly it wasn't the advice that he was looking for. Because after receiving this advice, Rehoboam goes to his friends, the guys that he grew up with. And this is what they tell him. Look in 1 Kings 12. I'm going to begin reading in verse 8. Verse 8 says, but he abandoned the counsel that the old men gave him and took counsel with the young men who had grown up with him and stood before him. So the old man said, take it easy on him, be nice to him, be the king that they want and that they need, and he abandoned that. He said, no, I'm not interested, and so he goes to his young friends and he asked, what do you guys think I should do? And he said to them, My little finger is thicker than my father's thighs. And now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions. Which, by the way, as an aside, this week I learned that scorpions are worse than whips. I would not have thought that 10 days ago, but now I understand that's actually worse. He goes to his friends. He receives the counsel from the old men who say, be the king that they need. And his friends go, no way. Don't tell them that. You need to go tell those people that your little finger is thicker than your father's thigh, that you have more power and more authority in your little finger than he did in his whole body. You need to go tell them that if they were scared of your dad, they need to be terrified of you. Your dad disciplined with whips. You're coming at them with scorpions. Your dad enslaved this many. You're going to enslave this many. Your dad pushed them this hard. You're going to push them harder. You need Rehoboam to go strike fear into their hearts and into their minds and let them know that you are not a king to be trifled with. They built up his ego. He said, go tell them you're a bad dude, man. And Rehoboam, who grew up watching his dad, who was a young man, and as we know, young men feel this desperation to make their mark and to stake their claim and to gain the respect of everyone. And so he clumsily forced it, and he goes back to the people after three days, and he says exactly what his friends told him to say. Forget you guys. You want me to go easy on you? I'm not going to. You think my dad was bad? Get a load of this. You see the slaves my dad took? I'm going to take more. You see how hard my dad worked you? I'm going to work you harder. And he just set up from the very beginning this ruthless, tyrannical dictatorship where he said, I'm the man and you can't mess with me. And what Rehoboam failed to consider is that there was another guy named Jeroboam. Jeroboam was a rival of his dad and rose up at one point to overthrow Solomon and when that wasn't successful, fled to Egypt. And when Solomon died, Jeroboam comes back to Israel and listens to Rehoboam say this. And after he says that, Jeroboam knows that he's going to have enough support for what a jerk Rehoboam is, that he can garner a military and take over part of the kingdom. And as a result of Rehoboam's pride and selfishness and short-sightedness and refusal to listen to wisdom, Jeroboam took 90% of his kingdom from him. And like I said last week, within four kings, Israel descends into a civil war, the result of which we now have the northern kingdoms that are led by Jeroboam and the southern kingdoms that are led by Rehoboam. The northern kingdom had 10 tribes in it. The southern kingdom had two. Rehoboam loses 90% of his kingdom because he made a selfish, egotistical decision. And I've always loved this story because it stands out as a stark warning to avoid the folly of Rehoboam, to avoid this big mistake. So when we planned out this series, and I was flipping through the books of 1 and 2 Kings, wondering what am I going to teach to grace, and I came across this story, I knew I was going to teach it. I knew that I had to highlight it. And so as I sat down this week and began to interact with it, the question becomes, well, what's the point? What do we take away from this? What's the application to us in our lives here in 2020? What's the application to grace? And, you know, I've always taken this as a warning to listen to the older voices in your life. For most of my ministry career, I've thought of myself as young. I realize that those days are fleeting now. Just this week, Lily put her hand on my stomach and she said, Daddy, you have a fat, fat belly and you have a lot of gray hair in your beard. You look like a grandpa, Daddy. So clearly my young days are behind me. But in my young days, I would look at this and I would think, this is a warning to heed the older voices in your life. And it is. But I don't think that those are the only voices that we should listen to. And so then I thought, well, this is a warning to heed the advice, to listen to the voices that God places in your life. And you have this juxtaposition, this comparing and contrasting between the old guard that God placed in his life and the friends that he chose to put in his own life. But you know, honestly, I believe that God puts friends in our lives that we should listen to, and so I would never tell us not to listen to our godly friends. And so the more I thought about it, what's the lesson from this mistake, from this episode in the life of Rehoboam? I realized that the overarching message here is to listen to wisdom. Listen to wisdom. And I know this is not an earth-shattering point for a sermon. I'm aware of this. That's why we have it in all caps there at the bottom of the screen, to make fun of me for making this the point of the sermon. But it is. It's the point. It's what comes out of the story of Rehoboam. You know what we should do when we read this story and we look at this mistake that he made and we see what it costed him? You know what we should take away from this? We should take away from this that we should listen to godly wisdom. But even as I say that, it's not a shocker that a pastor would say in a sermon that we should listen to wisdom. That's a pretty simple thing. We know that. You know that. And Rehoboam knew that. And because of that, because we all know that we should listen to wisdom, we all know that the wise way is the best way, the more interesting discussion becomes, why do we have such a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom? If we all know that we should listen to wisdom, if we all know that we should obey the Bible, let's just put it down to brass tacks. If we all know that we should do the things that this book tells us to do, and we should not do the things that this book tells us not to do, but we keep not doing the things we should do, and we keep doing the things that we shouldn't do, what that means is we have a problem listening to wisdom. And so the question becomes, why is it that we have such a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom? If we all know that we should listen to it, if we all know that we should obey what God says in his word, if we all know that there are voices in our life that tend to tell us the right thing even when it's the hard thing, why is it that we continue to have a hard time hearing that wisdom and heeding that wisdom and abiding by it in our own life? And I think that this is a fair question to ask of Rehoboam, because if there's anybody who knew that they should value wisdom, it's Rehoboam. If there's anyone ever in the history of the world that was poised to be a good king and to learn to listen to wisdom, to be able to hear it and heed it, it was Rehoboam. Think about it. Rehoboam's granddad was David, the guy who wrote Psalms. The guy who penned Psalm chapter 1, one of the most famous Psalms, maybe just behind Psalm chapter 23, where he warns people. In this case, his grandson. Do not sit in the seat of mockers or stand in the way of scorners. Do not associate with unwise people. But he says, Raybaum knows that, just like you know that. Rehoboam's dad was Solomon, who wrote the quintessential book of wisdom and addressed it to his son. I don't know if he addressed it directly to Rehoboam, but I know that Rehoboam was his son and took over as king, so it would make sense to think that Rehoboam had read it. And if you open up Proverbs and you read it, the first four chapters, all it says over and over again is get wisdom. No matter what you do, pursue wisdom. Foolish people throw off wisdom. Smart people accept wisdom. Get wisdom. Cherish it. Value it. It is greater than gold. It is greater than wealth. Get wisdom with everything that you do. This is what's poured into Rehoboam. And yet at the crucial moment, when more than any other time in his life he needed to listen to wisdom, to hear it and to heed it, he ignores it. And I think if we can look at why Rehoboam chose to ignore this wisdom in his life, what we'll find is that we can relate to those answers too. And that the same reasons that Rehoboam rejected wisdom in his life are the same reasons that we often reject wisdom in our life. So I'm going to give you three. This morning, there are more reasons than this than we have a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom. But these are the ones I think we can pull out of this story in 1 Kings chapter 12. The first reason why we often struggle to hear and heed wisdom is because wisdom doesn't care about our ego. Wisdom is wholly unconcerned with your ego. Rehoboam goes to the old guard and he says, the people want me to take it easy on them. What do you think I should do? And they told him to be the kind of king you don't want to be. He said, be gentle, man. Be loving. Be considerate. What they're really asking him to do is in your very first decision, in your very first my way or the highway moment, give in. Just give in. Just don't choose your way. Just let them have this one. You don't have to win everything. Be who they want you to be, not who you want to be. Let that respect come in a different way. Don't demand it of them. And then he went to his friends. And what did his friends do? They appealed to his ego. I got more strength in my finger than my father did in his whole body. If you thought he was tough, wait until you get a load of me. It was all ego. It was just being young and dumb and wanting to make a name for himself and being blinded by this appeal to his ego. And wisdom never cares about your ego. I remember a while back I was doing a wedding. And I was at the rehearsal in the rehearsal there's a little bit of a squabble between the husband and the bride-to-be. The husband wanted somebody else in his wedding party and the bride said that couldn't happen because that would be an odd number of people and it would throw off the entrance and the pictures and the whole deal and it was I mean, the bride's clearly right. It was a bad scene. And so they're frustrated at each other, and we're off to the side. I'm standing there with the groom and his best man, who happens to be his brother. And right before we're about to start the rehearsal, they're kind of fired up about it, and the groom's brother looks at him and he says, man, you just need to tell her. You just need to go right now. You go over there and you tell her that you're the man. This is your marriage. You're the man in this marriage. You make more money than she does and it's going to be your way and this person's going to be in your wedding. And I wasn't going to be disrespectful to the brother. But I had done some counseling with this couple, and I knew this guy well enough that I just kind of stood there quietly, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and I just went, that's terrible advice. Terrible advice for tons of reasons. But what it was on its face was an appeal to his ego. Foolishness appeals to our ego. You go be a man and you go be tough. No, that's stupid. That's not manly or tough. That's Neanderthalic. Don't do that. It's not going to help you do anything. Wisdom never comes in a package that appeals to our ego. It's always going to push us to do the kind thing. It's always going to push us to do the patient thing. It's always going to push us to take a back seat. Some of us with big egos have a hard time with wisdom because it doesn't kowtow to that. It just tells us the truth and we have to have the guts to walk in it. That's why Jesus says, when someone hits you, you should turn the other cheek. That's why we're told that a soft answer turns away wrath. That's why we're told in James that we should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry. That doesn't appeal to our ego, but that's the right thing to do. I think often we have a hard time heeding wisdom because it never comes in a package that strokes our ego. And for some of us, that's a thing that we have to get over. Rehoboam couldn't get over it, and so he made the wrong choice. Another reason that Rehoboam had a hard time hearing and heeding wisdom that I think we can relate to is that wisdom is rarely efficient. It's rarely efficient. Rehoboam wanted to get things done. He saw the works that his dad did. He saw the army that his dad did, and he wanted to do that too. He wanted to make a bigger army. He wanted to construct bigger things. And to do that right away within the next five to ten years, I've got to tax the people more heavily so I can make a bigger army. I've got to enslave more people so I can build bigger things. I've got to charge more taxes so I can get my things done. I can't let them off the hook, old guard, because if I do, then I can't accomplish the things that I want to accomplish. Wisdom often seems inefficient. It reminds me of one of my favorite Proverbs. In Proverbs 25, verse 15, it says, Sometimes in conflict. We just want to jump in with two feet and just make it happen and say all the things and give vent to everything that we're feeling and try to win the day when really a soft tongue breaks bones. Isn't this true in our marriages? When our spouse does something that bothers us? Sometimes we just want to jump on them with two feet. Hey, why'd you do that? I didn't deserve that. That's not fair. You shouldn't do that to me. You shouldn't treat me like that. You shouldn't expect that of me. When our husband or our wife bothers us, sometimes we just want to jump on them with two feet because we feel like we have every right to. But that's probably not what's wise. What's wise is to probably wait and to bite our tongue and to wonder what's motivating that choice. What's going on in their day and in their week and in their life? Let me just wait and see if they do it again. And then if they do, I'm going to approach this in a way that maybe can be helpful to everyone. But we live in a culture that just wants everything right now. And so we often throw off wisdom because it doesn't seem efficient. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this in the spiritual development of others and even in myself. Somebody comes to faith or gets reignited in their faith and they want to understand scripture. They want to be able to lead Bible studies. They want to be able to teach other people. And it's hard to accept that this takes a long time to learn. It's hard to accept that knowing the character of God, that knowing how to pray, that knowing how to hear the voice of God, that having a heart that beats with God, that having an understanding of the breadth of Scripture and how it all ties together and what's going on in Galatians that reaches back into the Old Testament that you need to understand so that you can understand Paul's letters and the things that Jesus says that are quotes of prophecies that he is fulfilling. It takes a long time to tie all of those together. It takes a long time to drop into the book of Romans and understand what it is that Paul is talking about and why it is such a radical gospel. But we live in a culture that wants everything right away. And I've seen so many people become believers, get ignited in their faith, start to read scripture or listen to a podcast or go to a Bible study or become more committed in their attendance for church. And they don't understand it like somebody over there understands it. It doesn't matter that that person has been walking with the Lord for 30 years. They don't understand it like that person understands it. And so they get discouraged and they walk away. And I think what we fail to realize is that this kind of wisdom is never efficient. If you come across someone who knows how to pray, when you pray with them or when you hear them pray or when they talk about their prayer life, it feels like they are literally at the throne of God, that they have this seasoned voice that you just don't have. You have to know that comes from a lifetime of prayer. That comes from worn knees and worn carpets. That comes from beating their head against the wall, wondering if these prayers are even leaving this room. That is a lifetime prayer. If you meet someone who knows the intricacies of the Bible, who knows how it weaves together, who knows which stories are talking about which person and which books are referring to which other books and how it all ties together, if you meet someone who you think has a mastery of Scripture, you have got to know that comes from a lifetime of diligent study. Spiritual growth is hard work. It is rarely efficient. But wisdom is found in that perseverance. Wisdom is interested not in short-term gain, but in long-term fruit. This is why the Bible over and over and over again encourages us to persevere and prizes perseverance as this thing that ought to be honored. Because true wisdom takes time and true wisdom will always push us towards future fruit rather than present gain. Rehoboam had a hard time with that. So he couldn't hear or heed that wisdom in his life. The last reason, and this one's my favorite, the last reason Rehoboam had a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom and the same reason that we have a difficult time sometimes hearing and heeding wisdom is that wisdom is often dumber than us. Come on. Come on, egomaniacs. Come on, guys. Those of you who understand me, it takes one to know one. Wisdom is often dumber than you, isn't it? It often comes in a package that you don't respect. If you're not sure if you're an egomaniac, here's a good test. If you've ever been in a room full of other people that you respect and had an opinion and tried to win the room over to your opinion and you left that room and no one agreed with you and you still thought you were right, then you and me are friends. Because I've done that before too. But that's a pretty good indicator that for one reason or another we're not accepting wisdom because we think that wisdom is dumber than us. We think we're smarter than the room. And sometimes that arrogance comes in the form of defiance, of loud defiance. Nope, y'all are all wrong and I'm right. Sometimes, though, it comes in the form of sweet, quiet stubbornness, of just sitting on it and thinking, I'm still not going to do all the things you want me to do. Sometimes it comes in this stubborn refusal to receive help. No, I still have it all together. It's all the same thing. It's all the same ego. It's us thinking we're the smartest ones in the room. It's us thinking I know better than these people that are telling me this thing. And Rehoboam's problem was that he was told truth. He was given wisdom, but he didn't respect the package that it came in. He thought you bunch of old men. You don't know what you're talking about. I watched you advise my dad. He probably took pot shots at their leadership, which is way easier to do when you're not the one making decisions. And he said, I'm not gonna listen to you guys. And Rehoboam very easily and swiftly sidestepped the wisdom because he didn't respect the package that it came in. And how often in our lives do we reject wisdom because we don't respect the package that it comes in? I remember when I first started writing sermons back at my previous church when they started asking me to preach. I would spend days coming up with a sermon. I would look at a text. I would think, what are the points here? What can we do? How do I want to approach this? What's the point that I want to make? And then once I felt like I had that, I would go to Jen. I would go to my wife and I would say, hey, here's the text. Here's the way I think I want to approach it. Here's the points that I think I want to make. What do you think of this? And most of the time she would go, I think that sounds really great. You do that. That sounds good. I'm looking forward to hearing this. But every now and again, she would say, uh, that's, uh, I don't think that's very good. She would say, I know that you think that's the point that the text is making. I got to tell you, I don't see it. She would say, I think you might want to take another go at that. I'm not sure that that's super good. And at the time, all I was interested in was her telling me, that's great. This is going to be the best sermon ever. I can't believe you're smart enough to come up with these things on your own. How do you do it? But instead, she says, you may want to go back to the starting board on that one. And I remember in my arrogance, thinking to myself, what do you know? You don't preach sermons. You've never had to do this before. You didn't go to preaching school like I did. You haven't been through seminary. You don't work at a church. Why am I asking you anyways? And I would go away mad at her that she didn't believe in me and get back into the text and try to write the sermon and keep butting my head up against a brick wall. And then one day it would dawn on me a week later, I think Jen was probably right. Maybe this isn't such a good sermon. And my arrogance in that situation, I didn't have respect for the package that the wisdom came in. Now, when she tells me a sermon isn't good, I'm like, well then, we can just slide this one over here. I don't think I need to do that one anymore because I've learned that I can trust her. I've learned that I respect her and her opinion. But often when wisdom comes packaged in a way that we don't respect, in a way that we don't look up to, we reject it. We reject the message because we don't trust the messenger. Isn't this what people do with faith? A lot of people who have a hard time accepting this is true think to themselves, this was written 2,000 years ago. How does it apply to me? Jesus taught these things to an ancient crowd that didn't have the nuanced understanding of life in the universe like we do. What did he know that I don't know? And we find ways to discount what's in the Bible in ways that we shouldn't really listen to Jesus in this instance or Paul in that instance. And I think what we'll find often when we are rejecting wisdom is that we're rejecting it because we don't respect the vessel. And if we'll stop doing that and just listen to the message and get over ourselves, we will learn lessons a lot more quickly and a lot less painfully. If I would have just listened to Jen and gotten over myself, which should have been really easy to do because I wasn't that impressive of a person and I'm still not, I would have had a lot easier time writing those sermons. If Rehoboam would just get over himself, he would have had a lot easier time being king. I wonder how many times in our own life if we would just get over ourselves and accept the wisdom or accept the help or accept the advice, how much better it would go for us. This morning, the lesson that we take away from Rehoboam's mistake that cost him the kingdom is that we should listen to wisdom. And I want us to acknowledge that often we have a difficult time hearing and heeding wisdom because wisdom doesn't care anything about our ego. Wisdom is often inefficient, often choosing the fruits of the future rather than the gains of the present. And that sometimes God and his goodness packages wisdom in a vessel that we don't respect and we have to get over ourselves and hear it anyways. And I hope that we will listen to this lesson, to the wisdom coming out of the story of Rehoboam through the centuries and heed it in our own lives. And that this summer, this year, in this difficult time, we can be people who hear and heed wisdom. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. You are patient with us. Lord, with those of us who have voices in our life right now that are giving us good wisdom, would you please give us the strength to hear it? Would you please give us the courage to enact it? If our egos are getting in the way of lessons that we should be learning and voices that we should be hearing, would you sweep those aside? Father, if we're rejecting a message because in our arrogance we don't trust the messenger, would you help us see ourselves more accurately and the vessels that you've placed in our life more accurately? Lord, would you make us a people who hear and recognize and heed and obey your wisdom in our lives? In Jesus' name, amen.