John

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this incredibly gross, hot Sunday. I heard somebody say it's like walking around in warm soup outside. I think that's pretty appropriate. I think we're going to take out the lounge areas next week and make more space for y'all. So we're getting the message. You're coming back to church, so this is great. These lounge areas are penalties for not coming in the summertime, so now we'll get back to normal. We've been moving through a series called 27 that we're going to do this summer and next summer where we're doing an overview of the 27 books in the New Testament to kind of give you an idea of where we're going for the rest of this summer and where we're going to pick up next summer. For the rest of the summer, I'm just going to go through the general epistles, the general letters that are largely in the back half or entirely in the back half of the New Testament. We're going to do Hebrews this morning. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, did a phenomenal job covering James for us in July. So if you want to catch that one, you can go back and take a look at it. And then we're going to do 1 and 2 Peter together, 1, 2, 3 John together. Because I don't want to do three sermons out of 1, 2, 3 John that all say like, hey, if you love God, obey him. That's the message of 1, 2, 3 John. And then we're going to do Jude Labor Day Sunday. We decided that we would save the most overlooked book of the Bible for the most overlooked Sunday of the calendar. So that's going to be very appropriate when we do Jude and you guys watch online while Aaron and I work. But this morning we're going to focus on Hebrews. And deciding how to approach Hebrews and how to give you guys an overview of Hebrews was a little tricky because Hebrews is such an incredible book with so many good things and so many good themes. The overriding theme of Hebrews is to exalt Christ. The overriding point of Hebrews is to hold Christ up as superior to everything, the only thing worthy of our devotion and our affection, the only thing worthy of our lives. That's what the book of Hebrews does, and it focuses us on Christ, which is appropriate because we preached Acts last week. Well, I preached. You guys listened and did a great job at listening. I preached Acts last week, and we talked about how it's the Holy Spirit's job to focus us on Jesus, past, present, and future. And so once again, we're just going to enter into this theme in the text where the whole goal of it is to focus us on Christ. And so my prayer for us is that that's what this will do for us this morning. In an effort to exalt Christ, the author of Hebrews, who we're not sure who it is, the author of Hebrews starts out his book this way. Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he had spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right some of the most sweeping prose about our Savior that we'll find in the Bible. The only other place that compares is probably found in Colossians, which Aaron covered. Aaron, our worship pastor, covered last month as well. So from the very beginning, he exalts Jesus. He is the image of God. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He upholds the universe with his majesty, the sweeping picture of Christ. And then the author goes on to kind of build this case for the superiority of Christ. And the book is called Hebrews because it's written to the Jewish diaspora all throughout Asia Minor. As here, I know that you have a Jewish background. Let me help you understand your new faith by helping you understand your new savior. And he goes to great lengths to explain to them why Jesus is superior. And he does this through four major comparisons. He compares Jesus to Moses. He compares Jesus to the angels. He says Jesus is superior to the high priests. And he says that Jesus is a superior sacrifice. And he goes through and he tells them why Jesus is superior to those things. Now, to the Jewish mind in the first century A.D., all of those comparisons would carry a great deal of heft. They would matter. The Jewish mind would immediately know what that meant, would immediately be taken aback by the boldness of the author of Hebrews, and feel the weight of the comparison that they were being asked to make. But for us in the 21st century in America, those things don't resonate with us like they did with the first century Hebrew mind. We know, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in two decades, you probably already know that we're of the opinion that Jesus is a bigger deal than Moses. Like, we got that one down. You know that already. You know that we think that Jesus is superior to angels. No one's getting confused and worshiping angels. Aaron's never gotten a request for a praise song for angels. Like, we've never gotten a Gabriel praise song request. So we know that. Nobody has any misgivings about me being superior to Jesus. We know Jesus is the superior priest. We know he's the superior priest to everyone that's ever lived. And that's a really hard concept for us to hold on to, I think, when we see it in Hebrews that he's the great high priest. That's a difficult one for us because most of us in this room have never really even had a priest. Most of us in this room have had pastors. And pastors are different than priests, take on a different role than priests, have historically been viewed differently than priests. So that's a tough one for us. And then the sacrifice, none of us in this room have ever performed a sacrifice. If you have, I'd love to talk with you about what led you to do that in your life. I'd like to hear that story. I don't know if I want to commit to a full lunch because you're crazy, but maybe just out there, you just tell me about that time with the goat, okay? But these things are difficult for us to relate to. They don't hit us the same way. So a lot of my thoughts and energy this week went into helping us understand why these are such weighty comparisons, why they are so persuasive, and most importantly, why they're still important to us today in 21st century America so that the book and the message of Hebrews can be just as impactful for us as it was for first century Jews. So I think, as we think about the overview of Hebrews, the most interesting question is, why did those comparisons matter to me today? Why are they important to me today? So we're going to look at them and we're going to ask, why does it matter that Jesus is superior to these things? So the first one that we see, I'm doing kind of a combo platter and you'll see why, but Jesus is superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message is greater than theirs. In your notes, I can't remember if I put it there or not, but there should, it'd be helpful to write above these three points and be bracketed by the text. Jesus is superior because, superior to blank because. So that's, that's the question that we're answering. He's superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message are greater than theirs. Okay. Here's why I kind of combined those two. We probably all know, the Jewish mind certainly knew, that God's law came from Moses. God brought the law down off of Mount Sinai and presented it to the people. Now we often think that just the Ten Commandments were written on those tablets, but those tablets were covered front and back. So we don't know what all was on there, but most certainly more laws. And if you read through the books of Moses, the first five in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, you'll get somewhere around 620 some odd laws depending on which rabbi or scholar you're talking to. And so those were the laws of Moses. And those were the laws around which their religion was framed. Those are the laws around which their culture was built, around which their entire life was formed by following those laws well. And Hebrews is earth shattering to them because it says, hey, Jesus's law is superior to Moses's law. You can cast Moses's law aside. It doesn't mean there's not some good ideas in there. The one about like not committing adultery, we should probably carry that principle forward. But those laws are done. It's now Jesus's new law that he gives us in John. Jesus tells us that in these two things are summed up all of the law and the prophets. Everything that Moses or the prophets ever wrote or writings that's ascribed to them can be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells us that early in his ministry. But then at the end of his ministry, he's sitting around with the disciples and he says, this new command I give you, there's this new thing I want you to do. I'm going to add to the, I'm going to sweep away those commands. I'm going to give you this new command. Follow this. I want you to love your neighbor. I want you to love others as I have loved you. It's this new command that Jesus gives. And so that command is superior to all of the commands that came from Moses in the Old Testament. It's also superior to all the commands that come after that. His message is superior. This is what it means with the angels really quickly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the angels that took the tablets from God and delivered them to Moses as God's holy and anointed messengers. So what we're seeing in these two comparisons is Jesus' message is greater than any message that's come before or will come since, and his law is the greatest law, superior to all other laws, and it's the only one worth following. This is incredibly important for us because we live in a culture and we are people who are incredibly vulnerable to the insidious slide towards legalism. We are incredibly vulnerable to reducing our faith to a list of do's and don'ts. Okay, I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Like, I get that. But is it a sin if I do blank? I hate that question. Is it a sin if I do this? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it a sin if I go there? Is it a sin if I have this? That's an immature question. It's almost irrelevant. Is it a sin? And we even do it in the early stages of our faith. Am I in or am I out? When I die, am I going to burn forever or dance in the streets? Which one is it? I just want to make sure I'm praying the right prayer so I don't burn forever. That seems like a bummer. So I'm going to believe in this. Am I in or am I out? Is there an unforgivable sin? Is there something that if I do it, I'm going to lose my salvation and then I'm out? And we try to make it about the rules. We enter into Christianity kind of asking the leader, like whoever's in charge here, can I just have my personnel handbook? I just need to know when my vacation days are. I need to know how many Sundays I can miss in a year and still be like, good. You know? I don't want to have to feel that out. We want our policy handbook. And when we make that our faith, we pervert it and distort it into things that it ought not be and was never intended to be. When we try to make the Bible basic instructions before leaving earth, have you heard that? If you haven't heard it, sorry, because it's stupid. And I just told you it, now you know. We try to make it God's handbook for life. There's a rule for everything, we just got to find it. And when you do that, the people who know the rules the best and appear to follow them the best are the spiritually mature ones. Meanwhile, the people over there who don't follow what we think are the rules super well are actually getting busy loving other people as Christ loved them. But we don't value them because we value the rules. So it's important to let Hebrews remind us that Jesus' law is superior to the laws that we add to his law. Because we love to say yes and. We love to turn Christianity into an improv class. Yes, that's true, and this. Yes, to be a believer, what does God ask of you? That you would love other people as Jesus loved you. Yes. And also you shouldn't watch shows that are rated MA on Netflix. You should not do that. Yes. And you should love other people as Jesus loved you. And you shouldn't say cuss words. Because we got together in a room at some point, and we decided that these words that are spelled this way are bad. And you can't say them. And they're very offensive. And they offend the very heart of God. Jesus didn't make that law. We do yes and, and we start to build other rules that are requisite for our faith. And at the end of that is legalism. And some of y'all grew up in legalism. I know my parents grew up in legalism. My mom went to a church outside of Atlanta where you couldn't, if you're a girl, you were not allowed to wear skirts above the knees. They all had to be to the knees or below. And if they weren't, you're a sinner. You couldn't go, you weren't even allowed to go to the movie theater. If you're going to see a Disney movie, you cannot, you cannot go to the theater. You were not, your family was not allowed to own a deck of cards because with those cards, you might gamble and offend the sensibilities of God. And what happens when we do that is people like my mom who grow up in that, when they grew up in that, in their adolescence, they're riddled with all this guilt of things that they're supposed to do and shame for not being able to do them. And that shame isn't coming from Jesus because you've offended his law. That shame is coming from rickety old deacons because you offended their sensibilities. And it's not right. We should always choose love over law because that's what Jesus asked us to do. And here's what can happen when we do that. At the last church I worked at, there was a policy, and some of you are familiar with policies like these. They're particularly prominent in the South. There was a policy that you could not consume alcohol in public. You had to privately foster your own alcoholism. You couldn't consume it in public. You can have it in your house. You can have it with trusted friends. But you can't consume it in public and you can't be seen purchasing it by someone from the church. It's absurd policy. Be all in or all out. Just say don't drink it. That's way less hypocritical than drive to DeKalb County to get it and then drive back. So one day, I'm cutting my grass. I'm relatively new to the neighborhood. And when I finish up, my neighbor, Luis, comes out. He says, hey man, hot day. I said, yeah, it's hot. He goes, you want to have a beer with me? Now that's against the rules. I'm not allowed to have a beer with Luis because I don't want to, I'm not going to get into it. According to the rules, this is bad. But he's my neighbor and we know what do you want to have a beer with me means. He's showing me hospitality. He wants to talk to me. He wants to get to know me and I need to love him. And it's not very loving of me to be like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get my water. That's just not what you do. So I said, sure. I had a beer, an illicit, an illicit beer. God, I'm still sorry. And we talked and we became buddies. And Luis had a stepson and two sons that lived with him as well, him and his wife as well. Gabriel, Yoel, and Yariel. And over the course of the next six years, I got to be their pastor. And I got to baptize all four of those guys in the church. Now, if I had said no that day, could that still have happened? Sure. But, I chose love over law, and God used it. We should be people who choose love over law, understanding that Jesus' law is the superior law. And just in case you think I'm letting people off the hook to do whatever you want under Jesus' law, as long as you're loving others, it is absolutely impossible to love others as Jesus loved us without being fueled and imbued by the love of the Holy Spirit. We cannot love others as Jesus loved us if we do not know Jesus and love him well. That the two things that sum up the law and the prophets, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen, love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as Jesus did if you do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. It takes care of everything. And suddenly there's times when you shouldn't watch that, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't have that, or you shouldn't shouldn't go there or you should do this or you should do that, but not because it offends some law or sensibility that we've added to over the years, but because to do that or to not do that is the most loving action to take. That's why it's important for us to still acknowledge that Jesus's law is the superior law and that Jesus is a superior messenger and the angels. Now your notes are out of order. The next one we're going to do is priest and then sacrifice. So I'm sorry about that. But it's important to us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priests because Nate is broken. It's important for us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priest because I am broken. When we were running through the slides before the service started, we got to this one, and the band and the tech team laughed at me. They're like, Nate, you think we don't know that? We haven't pieced that one together. And I said, well, my mom's coming. So this one's for her. Sorry, mom, this is news to you. I know that you don't need me to tell you that I'm broken and that I'm a human. And that I'm going to teach you the wrong stuff sometimes. The way I think about faith and the Bible and God and Scripture and all the things evolves. It changes. There's things I taught when I was 30 that I'm so embarrassed about now. And there's things I'm saying to you right now that when I'm 52, I'm going to be like, oh, what a moron. I just know that's true. I'm broken. And even though you guys know that, and you guys know not to put pastors on pedestals, and you would probably all say that you have a pretty healthy idea about that, and I consider it part of my personal ministry to you to act in such a way where it's very easy for you to not put me on a pedestal. That's my ministerial gift to you guys. You would probably all say that you know better than that. But we still get the jokes. Those still happen. I had a friend, a good buddy, still a friend of mine named Heath Hollinsworth. Heath had three brothers. He still has three brothers. Jim was the oldest and Jim was an associate pastor at the church that Heath and I both worked at. So we all worked together. And then Ryan and Hunter worked construction. So they're a little bit less important in the kingdom of God than me and Heath and Jim. Which is the, that's the point I'm making. And whenever they would be around their dad for a meal and it came time to pray for the meal, Heath was in charge of the service. He was program director. It was a big church. So he had positions like program director. Here, Aaron does that. But whenever it came time to pray for a meal, their dad really didn't like praying in public, so he would always get one of the boys to do it, and he'd kind of look them over, and he'd be like, Jim, why don't you lead us today? You're the closest to the Lord. You have the most direct line. And Heath would be like, I work at a church too, and I'm sure it flew all over Ryan and Hunter. But he would joke about it. It didn't really make him mad. He just thought it was the stupidest thing because Jim was ordained and Heath wasn't. His dad thought he had a more direct line to the Lord. And as stupid as that sounds, you guys say that to me. I know we don't really believe it, but we keep saying it. When I golf with y'all and I hit one in the woods, which is rare, but when I hit one in the woods and it comes bouncing out just miraculously, just a squirrel throws it and it just lands in the middle of the fairway, somebody is going to say, got that pastor bounce, somebody's going to say it. We make the jokes and we think the things, and I can tell you from personal experience, we exonerate pastors too much. We honor pastors too much. We think too much of them. We have too great an expectation for them. I am not to be exonerated. My job in God's kingdom is not more important than your job. My gifting is not more valuable than your gifting. And listen, your character is not less important than my character. A lot of us have more expectations for me and what my character should be than for ourselves. And that makes no sense because you're a royal priesthood too. If it's okay for you and not okay for me, then you either need to raise your standards for yourself or lower them for me. Probably raise. And I don't mean to hit that too hard, but the church has a long history of making the people who stand here way more important than they actually are. And we've got to knock that off. While I'm here, and just kind of kicking you guys in the gut, let me kick you in the teeth. The other thing I was thinking about with priests and why this is important is the historic role of the priest. Do you realize that for a vast majority of Christian history, from the first century A.D. to now, for the vast majority of that, Christendom did exist under a priesthood. And that those priests were the sole arbiters of the truth of God in the lives of their people. Do you understand that? The people, for much of history, were largely illiterate. The vast majority of people were illiterate for much of church history. And before the printing press, a Bible was so expensive that it took the whole town to raise money to get one, and then they'd put it up on the lectern in the church or in the pulpit, and they would literally chain it so that nobody could steal the Bible because it was that valuable, and it's the only one that existed in the town, and because everyone's largely illiterate, the only person who can read it is the pastor. Do you understand how easy it is to manipulate when that is true? Do you understand how vulnerable that populace was to the malice that might be in their pastor? Do you understand how limiting it is for your faith if there's only one person who can explain to you who's reading scripture on your behalf and then telling you what it says and then telling you what you should do about that? That's how we got indulgences and we paid for St. Peter's Basilica because they manipulated the masses in that way. Because I'm the only one in the room who can read this and I get to tell you what it means. That's incredibly harmful. And now, we live in a time when Bibles are ubiquitous everywhere. You all probably have multiple Bibles in your home. You probably have more Bibles than you do people. If you'd like to add to your collection, take one of ours. You can download it on your phone. You can look it up on the World Wide Web. You have universal access to the scriptures of God. And yet, I see so many of you, so many Christians, walking through life, functioning as scriptural illiterates, trusting your pastor to spoon feed you truth twice a month for 30 minutes. And that's all you know of this. People have fought and people have died and people have lived to make this available to you. And yet as Christians, many of us live our lives as functional illiterates who still rely on our pastor or spiritual leader to spoon feed us the truth twice a month? How can we be Christians and be so disinterested in what God tells us? How can we call ourselves passionate followers of Christ and yet not read about him? How can we have access to this special revelation of God and the inspired and authoritative words within it that tell us not basic instructions for life but about our wild and wonderful and mysterious father? They tell us all about that and we have access to it all the time. We can read it whenever we want. We can do all the research we want. We can even, you can download professors walking you through this as you explore it on your own. And yet we function as illiterates still acting like the only source of truth is our pastor for whatever sermon they want to give that day. Jesus is your pastor. He's your source of truth. And he made sure that this got left for you so that you could learn about him. I'm here to augment the work that you're doing. I can't do the work for your whole life. Neither can your small group leader. It's important to know that Jesus is our high priest because we have the freedom to go to him and to pray to him whenever we want. We don't need a go-between. We don't need someone else to spoon-feed us truth. He makes it available to us here. Now, let's end on a higher note than that. It's important for us to know that Jesus was the superior sacrifice because he was enough. It's important for us to know that Jesus was a superior sacrifice because he was. This is important to mention. Because the old sacrificial system, you had to perform a sacrifice, and then you were good until you messed up again, and then you had to go back and you had to sacrifice. Like I wonder about the people who like went to the temple for a certain festival and they performed all their sacrifices and they're good. They're good before God. If they die, they're fine. And then they like take a wrong turn or there's traffic getting out of Jerusalem and they say things they shouldn't say. Like, I guess we got to go back to the temple and do this again. But Jesus is a superior sacrifice because we need one for all time. That's it. We're done. We don't have to go back and keep making sacrifices. And yet, we do the yes and thing again where we go, yeah, Jesus died for me and he made me right before God, but now that I'm a Christian, I keep messing up, so I need to do more and I need to better, and I need to perform my own personal sacrifices to get myself back in good graces with God. And we make Jesus' sacrifice not enough. Yeah, that was good then, but I know better now, and I need to keep working harder and keep being hard on myself and keep making my own sacrifices to then get back into the good graces of God so that he will love me more and approve of me more. And we live our lives, I do this too, as if Jesus' sacrifice wasn't enough. And now God in his goodness and glory and perfection requires me, Nate, to make greater sacrifices to supplement the insufficient sacrifice that Jesus made for me. I think that we would do well to wake up every morning and remind ourselves, even if we have to say it out loud, what Jesus has done for me is enough. God loves me as much as he possibly can and ever will. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me less. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me more. And there's nothing I can do today to make myself more right before God. Jesus was enough. He did that for me. And then walk in the goodness and freedom of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Walk in that fullness. Walk in that grace. Walk in that gratitude by allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to be enough. That's why Hebrews can still, that's how Hebrews can still resonate with us today. By acknowledging that Jesus is superior to the law and the message of old, that he's the superior priest that gives us unfettered access to him, and we ought to passionately pursue that, and that he is the greatest sacrifice because he's enough for us once and for all. We don't have to keep supplementing that with our insufficiency. And to do all of this, as we're reminded of all of this, and we start with the sweeping prose about Christ, and then we see the comparisons, he starts to close his book by drawing this conclusion, and I think it's a great place for us to stop and put our focus on today as we prepare our hearts for communion after the sermon. But he starts to summarize his book and to wrap up by telling us to do this. I preach about this lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, my Bible says, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. In light of all that we learned, in light of who Jesus is, the image of God, the very imprint of His nature, and in light of the ways that Jesus is superior and serves us and sacrifices for us and is our high priest, in light of the law that is to love Jesus with all our heart, in light of the law that is to love other people as Jesus loved us and then so in turn love Christ and be fueled by that love, in light of all these things, what are we to do? What are the rules that we're supposed to follow? How are we supposed to live this Christian life? Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. Run your race. Go out there and run hard. Pursue Jesus with everything you've got. Go love other people with your whole heart. And to do it well, you've got to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we don't do that by white-knuckling it. We don't do that by trying to be our own sacrifice. We don't do that by supplementing the work of Christ in our life. No, we do it by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If we'll do that, we will follow God's laws. We will pursue Jesus hard. We will love others well, and we will have run a good race. That's the point of Hebrews. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are, for how you've loved us. Thank you for your son. Father, I pray that it would be critically important to us to acknowledge the superiority of Christ. That it would be critically important to us to pursue Him, to love Him, to know Him. Father, if we are not in Your Word, if we're not pursuing You on our own, would you light a fire in us to do that? If we've spent too many years not knowing your Bible well, would you let this be the year that fixes it? If we've spent too many years adding to your law, would this be the year that we let that go? If we've spent too many years supplementing your sacrifice, would this be the year that we finally accept yours? And God, as we go from here, would you help us run our race? It's in Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this incredibly gross, hot Sunday. I heard somebody say it's like walking around in warm soup outside. I think that's pretty appropriate. I think we're going to take out the lounge areas next week and make more space for y'all. So we're getting the message. You're coming back to church, so this is great. These lounge areas are penalties for not coming in the summertime, so now we'll get back to normal. We've been moving through a series called 27 that we're going to do this summer and next summer where we're doing an overview of the 27 books in the New Testament to kind of give you an idea of where we're going for the rest of this summer and where we're going to pick up next summer. For the rest of the summer, I'm just going to go through the general epistles, the general letters that are largely in the back half or entirely in the back half of the New Testament. We're going to do Hebrews this morning. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, did a phenomenal job covering James for us in July. So if you want to catch that one, you can go back and take a look at it. And then we're going to do 1 and 2 Peter together, 1, 2, 3 John together. Because I don't want to do three sermons out of 1, 2, 3 John that all say like, hey, if you love God, obey him. That's the message of 1, 2, 3 John. And then we're going to do Jude Labor Day Sunday. We decided that we would save the most overlooked book of the Bible for the most overlooked Sunday of the calendar. So that's going to be very appropriate when we do Jude and you guys watch online while Aaron and I work. But this morning we're going to focus on Hebrews. And deciding how to approach Hebrews and how to give you guys an overview of Hebrews was a little tricky because Hebrews is such an incredible book with so many good things and so many good themes. The overriding theme of Hebrews is to exalt Christ. The overriding point of Hebrews is to hold Christ up as superior to everything, the only thing worthy of our devotion and our affection, the only thing worthy of our lives. That's what the book of Hebrews does, and it focuses us on Christ, which is appropriate because we preached Acts last week. Well, I preached. You guys listened and did a great job at listening. I preached Acts last week, and we talked about how it's the Holy Spirit's job to focus us on Jesus, past, present, and future. And so once again, we're just going to enter into this theme in the text where the whole goal of it is to focus us on Christ. And so my prayer for us is that that's what this will do for us this morning. In an effort to exalt Christ, the author of Hebrews, who we're not sure who it is, the author of Hebrews starts out his book this way. Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he had spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right some of the most sweeping prose about our Savior that we'll find in the Bible. The only other place that compares is probably found in Colossians, which Aaron covered. Aaron, our worship pastor, covered last month as well. So from the very beginning, he exalts Jesus. He is the image of God. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He upholds the universe with his majesty, the sweeping picture of Christ. And then the author goes on to kind of build this case for the superiority of Christ. And the book is called Hebrews because it's written to the Jewish diaspora all throughout Asia Minor. As here, I know that you have a Jewish background. Let me help you understand your new faith by helping you understand your new savior. And he goes to great lengths to explain to them why Jesus is superior. And he does this through four major comparisons. He compares Jesus to Moses. He compares Jesus to the angels. He says Jesus is superior to the high priests. And he says that Jesus is a superior sacrifice. And he goes through and he tells them why Jesus is superior to those things. Now, to the Jewish mind in the first century A.D., all of those comparisons would carry a great deal of heft. They would matter. The Jewish mind would immediately know what that meant, would immediately be taken aback by the boldness of the author of Hebrews, and feel the weight of the comparison that they were being asked to make. But for us in the 21st century in America, those things don't resonate with us like they did with the first century Hebrew mind. We know, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in two decades, you probably already know that we're of the opinion that Jesus is a bigger deal than Moses. Like, we got that one down. You know that already. You know that we think that Jesus is superior to angels. No one's getting confused and worshiping angels. Aaron's never gotten a request for a praise song for angels. Like, we've never gotten a Gabriel praise song request. So we know that. Nobody has any misgivings about me being superior to Jesus. We know Jesus is the superior priest. We know he's the superior priest to everyone that's ever lived. And that's a really hard concept for us to hold on to, I think, when we see it in Hebrews that he's the great high priest. That's a difficult one for us because most of us in this room have never really even had a priest. Most of us in this room have had pastors. And pastors are different than priests, take on a different role than priests, have historically been viewed differently than priests. So that's a tough one for us. And then the sacrifice, none of us in this room have ever performed a sacrifice. If you have, I'd love to talk with you about what led you to do that in your life. I'd like to hear that story. I don't know if I want to commit to a full lunch because you're crazy, but maybe just out there, you just tell me about that time with the goat, okay? But these things are difficult for us to relate to. They don't hit us the same way. So a lot of my thoughts and energy this week went into helping us understand why these are such weighty comparisons, why they are so persuasive, and most importantly, why they're still important to us today in 21st century America so that the book and the message of Hebrews can be just as impactful for us as it was for first century Jews. So I think, as we think about the overview of Hebrews, the most interesting question is, why did those comparisons matter to me today? Why are they important to me today? So we're going to look at them and we're going to ask, why does it matter that Jesus is superior to these things? So the first one that we see, I'm doing kind of a combo platter and you'll see why, but Jesus is superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message is greater than theirs. In your notes, I can't remember if I put it there or not, but there should, it'd be helpful to write above these three points and be bracketed by the text. Jesus is superior because, superior to blank because. So that's, that's the question that we're answering. He's superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message are greater than theirs. Okay. Here's why I kind of combined those two. We probably all know, the Jewish mind certainly knew, that God's law came from Moses. God brought the law down off of Mount Sinai and presented it to the people. Now we often think that just the Ten Commandments were written on those tablets, but those tablets were covered front and back. So we don't know what all was on there, but most certainly more laws. And if you read through the books of Moses, the first five in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, you'll get somewhere around 620 some odd laws depending on which rabbi or scholar you're talking to. And so those were the laws of Moses. And those were the laws around which their religion was framed. Those are the laws around which their culture was built, around which their entire life was formed by following those laws well. And Hebrews is earth shattering to them because it says, hey, Jesus's law is superior to Moses's law. You can cast Moses's law aside. It doesn't mean there's not some good ideas in there. The one about like not committing adultery, we should probably carry that principle forward. But those laws are done. It's now Jesus's new law that he gives us in John. Jesus tells us that in these two things are summed up all of the law and the prophets. Everything that Moses or the prophets ever wrote or writings that's ascribed to them can be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells us that early in his ministry. But then at the end of his ministry, he's sitting around with the disciples and he says, this new command I give you, there's this new thing I want you to do. I'm going to add to the, I'm going to sweep away those commands. I'm going to give you this new command. Follow this. I want you to love your neighbor. I want you to love others as I have loved you. It's this new command that Jesus gives. And so that command is superior to all of the commands that came from Moses in the Old Testament. It's also superior to all the commands that come after that. His message is superior. This is what it means with the angels really quickly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the angels that took the tablets from God and delivered them to Moses as God's holy and anointed messengers. So what we're seeing in these two comparisons is Jesus' message is greater than any message that's come before or will come since, and his law is the greatest law, superior to all other laws, and it's the only one worth following. This is incredibly important for us because we live in a culture and we are people who are incredibly vulnerable to the insidious slide towards legalism. We are incredibly vulnerable to reducing our faith to a list of do's and don'ts. Okay, I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Like, I get that. But is it a sin if I do blank? I hate that question. Is it a sin if I do this? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it a sin if I go there? Is it a sin if I have this? That's an immature question. It's almost irrelevant. Is it a sin? And we even do it in the early stages of our faith. Am I in or am I out? When I die, am I going to burn forever or dance in the streets? Which one is it? I just want to make sure I'm praying the right prayer so I don't burn forever. That seems like a bummer. So I'm going to believe in this. Am I in or am I out? Is there an unforgivable sin? Is there something that if I do it, I'm going to lose my salvation and then I'm out? And we try to make it about the rules. We enter into Christianity kind of asking the leader, like whoever's in charge here, can I just have my personnel handbook? I just need to know when my vacation days are. I need to know how many Sundays I can miss in a year and still be like, good. You know? I don't want to have to feel that out. We want our policy handbook. And when we make that our faith, we pervert it and distort it into things that it ought not be and was never intended to be. When we try to make the Bible basic instructions before leaving earth, have you heard that? If you haven't heard it, sorry, because it's stupid. And I just told you it, now you know. We try to make it God's handbook for life. There's a rule for everything, we just got to find it. And when you do that, the people who know the rules the best and appear to follow them the best are the spiritually mature ones. Meanwhile, the people over there who don't follow what we think are the rules super well are actually getting busy loving other people as Christ loved them. But we don't value them because we value the rules. So it's important to let Hebrews remind us that Jesus' law is superior to the laws that we add to his law. Because we love to say yes and. We love to turn Christianity into an improv class. Yes, that's true, and this. Yes, to be a believer, what does God ask of you? That you would love other people as Jesus loved you. Yes. And also you shouldn't watch shows that are rated MA on Netflix. You should not do that. Yes. And you should love other people as Jesus loved you. And you shouldn't say cuss words. Because we got together in a room at some point, and we decided that these words that are spelled this way are bad. And you can't say them. And they're very offensive. And they offend the very heart of God. Jesus didn't make that law. We do yes and, and we start to build other rules that are requisite for our faith. And at the end of that is legalism. And some of y'all grew up in legalism. I know my parents grew up in legalism. My mom went to a church outside of Atlanta where you couldn't, if you're a girl, you were not allowed to wear skirts above the knees. They all had to be to the knees or below. And if they weren't, you're a sinner. You couldn't go, you weren't even allowed to go to the movie theater. If you're going to see a Disney movie, you cannot, you cannot go to the theater. You were not, your family was not allowed to own a deck of cards because with those cards, you might gamble and offend the sensibilities of God. And what happens when we do that is people like my mom who grow up in that, when they grew up in that, in their adolescence, they're riddled with all this guilt of things that they're supposed to do and shame for not being able to do them. And that shame isn't coming from Jesus because you've offended his law. That shame is coming from rickety old deacons because you offended their sensibilities. And it's not right. We should always choose love over law because that's what Jesus asked us to do. And here's what can happen when we do that. At the last church I worked at, there was a policy, and some of you are familiar with policies like these. They're particularly prominent in the South. There was a policy that you could not consume alcohol in public. You had to privately foster your own alcoholism. You couldn't consume it in public. You can have it in your house. You can have it with trusted friends. But you can't consume it in public and you can't be seen purchasing it by someone from the church. It's absurd policy. Be all in or all out. Just say don't drink it. That's way less hypocritical than drive to DeKalb County to get it and then drive back. So one day, I'm cutting my grass. I'm relatively new to the neighborhood. And when I finish up, my neighbor, Luis, comes out. He says, hey man, hot day. I said, yeah, it's hot. He goes, you want to have a beer with me? Now that's against the rules. I'm not allowed to have a beer with Luis because I don't want to, I'm not going to get into it. According to the rules, this is bad. But he's my neighbor and we know what do you want to have a beer with me means. He's showing me hospitality. He wants to talk to me. He wants to get to know me and I need to love him. And it's not very loving of me to be like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get my water. That's just not what you do. So I said, sure. I had a beer, an illicit, an illicit beer. God, I'm still sorry. And we talked and we became buddies. And Luis had a stepson and two sons that lived with him as well, him and his wife as well. Gabriel, Yoel, and Yariel. And over the course of the next six years, I got to be their pastor. And I got to baptize all four of those guys in the church. Now, if I had said no that day, could that still have happened? Sure. But, I chose love over law, and God used it. We should be people who choose love over law, understanding that Jesus' law is the superior law. And just in case you think I'm letting people off the hook to do whatever you want under Jesus' law, as long as you're loving others, it is absolutely impossible to love others as Jesus loved us without being fueled and imbued by the love of the Holy Spirit. We cannot love others as Jesus loved us if we do not know Jesus and love him well. That the two things that sum up the law and the prophets, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen, love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as Jesus did if you do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. It takes care of everything. And suddenly there's times when you shouldn't watch that, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't have that, or you shouldn't shouldn't go there or you should do this or you should do that, but not because it offends some law or sensibility that we've added to over the years, but because to do that or to not do that is the most loving action to take. That's why it's important for us to still acknowledge that Jesus's law is the superior law and that Jesus is a superior messenger and the angels. Now your notes are out of order. The next one we're going to do is priest and then sacrifice. So I'm sorry about that. But it's important to us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priests because Nate is broken. It's important for us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priest because I am broken. When we were running through the slides before the service started, we got to this one, and the band and the tech team laughed at me. They're like, Nate, you think we don't know that? We haven't pieced that one together. And I said, well, my mom's coming. So this one's for her. Sorry, mom, this is news to you. I know that you don't need me to tell you that I'm broken and that I'm a human. And that I'm going to teach you the wrong stuff sometimes. The way I think about faith and the Bible and God and Scripture and all the things evolves. It changes. There's things I taught when I was 30 that I'm so embarrassed about now. And there's things I'm saying to you right now that when I'm 52, I'm going to be like, oh, what a moron. I just know that's true. I'm broken. And even though you guys know that, and you guys know not to put pastors on pedestals, and you would probably all say that you have a pretty healthy idea about that, and I consider it part of my personal ministry to you to act in such a way where it's very easy for you to not put me on a pedestal. That's my ministerial gift to you guys. You would probably all say that you know better than that. But we still get the jokes. Those still happen. I had a friend, a good buddy, still a friend of mine named Heath Hollinsworth. Heath had three brothers. He still has three brothers. Jim was the oldest and Jim was an associate pastor at the church that Heath and I both worked at. So we all worked together. And then Ryan and Hunter worked construction. So they're a little bit less important in the kingdom of God than me and Heath and Jim. Which is the, that's the point I'm making. And whenever they would be around their dad for a meal and it came time to pray for the meal, Heath was in charge of the service. He was program director. It was a big church. So he had positions like program director. Here, Aaron does that. But whenever it came time to pray for a meal, their dad really didn't like praying in public, so he would always get one of the boys to do it, and he'd kind of look them over, and he'd be like, Jim, why don't you lead us today? You're the closest to the Lord. You have the most direct line. And Heath would be like, I work at a church too, and I'm sure it flew all over Ryan and Hunter. But he would joke about it. It didn't really make him mad. He just thought it was the stupidest thing because Jim was ordained and Heath wasn't. His dad thought he had a more direct line to the Lord. And as stupid as that sounds, you guys say that to me. I know we don't really believe it, but we keep saying it. When I golf with y'all and I hit one in the woods, which is rare, but when I hit one in the woods and it comes bouncing out just miraculously, just a squirrel throws it and it just lands in the middle of the fairway, somebody is going to say, got that pastor bounce, somebody's going to say it. We make the jokes and we think the things, and I can tell you from personal experience, we exonerate pastors too much. We honor pastors too much. We think too much of them. We have too great an expectation for them. I am not to be exonerated. My job in God's kingdom is not more important than your job. My gifting is not more valuable than your gifting. And listen, your character is not less important than my character. A lot of us have more expectations for me and what my character should be than for ourselves. And that makes no sense because you're a royal priesthood too. If it's okay for you and not okay for me, then you either need to raise your standards for yourself or lower them for me. Probably raise. And I don't mean to hit that too hard, but the church has a long history of making the people who stand here way more important than they actually are. And we've got to knock that off. While I'm here, and just kind of kicking you guys in the gut, let me kick you in the teeth. The other thing I was thinking about with priests and why this is important is the historic role of the priest. Do you realize that for a vast majority of Christian history, from the first century A.D. to now, for the vast majority of that, Christendom did exist under a priesthood. And that those priests were the sole arbiters of the truth of God in the lives of their people. Do you understand that? The people, for much of history, were largely illiterate. The vast majority of people were illiterate for much of church history. And before the printing press, a Bible was so expensive that it took the whole town to raise money to get one, and then they'd put it up on the lectern in the church or in the pulpit, and they would literally chain it so that nobody could steal the Bible because it was that valuable, and it's the only one that existed in the town, and because everyone's largely illiterate, the only person who can read it is the pastor. Do you understand how easy it is to manipulate when that is true? Do you understand how vulnerable that populace was to the malice that might be in their pastor? Do you understand how limiting it is for your faith if there's only one person who can explain to you who's reading scripture on your behalf and then telling you what it says and then telling you what you should do about that? That's how we got indulgences and we paid for St. Peter's Basilica because they manipulated the masses in that way. Because I'm the only one in the room who can read this and I get to tell you what it means. That's incredibly harmful. And now, we live in a time when Bibles are ubiquitous everywhere. You all probably have multiple Bibles in your home. You probably have more Bibles than you do people. If you'd like to add to your collection, take one of ours. You can download it on your phone. You can look it up on the World Wide Web. You have universal access to the scriptures of God. And yet, I see so many of you, so many Christians, walking through life, functioning as scriptural illiterates, trusting your pastor to spoon feed you truth twice a month for 30 minutes. And that's all you know of this. People have fought and people have died and people have lived to make this available to you. And yet as Christians, many of us live our lives as functional illiterates who still rely on our pastor or spiritual leader to spoon feed us the truth twice a month? How can we be Christians and be so disinterested in what God tells us? How can we call ourselves passionate followers of Christ and yet not read about him? How can we have access to this special revelation of God and the inspired and authoritative words within it that tell us not basic instructions for life but about our wild and wonderful and mysterious father? They tell us all about that and we have access to it all the time. We can read it whenever we want. We can do all the research we want. We can even, you can download professors walking you through this as you explore it on your own. And yet we function as illiterates still acting like the only source of truth is our pastor for whatever sermon they want to give that day. Jesus is your pastor. He's your source of truth. And he made sure that this got left for you so that you could learn about him. I'm here to augment the work that you're doing. I can't do the work for your whole life. Neither can your small group leader. It's important to know that Jesus is our high priest because we have the freedom to go to him and to pray to him whenever we want. We don't need a go-between. We don't need someone else to spoon-feed us truth. He makes it available to us here. Now, let's end on a higher note than that. It's important for us to know that Jesus was the superior sacrifice because he was enough. It's important for us to know that Jesus was a superior sacrifice because he was. This is important to mention. Because the old sacrificial system, you had to perform a sacrifice, and then you were good until you messed up again, and then you had to go back and you had to sacrifice. Like I wonder about the people who like went to the temple for a certain festival and they performed all their sacrifices and they're good. They're good before God. If they die, they're fine. And then they like take a wrong turn or there's traffic getting out of Jerusalem and they say things they shouldn't say. Like, I guess we got to go back to the temple and do this again. But Jesus is a superior sacrifice because we need one for all time. That's it. We're done. We don't have to go back and keep making sacrifices. And yet, we do the yes and thing again where we go, yeah, Jesus died for me and he made me right before God, but now that I'm a Christian, I keep messing up, so I need to do more and I need to better, and I need to perform my own personal sacrifices to get myself back in good graces with God. And we make Jesus' sacrifice not enough. Yeah, that was good then, but I know better now, and I need to keep working harder and keep being hard on myself and keep making my own sacrifices to then get back into the good graces of God so that he will love me more and approve of me more. And we live our lives, I do this too, as if Jesus' sacrifice wasn't enough. And now God in his goodness and glory and perfection requires me, Nate, to make greater sacrifices to supplement the insufficient sacrifice that Jesus made for me. I think that we would do well to wake up every morning and remind ourselves, even if we have to say it out loud, what Jesus has done for me is enough. God loves me as much as he possibly can and ever will. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me less. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me more. And there's nothing I can do today to make myself more right before God. Jesus was enough. He did that for me. And then walk in the goodness and freedom of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Walk in that fullness. Walk in that grace. Walk in that gratitude by allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to be enough. That's why Hebrews can still, that's how Hebrews can still resonate with us today. By acknowledging that Jesus is superior to the law and the message of old, that he's the superior priest that gives us unfettered access to him, and we ought to passionately pursue that, and that he is the greatest sacrifice because he's enough for us once and for all. We don't have to keep supplementing that with our insufficiency. And to do all of this, as we're reminded of all of this, and we start with the sweeping prose about Christ, and then we see the comparisons, he starts to close his book by drawing this conclusion, and I think it's a great place for us to stop and put our focus on today as we prepare our hearts for communion after the sermon. But he starts to summarize his book and to wrap up by telling us to do this. I preach about this lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, my Bible says, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. In light of all that we learned, in light of who Jesus is, the image of God, the very imprint of His nature, and in light of the ways that Jesus is superior and serves us and sacrifices for us and is our high priest, in light of the law that is to love Jesus with all our heart, in light of the law that is to love other people as Jesus loved us and then so in turn love Christ and be fueled by that love, in light of all these things, what are we to do? What are the rules that we're supposed to follow? How are we supposed to live this Christian life? Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. Run your race. Go out there and run hard. Pursue Jesus with everything you've got. Go love other people with your whole heart. And to do it well, you've got to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we don't do that by white-knuckling it. We don't do that by trying to be our own sacrifice. We don't do that by supplementing the work of Christ in our life. No, we do it by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If we'll do that, we will follow God's laws. We will pursue Jesus hard. We will love others well, and we will have run a good race. That's the point of Hebrews. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are, for how you've loved us. Thank you for your son. Father, I pray that it would be critically important to us to acknowledge the superiority of Christ. That it would be critically important to us to pursue Him, to love Him, to know Him. Father, if we are not in Your Word, if we're not pursuing You on our own, would you light a fire in us to do that? If we've spent too many years not knowing your Bible well, would you let this be the year that fixes it? If we've spent too many years adding to your law, would this be the year that we let that go? If we've spent too many years supplementing your sacrifice, would this be the year that we finally accept yours? And God, as we go from here, would you help us run our race? It's in Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you've been coming in July and never before that, and I'm new to you, they gave me the month off, and they were very, very kind to do that. So again, as I iterated in the Grace Vine this week, thank you so much for being the kind of church that allows me to take a month off and be with my family and be present with my kids. When I came back to work this week and I said bye to the kids, my daughter Lily was actually disappointed, which I feel is probably a good thing. I guess that means the month went well. It would probably be bad news if she was like, praise the Lord, he's leaving again. That may be how Jen felt, but Lily was sad. And just to set the expectations for this morning, I heard comments and things as I was wrapping up the month of June to take sabbatical and then some stuff during the month and even some stuff this morning about like, oh man, this is going to be a good sermon. You had six weeks to get this one ready. Like you used to come back and light our faces on fire. No, no. I didn't think about this sermon for one single second in the month of July. Not a single one. I didn't even know that I was preaching. This is the book of Acts this morning. I didn't even know I was preaching on the book of Acts until Tuesday when I decided that it would be the book of Acts. And then some stuff happened in my week. I ended up having to go back out of town. I wrote this sermon on my parents' dinner table at 10 o'clock on Thursday night. I'm essentially winging this, and I'm rusty. So let's just tamp down expectations of good and hope for brief, and then later I'll be good. If you really want to hear the sermon that I've been thinking about all month, then you should come on September the 10th. On September the 10th, we're going to roll out the plans that we have for the church. We're almost done. We're ready to show you. We're very excited. We're going to launch the campaign in earnest. It's going to be an update, and I've been really thinking a lot about what I want to share with you guys that Sunday morning about the future of grace and what we hope for. So that's the one that I hope is really good. This is going to be fine. With that being said, you can open your Bibles not to the book of Acts, but to John chapter 16. We will get there in a second. As I think about the book of Acts and what I want you to do with Acts, so we're going to be focused on just kind of an overview of Acts. What is it? How do we use it? Why is it there? What can it teach us? One of the things to know contextually about Acts is that it's essentially the second half of the book of Luke. Luke wrote the gospel of Luke and then he wrote the Acts of the Spirit or the Acts of the Apostles, depending on which strand of the church you come from. But they're both written to a guy named Theophilus. So they're basically part one and part two of the accounts of Christ and then the accounts of the Spirit. And when I think of the book of Acts, I think of it this way as it fits into the New Testament. From a narrative perspective, the book of Acts is an atlas. I think we have that in your notes. Yes, in a narrative sense, Acts serves as an atlas. Now, here's what I mean. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember this, to know what this is. I see you don't know. You know lots of it. You have no clue. You never touched this in your life. Then here's what you don't know. If you're too young to know what this is, I have been entrusted with a church, the leadership of a church, with children, young lives to mold, a marriage, various stations of responsibility throughout my life. I have never felt a deeper sense of responsibility than when I was in the back seat of our 1985 Maxima with automatic seat belts and my dad would tell me to open up the Atlas and tell me where I need to turn next. That is fully locked in. I've never felt a greater sense of responsibility because you can't just let any of the kids do that. You let my sister do it, we're going to be in Kansas. It's going to be a disaster. I have to do it. And the family is relying on me. So atlases hold a great place in my heart. And when you look at an atlas, when I open this to North Carolina, the way that an atlas works, I know you guys can't see it, but you can see enough for this to work. When you look at North Carolina, it's just the whole state, right? It's an overview of the whole state. And then what you get is you get these little windows where different cities are blown up. So like Charlotte is there. Charlotte's there. But then this is Charlotte for when you get in the city, you need more detail. And then Raleigh gets its own on the next page there. This is back before 540. I was actually looking at it this morning. Yeah, this is 1995. I had to email some people who are not in the millennial demographic to get my hands on one of these. But that's how atlases work, right? There's an overview of the whole state, and then where more detail is required, there's these little windows, these little blow-ups that accompany it to give you more detail for certain parts of the map. And that's how I think about the book of Acts and how it interacts with the New Testament. When you think about the story, the narrative arc of the New Testament, from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospel telling the story of Christ, to the end of the book, Revelation, and you think about chronologically, how does that flow? Acts is, from a narrative perspective, the atlas. It gives the overview. It's the state overview of the New Testament. And then the letters that we see subsequent to Acts, the Pauline epistles, Paul's letters, Romans and Corinthians and Galatians, Ephesians, and all down through Philemon, those serve to me as windows into the goings on in the book of Acts. When you read through Acts, you'll see Paul go to Philippi and Thessalonica and Corinth and all the places. And then you can turn to those letters and you can get a greater detail about what's going on in those churches. And the same with the general epistles. They're kind of tucked into the narrative story of Acts. So as we approach the Bible and we think about the New Testament, the composition of it, the book of Acts serves as kind of the atlas of the roadmap that gives you the narrative arc from the Gospels to Revelation. And that's helpful for me as I think about the structure of my Bible. But far more importantly than what Acts does for the Bible in a narrative sense is what the book of Acts does in an ecclesiastical sense, in a sense that pertains to the church and to the theology of the church. So in an ecclesiastical sense, Acts serves as a telling of the great work of the Holy Spirit that links the two great works of Jesus. So an ecclesiastical church, as it pertains to the church, as it pertains to church life, as it pertains to theology and how we understand God moving and acting and working in his church, the book of Acts serves to tell the story of the great work of the Spirit, of the age of the Spirit, as that work links the two great works of Christ. Now, admittedly, theologically, for those of you who think about these things, I struggled with that sentence because Christ, according to John 1, was involved in creation. That's a great work. Christ is still at work right now as our high priest interceding on our behalf. Christ will rule forever. So I don't mean to reduce the life of Christ and the works of Christ to the death and resurrection and then his return. Those are just what I'm calling the two great works of Christ. And so in the church age that we are in, in the age of the spirit in which we find ourselves, we constantly look back to Christ on the cross, that great work, and we anticipate the next great work, the return of Christ. And the book of Acts serves as a descriptor of the age of the Holy Spirit, whose work links the two great works of Christ as the Spirit grows the church. So that's how we think about the book of Acts, and that's what it sets out to describe for us, is the work of the Spirit, the age of the Spirit and of the church, the thing that Jesus came to build. So if we want to know, okay, it's the age of the Spirit. Acts details the acts of the Spirit in this church age. Then what is the Holy Spirit supposed to do? What is its job? What can we expect of it? What are we looking for as we look at the works of the Spirit? The best answer to this question actually comes in John chapter 16. I know it might feel weird that the highlighted verse on a sermon on the book of Acts is from the Gospel of John, but I think after we read it together, it will make more sense to you. This verse, this passage, is Jesus talking. John 15, 16, and 17 is this long discourse from Jesus just to the disciples. It's some good, intimate, revelatory teaching. It's capped off at the end of it by the high priestly prayer when Jesus, it's the longest recorded prayer of Christ where he prays for them and the church to come. And he prays for you and for me if we have placed our faith in Jesus. And in the midst of that discourse, Jesus tells them, I know you're sad that I'm leaving, but it's actually better that I am. And here's what he says in John chapter 16, verses 6 through 11. He will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. It's a threefold purpose. Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. Concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you will see me no longer. Concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. So Jesus outlines to his disciples and to us this threefold purpose of the Holy Spirit. And what I want you to see this morning is what that means. What does it mean to convict the world of sin, to convict the world of righteousness, to convict the world of judgment? And then how does that show up in the book of Acts? And then not only in the book of Acts, but in our lives as well. So if we look at the first one, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of sin. And then he gives detail of this down in verse 8. And when he comes, he will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Verse 9, concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. This is the apex sin, to not believe in Christ. It's the one that can't be fixed. It's the thing that we have to do. And so when we ask what it means for the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, I think it means this. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin by helping people believe in Jesus. And I know I already taught you ecclesiastical. Now I'm throwing in salvific. That just means something that has the power to save. And so this repentance of who Jesus is, repenting of who you thought he was and accepting who he says he is, is the fundamental repentance to enter Christendom. It is the foundational repentance for anyone who would seek to become a Christian. It's why I articulate as often as I can that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. The fundamental repentance to become a Christian is to repent of who you thought Jesus was and accept who he says he is. And I believe this to be true because of how the Holy Spirit works in the book of Acts to bring this repentance about in the crowds of the people of Jerusalem. If you look in your Bible in Acts chapter 2, what you'll see is that Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's milled about for 40 days interacting with people and freaking people out, and then he ascends into heaven. And when he ascends into heaven, he tells the disciples to wait until the appointed time and they'll know what to do. So the disciples are assembled in this upper room and they don't know what to do. They're just looking at each other going, what do we do now? I don't know. He just said, wait. Wait on what? I don't know. We'll know when it happens. Meanwhile, Jerusalem is abuzz. They're trying to figure out what's going on with this guy and what these guys are doing in this upper room. So they're all milling around outside, thousands of people just waiting to see what the disciples are going to do. And one day at Pentecost, the flaming tongues descend down from heaven and light on the disciples and they are given the gift of tongues and they go out onto the balcony, onto the portico, and they preach to the crowds that are gathered there. Peter preaches in his own language and each person hears it in their language. That's the gift of tongues that we see in Acts. And they're all convicted and they all want to be saved. Peter goes out and he preaches the gospel. He tells them who Jesus is. And their response is, we believe, what do we do? And Peter's response, my Bible scholars already know, repent and be baptized. And this is something that I've chewed on for years. But repent of what? We're tempted to say, we often say, repent of your sins. Sure. All of them? Perfectly? This is the line of delineation for salvation? I should repent of everything I've ever done and am doing and I should repent perfectly and if I can't do that then I cannot enter the kingdom of heaven? Certainly perfect repentance of all the things isn't the line because there would be no one saved but Christ. Because of that I am convinced more and more that what Peter is telling them to do is repent of who you thought he was before you killed him and when you killed him. This crowd is the same crowd that was surrounding the courts of Pilate when Pilate was going, we don't need to kill this guy. He hasn't done anything. Why don't you just let me release him and kill Barabbas? And the crowd said, no, give us Barabbas and kill Jesus. And Pilate says, well, this isn't on me. And the crowd says, well, his blood is on our hands and on the hands of our children. It's that same crowd. I don't know if it's one for one, but a majority of them are in the same place. It's that same ethic, that same group of people. And so Peter is telling them, repent of who you thought Jesus was, that guy that you killed, and confess that he is the Lord, that he is who he says he is, and then be baptized. It is salvific repentance. It is foundational repentance for all people for all time. And the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of the sin of not seeing Jesus and accepting him for who he says he is. And he is still doing this work today. If you have a friend that you are trying to love towards the kingdom of heaven and share the gospel with, it is we work, we say words, we pray, we do. It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict and to open up eyes to see Jesus for who he says he is. And often, in our culture, in this day and age, in a nation that is very close to post-Christian, where everyone has heard the name of Jesus, and if they're not following Jesus, they probably have a reason, and here's the thing, it's probably a good one. In our culture now, the Holy Spirit has to do a lot of the same work that he had to do back in the church age, back in the age of Christ. What did he have to do to help them see that Jesus was who he says he was? He had to knock off the scales of religiosity and tradition and poor teaching and well-meaning teachers who were slightly askew and led them to an expectation of Christ that he never set for himself. And so the Holy Spirit is doing that same work today in our hearts and in our lives. I read a stat this week that over the last 20 years or 25 years, over 40 million Americans have stopped going to church. Why is that the case? Why are we living in this deconstructed culture? Well, part of it is on them. Part of it is they had great pastors and great teachers and great people in their life, and they just weren't listening. And that's part of the deal. But a larger part is because we've done church really badly, because we've depicted Jesus as who he isn't, because we put expectations on him that he didn't ask for. And so people are growing up in the church blind to who Jesus really is because the teaching in the church has been so bad. And the Holy Spirit has to convict us in our adulthood and help us knock the scales off of the Jesus that we were taught and help us see the Jesus that presents himself in scripture and in the hearts of people who love us well. So the Holy Spirit is still doing that work. And I'm not so ignorant as to believe that he's not doing that work for some of us in here today who have our doubts. I would just posit to you that maybe your doubts about who Jesus is aren't because of who he said he was, but because of what someone else told you that he was. And maybe the Holy Spirit can help open your eyes to see past those things. Then Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of righteousness. What does it mean to convict of righteousness? I think of it like this. Jesus says that he convicts of righteousness because he is going to be with the Father, and that's a little bit mysterious. And so for this one, I did, I did my research, which I know, I know it's a surprise for everyone, but I did my research and I think it's easiest to understand it like this. The Holy Spirit convicts those who believe to grow in Christ likeness. So once, once he's convicted you to believe and you see Jesus for who he is, then he convicts you to grow in Christ-likeness, to grow in your own righteousness. This is the process that the Bible and theologians call sanctification. The sanctification process is to become more like Christ in character. I grew up thinking of salvation as this moment, as this point of inflection in time where you were saved or you were not, and that is still partially true. But now as an adult, I think of salvation as a process from the moment God opens our eyes in faith to the moment he claims us in eternity and secures us in his kingdom forever. That is a process as we live the rest of our lives as Christians. And in that process, in our time of living, God sanctifies us. He convicts us of places where we're not righteous, where we're not Christ-like. And he shows us where we need to be more righteous and more like Christ. The Holy Spirit convicts. Now that we have opened our eyes and we believe in him, then the Holy Spirit says, good, that's step one. Now step two, I'm going to convict you of where you're not righteous so that you can become more righteous and more like Christ in character. We see him doing this to Peter in the book of Acts. We see the Holy Spirit acting this way in Acts. In Acts chapter 10, there's a conversation between Peter and Cornelius, and Peter receives a vision. Peter was a good Jew. He was a Jew's Jew. And in this time, there was several dietary restrictions that had religious connotations to the Jew. There was things he could and could not eat and people he could and could not eat with. And the Holy Spirit comes to him in a dream, gives him a vision, and basically says, hey, you can leave those rules behind. Knock it off with that. Eat with Cornelius. And Paul has to end up getting on to him. You eat with Gentiles when no one else is around, but when Jews are around, you won't do it because you're a hypocrite and you're scared of other people and you need to knock it off and quit being a sissy. It's this moment of conviction for Peter. And what I love about that moment of conviction, and it's so important for us in our moments of conviction, I think conviction can sometimes have a negative or judgmental connotation. That we feel that when we're convicted of a sin, that that's somehow God telling us, hey, you're not pleasing me right now. That's the spirit in your ear saying, you should stop that behavior because it's not pleasing to the Lord. It displeases God for you to do that. Over sabbatical, I got the fresh conviction of get off your phone and engage with your children, right? Well, the conviction doesn't come from the spirit because me being on my phone and reading the New York Times or my Kindle app or whatever it is, is sinful. And God wants me to stop doing that because it displeases him. And the holy watchdog is disappointed in me. He's convicted me of that because he's saying, hey, by doing that, you're not loving your kids as well as you could be. So love your kids. And this all makes sense when you consider the new commandment that Christ gave us. Christ left the disciples with one commandment. Go and love others as I have loved you. That's the new commandment I give to you. That's the commandment for all Christians and all of Christendom. Go love others as Christ has loved us. And so the conviction of the Holy Spirit towards Christ's likeness and righteousness isn't a conviction of displeasure before God. It's a conviction of, hey, when you do that, you're not loving other people well. When you engage in that behavior, you're not obeying the command to love others as I have loved you. Look at Peter. He says, stop, knock it off with the dietary restrictions. Why? Because those restrictions are prohibiting you from loving Cornelius in a way that he needs to be loved. He thinks he's unacceptable to God because you won't eat with him. So stop it, man. You can't love Cornelius well. This is what convicts me. This is an unconvincing statement. I know. I need to be healthier. I have young kids. I'm old. I did the math the other day. I'm 42. When my grandma was 42, I was two. I was John's age. My son, that's nuts. I'm going to be 70 when he has a career and meets someone. I would like to meet his kids. So I got to knock it off with the red meat. I got to knock it off with filet of fish, which is going to be a tough battle. Those are good. That's the Holy Spirit's conviction. Not because those things are displeasing before the Lord, but because if I want to love my children and the next generation well and be present for them in old age, then I need to do what I need to do now to be ready for that. Now, I don't know what the Lord's timing is, and I don't know what's going to happen between now and then, but I am convicted that I need to do my part to be healthy for my family, and I think that's a good conviction for us to have. Not because what we consume is displeasing before the Lord, but because what we consume doesn't enable us to love the people in our lives the way he's asked us to do that. So when we're convicted to righteousness, what we are convicted towards is Christ's likeness and loving people better. All sin that you have in your life, all unholiness that you have in your life. It's so abhorrent to God because it does displease him, because it does disqualify us, but more than that, it disables you from doing what he's asked you to do, which is to love other people well. So when he convicts towards righteousness, he's convicting us towards love. But the other important part of this is coming to grips with the abhorrence of our sin. And not just the abhorrence of it, but the weight of it, the volume of it. It's right and good for the Holy Spirit to hold up a mirror before us and for us to be crushed underneath the weight of our sin because of the place it brings us to. I came across this as I was doing a little bit of research this week. This is from Charles Spurgeon. Charles Spurgeon was the pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle in London in the late 1800s. He's called by many the prince of preachers. He may have been the greatest preacher that ever lived. He comes to remind them not only of God's loveliness, but of their own unloveliness, of their own enmity and hatred to this God of love, and consequently of their terrible sin and thus ill-using one so infinitely kind. Listen, the Holy Ghost does he want to convict us towards greater love for one another, he does want us to feel the weight of our sin and our utter inability to fight the battle against it alone. When the Holy Spirit has done his job and we have invited him into our hearts to do his work, he will so overwhelm us with the weight of our iniquity that we will cry out to the Father, I am helpless. It will be the cry of Paul in Romans 7, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? If you are here and you think you can just leave this room determined to be more righteous, then you will not be more righteous. And if by some miracle you succeed in breaking the chains of one sin in your life, you will usher in the new chain of pride at having done it on your own. Congratulations. The Holy Spirit pushes us towards love of others and helps us feel the weight of our sins that we might be reliant on him and his work rather than ourselves. That's how he convicts of righteousness. Now, how does he convict of judgment? What does it mean to convict us of judgment? Because the time of the evil one is coming. Let's sum it up like this. The Holy Spirit convicts concerning judgment by reminding us that good will triumph over evil. When Paul, we see this in Acts, when Paul goes to the Greek Areopagus, Mars Hill, he interacts with the philosophers there who like to talk about ideas. And a lot of you guys know the story. They say you have monuments to all the gods. I see here you have a monument to an unknown God. I know who that God is. That's actually Jesus. And he goes on to share the gospel with them. And then the end of that passage in Acts chapter 10, it says that they were convicted by the Spirit about who Jesus was and an assurance of the judgment to come. An assurance of where they would go when they died. We see the Holy Spirit doing that work in Acts. And the Holy Spirit does that work now. When we say that his job is to convict us of judgment, it means his job is to remind us that there is a time coming when that judgment will happen. And if you are not a believer, that judgment is terrifying and wrathful and awful, and you ought to be terrified of it. But when you are a Christian, we can look forward to that judgment with hopeful anticipation. That moment that I preach about often when Jesus comes crashing down out of the clouds in Revelation 19 and on his leg is righteous and true and he comes back to restore creation and to redeem us and to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. As Christians we cling to the hope of that moment. It's what gets us through death. It's what gets us through trials. It's what gets us through hard times is the belief in the arctic hope and the assurance that one day Jesus will do what he says he's going to do as the Holy Spirit seeks to link the great works of Christ, not just from his death and resurrection, but links the church age to the return of Christ when it's all said and done to tell us die for, when he comes back to get us. So the Holy Spirit is constantly, constantly, constantly pointing you to Christ. In sin, he points us to who Christ is to believe in him. In righteousness, he points us to the character of Christ to become more like him. And in judgment, he points us to the future of Christ in hope that we might cling to these things in life. That's the role of the Holy Spirit, to point you to Jesus, past, present, and future. To assure you, while you watch someone you know fade away, that you will see them again in glory and they will not look like this. To assure you, when you watch your children struggling through something you can't fix, that there's more to the story than this, it ends better. To assure you that the people you know that have been degenerated by illness or mental issues or whatever, that one day you will get to meet a healthy, loving version of them. The Holy Spirit points us back to the victory on the cross, to the victory of Easter, where all the crud that you deal with was broken and defeated. If only we can place our faith there. So that's the role of the book of Acts. That's the role of the Spirit in the book of Acts and now. And what's wonderful about Acts is it's the only book in the Bible that ends with an ellipsis. Acts isn't finished, and neither is the Spirit. The book of Acts isn't done being written. We're still in the book of Acts. Now, I'm not getting crazy. I'm not saying we're adding stuff to the Bible. All right, relax. But we're still into the church age that was ushered in at the ascension of Christ that awaits the return of Christ. We are still writing the story of the church and the Holy Spirit is still moving in the writing of that story. And he's still moving in you to convict you of your belief in Christ, of your Christ-like character and of your hope in what he will do one day. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the church and the gift that it is to us. Thank you for all the expressions of the church happening all over our community and all over the world today. God, I pray that each person in this service and the service next door and the service across the country and across the globe, that each person is somehow convicted by your spirit today, is somehow warmed by the hope of your spirit, by the promises of your spirit, is somehow moved closer to love through the spirit opening their eyes. God, I pray that the people who sit in the services today who don't yet believe you because they don't see you for who you are would have their eyes opened even just a little bit more today. We thank you for the church and what it is. We thank you for the church age. We thank you for your spirit, for your helper, who points us constantly to your son. And it's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you've been coming in July and never before that, and I'm new to you, they gave me the month off, and they were very, very kind to do that. So again, as I iterated in the Grace Vine this week, thank you so much for being the kind of church that allows me to take a month off and be with my family and be present with my kids. When I came back to work this week and I said bye to the kids, my daughter Lily was actually disappointed, which I feel is probably a good thing. I guess that means the month went well. It would probably be bad news if she was like, praise the Lord, he's leaving again. That may be how Jen felt, but Lily was sad. And just to set the expectations for this morning, I heard comments and things as I was wrapping up the month of June to take sabbatical and then some stuff during the month and even some stuff this morning about like, oh man, this is going to be a good sermon. You had six weeks to get this one ready. Like you used to come back and light our faces on fire. No, no. I didn't think about this sermon for one single second in the month of July. Not a single one. I didn't even know that I was preaching. This is the book of Acts this morning. I didn't even know I was preaching on the book of Acts until Tuesday when I decided that it would be the book of Acts. And then some stuff happened in my week. I ended up having to go back out of town. I wrote this sermon on my parents' dinner table at 10 o'clock on Thursday night. I'm essentially winging this, and I'm rusty. So let's just tamp down expectations of good and hope for brief, and then later I'll be good. If you really want to hear the sermon that I've been thinking about all month, then you should come on September the 10th. On September the 10th, we're going to roll out the plans that we have for the church. We're almost done. We're ready to show you. We're very excited. We're going to launch the campaign in earnest. It's going to be an update, and I've been really thinking a lot about what I want to share with you guys that Sunday morning about the future of grace and what we hope for. So that's the one that I hope is really good. This is going to be fine. With that being said, you can open your Bibles not to the book of Acts, but to John chapter 16. We will get there in a second. As I think about the book of Acts and what I want you to do with Acts, so we're going to be focused on just kind of an overview of Acts. What is it? How do we use it? Why is it there? What can it teach us? One of the things to know contextually about Acts is that it's essentially the second half of the book of Luke. Luke wrote the gospel of Luke and then he wrote the Acts of the Spirit or the Acts of the Apostles, depending on which strand of the church you come from. But they're both written to a guy named Theophilus. So they're basically part one and part two of the accounts of Christ and then the accounts of the Spirit. And when I think of the book of Acts, I think of it this way as it fits into the New Testament. From a narrative perspective, the book of Acts is an atlas. I think we have that in your notes. Yes, in a narrative sense, Acts serves as an atlas. Now, here's what I mean. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember this, to know what this is. I see you don't know. You know lots of it. You have no clue. You never touched this in your life. Then here's what you don't know. If you're too young to know what this is, I have been entrusted with a church, the leadership of a church, with children, young lives to mold, a marriage, various stations of responsibility throughout my life. I have never felt a deeper sense of responsibility than when I was in the back seat of our 1985 Maxima with automatic seat belts and my dad would tell me to open up the Atlas and tell me where I need to turn next. That is fully locked in. I've never felt a greater sense of responsibility because you can't just let any of the kids do that. You let my sister do it, we're going to be in Kansas. It's going to be a disaster. I have to do it. And the family is relying on me. So atlases hold a great place in my heart. And when you look at an atlas, when I open this to North Carolina, the way that an atlas works, I know you guys can't see it, but you can see enough for this to work. When you look at North Carolina, it's just the whole state, right? It's an overview of the whole state. And then what you get is you get these little windows where different cities are blown up. So like Charlotte is there. Charlotte's there. But then this is Charlotte for when you get in the city, you need more detail. And then Raleigh gets its own on the next page there. This is back before 540. I was actually looking at it this morning. Yeah, this is 1995. I had to email some people who are not in the millennial demographic to get my hands on one of these. But that's how atlases work, right? There's an overview of the whole state, and then where more detail is required, there's these little windows, these little blow-ups that accompany it to give you more detail for certain parts of the map. And that's how I think about the book of Acts and how it interacts with the New Testament. When you think about the story, the narrative arc of the New Testament, from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospel telling the story of Christ, to the end of the book, Revelation, and you think about chronologically, how does that flow? Acts is, from a narrative perspective, the atlas. It gives the overview. It's the state overview of the New Testament. And then the letters that we see subsequent to Acts, the Pauline epistles, Paul's letters, Romans and Corinthians and Galatians, Ephesians, and all down through Philemon, those serve to me as windows into the goings on in the book of Acts. When you read through Acts, you'll see Paul go to Philippi and Thessalonica and Corinth and all the places. And then you can turn to those letters and you can get a greater detail about what's going on in those churches. And the same with the general epistles. They're kind of tucked into the narrative story of Acts. So as we approach the Bible and we think about the New Testament, the composition of it, the book of Acts serves as kind of the atlas of the roadmap that gives you the narrative arc from the Gospels to Revelation. And that's helpful for me as I think about the structure of my Bible. But far more importantly than what Acts does for the Bible in a narrative sense is what the book of Acts does in an ecclesiastical sense, in a sense that pertains to the church and to the theology of the church. So in an ecclesiastical sense, Acts serves as a telling of the great work of the Holy Spirit that links the two great works of Jesus. So an ecclesiastical church, as it pertains to the church, as it pertains to church life, as it pertains to theology and how we understand God moving and acting and working in his church, the book of Acts serves to tell the story of the great work of the Spirit, of the age of the Spirit, as that work links the two great works of Christ. Now, admittedly, theologically, for those of you who think about these things, I struggled with that sentence because Christ, according to John 1, was involved in creation. That's a great work. Christ is still at work right now as our high priest interceding on our behalf. Christ will rule forever. So I don't mean to reduce the life of Christ and the works of Christ to the death and resurrection and then his return. Those are just what I'm calling the two great works of Christ. And so in the church age that we are in, in the age of the spirit in which we find ourselves, we constantly look back to Christ on the cross, that great work, and we anticipate the next great work, the return of Christ. And the book of Acts serves as a descriptor of the age of the Holy Spirit, whose work links the two great works of Christ as the Spirit grows the church. So that's how we think about the book of Acts, and that's what it sets out to describe for us, is the work of the Spirit, the age of the Spirit and of the church, the thing that Jesus came to build. So if we want to know, okay, it's the age of the Spirit. Acts details the acts of the Spirit in this church age. Then what is the Holy Spirit supposed to do? What is its job? What can we expect of it? What are we looking for as we look at the works of the Spirit? The best answer to this question actually comes in John chapter 16. I know it might feel weird that the highlighted verse on a sermon on the book of Acts is from the Gospel of John, but I think after we read it together, it will make more sense to you. This verse, this passage, is Jesus talking. John 15, 16, and 17 is this long discourse from Jesus just to the disciples. It's some good, intimate, revelatory teaching. It's capped off at the end of it by the high priestly prayer when Jesus, it's the longest recorded prayer of Christ where he prays for them and the church to come. And he prays for you and for me if we have placed our faith in Jesus. And in the midst of that discourse, Jesus tells them, I know you're sad that I'm leaving, but it's actually better that I am. And here's what he says in John chapter 16, verses 6 through 11. He will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. It's a threefold purpose. Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. Concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you will see me no longer. Concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. So Jesus outlines to his disciples and to us this threefold purpose of the Holy Spirit. And what I want you to see this morning is what that means. What does it mean to convict the world of sin, to convict the world of righteousness, to convict the world of judgment? And then how does that show up in the book of Acts? And then not only in the book of Acts, but in our lives as well. So if we look at the first one, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of sin. And then he gives detail of this down in verse 8. And when he comes, he will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Verse 9, concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. This is the apex sin, to not believe in Christ. It's the one that can't be fixed. It's the thing that we have to do. And so when we ask what it means for the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, I think it means this. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin by helping people believe in Jesus. And I know I already taught you ecclesiastical. Now I'm throwing in salvific. That just means something that has the power to save. And so this repentance of who Jesus is, repenting of who you thought he was and accepting who he says he is, is the fundamental repentance to enter Christendom. It is the foundational repentance for anyone who would seek to become a Christian. It's why I articulate as often as I can that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. The fundamental repentance to become a Christian is to repent of who you thought Jesus was and accept who he says he is. And I believe this to be true because of how the Holy Spirit works in the book of Acts to bring this repentance about in the crowds of the people of Jerusalem. If you look in your Bible in Acts chapter 2, what you'll see is that Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's milled about for 40 days interacting with people and freaking people out, and then he ascends into heaven. And when he ascends into heaven, he tells the disciples to wait until the appointed time and they'll know what to do. So the disciples are assembled in this upper room and they don't know what to do. They're just looking at each other going, what do we do now? I don't know. He just said, wait. Wait on what? I don't know. We'll know when it happens. Meanwhile, Jerusalem is abuzz. They're trying to figure out what's going on with this guy and what these guys are doing in this upper room. So they're all milling around outside, thousands of people just waiting to see what the disciples are going to do. And one day at Pentecost, the flaming tongues descend down from heaven and light on the disciples and they are given the gift of tongues and they go out onto the balcony, onto the portico, and they preach to the crowds that are gathered there. Peter preaches in his own language and each person hears it in their language. That's the gift of tongues that we see in Acts. And they're all convicted and they all want to be saved. Peter goes out and he preaches the gospel. He tells them who Jesus is. And their response is, we believe, what do we do? And Peter's response, my Bible scholars already know, repent and be baptized. And this is something that I've chewed on for years. But repent of what? We're tempted to say, we often say, repent of your sins. Sure. All of them? Perfectly? This is the line of delineation for salvation? I should repent of everything I've ever done and am doing and I should repent perfectly and if I can't do that then I cannot enter the kingdom of heaven? Certainly perfect repentance of all the things isn't the line because there would be no one saved but Christ. Because of that I am convinced more and more that what Peter is telling them to do is repent of who you thought he was before you killed him and when you killed him. This crowd is the same crowd that was surrounding the courts of Pilate when Pilate was going, we don't need to kill this guy. He hasn't done anything. Why don't you just let me release him and kill Barabbas? And the crowd said, no, give us Barabbas and kill Jesus. And Pilate says, well, this isn't on me. And the crowd says, well, his blood is on our hands and on the hands of our children. It's that same crowd. I don't know if it's one for one, but a majority of them are in the same place. It's that same ethic, that same group of people. And so Peter is telling them, repent of who you thought Jesus was, that guy that you killed, and confess that he is the Lord, that he is who he says he is, and then be baptized. It is salvific repentance. It is foundational repentance for all people for all time. And the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of the sin of not seeing Jesus and accepting him for who he says he is. And he is still doing this work today. If you have a friend that you are trying to love towards the kingdom of heaven and share the gospel with, it is we work, we say words, we pray, we do. It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict and to open up eyes to see Jesus for who he says he is. And often, in our culture, in this day and age, in a nation that is very close to post-Christian, where everyone has heard the name of Jesus, and if they're not following Jesus, they probably have a reason, and here's the thing, it's probably a good one. In our culture now, the Holy Spirit has to do a lot of the same work that he had to do back in the church age, back in the age of Christ. What did he have to do to help them see that Jesus was who he says he was? He had to knock off the scales of religiosity and tradition and poor teaching and well-meaning teachers who were slightly askew and led them to an expectation of Christ that he never set for himself. And so the Holy Spirit is doing that same work today in our hearts and in our lives. I read a stat this week that over the last 20 years or 25 years, over 40 million Americans have stopped going to church. Why is that the case? Why are we living in this deconstructed culture? Well, part of it is on them. Part of it is they had great pastors and great teachers and great people in their life, and they just weren't listening. And that's part of the deal. But a larger part is because we've done church really badly, because we've depicted Jesus as who he isn't, because we put expectations on him that he didn't ask for. And so people are growing up in the church blind to who Jesus really is because the teaching in the church has been so bad. And the Holy Spirit has to convict us in our adulthood and help us knock the scales off of the Jesus that we were taught and help us see the Jesus that presents himself in scripture and in the hearts of people who love us well. So the Holy Spirit is still doing that work. And I'm not so ignorant as to believe that he's not doing that work for some of us in here today who have our doubts. I would just posit to you that maybe your doubts about who Jesus is aren't because of who he said he was, but because of what someone else told you that he was. And maybe the Holy Spirit can help open your eyes to see past those things. Then Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of righteousness. What does it mean to convict of righteousness? I think of it like this. Jesus says that he convicts of righteousness because he is going to be with the Father, and that's a little bit mysterious. And so for this one, I did, I did my research, which I know, I know it's a surprise for everyone, but I did my research and I think it's easiest to understand it like this. The Holy Spirit convicts those who believe to grow in Christ likeness. So once, once he's convicted you to believe and you see Jesus for who he is, then he convicts you to grow in Christ-likeness, to grow in your own righteousness. This is the process that the Bible and theologians call sanctification. The sanctification process is to become more like Christ in character. I grew up thinking of salvation as this moment, as this point of inflection in time where you were saved or you were not, and that is still partially true. But now as an adult, I think of salvation as a process from the moment God opens our eyes in faith to the moment he claims us in eternity and secures us in his kingdom forever. That is a process as we live the rest of our lives as Christians. And in that process, in our time of living, God sanctifies us. He convicts us of places where we're not righteous, where we're not Christ-like. And he shows us where we need to be more righteous and more like Christ. The Holy Spirit convicts. Now that we have opened our eyes and we believe in him, then the Holy Spirit says, good, that's step one. Now step two, I'm going to convict you of where you're not righteous so that you can become more righteous and more like Christ in character. We see him doing this to Peter in the book of Acts. We see the Holy Spirit acting this way in Acts. In Acts chapter 10, there's a conversation between Peter and Cornelius, and Peter receives a vision. Peter was a good Jew. He was a Jew's Jew. And in this time, there was several dietary restrictions that had religious connotations to the Jew. There was things he could and could not eat and people he could and could not eat with. And the Holy Spirit comes to him in a dream, gives him a vision, and basically says, hey, you can leave those rules behind. Knock it off with that. Eat with Cornelius. And Paul has to end up getting on to him. You eat with Gentiles when no one else is around, but when Jews are around, you won't do it because you're a hypocrite and you're scared of other people and you need to knock it off and quit being a sissy. It's this moment of conviction for Peter. And what I love about that moment of conviction, and it's so important for us in our moments of conviction, I think conviction can sometimes have a negative or judgmental connotation. That we feel that when we're convicted of a sin, that that's somehow God telling us, hey, you're not pleasing me right now. That's the spirit in your ear saying, you should stop that behavior because it's not pleasing to the Lord. It displeases God for you to do that. Over sabbatical, I got the fresh conviction of get off your phone and engage with your children, right? Well, the conviction doesn't come from the spirit because me being on my phone and reading the New York Times or my Kindle app or whatever it is, is sinful. And God wants me to stop doing that because it displeases him. And the holy watchdog is disappointed in me. He's convicted me of that because he's saying, hey, by doing that, you're not loving your kids as well as you could be. So love your kids. And this all makes sense when you consider the new commandment that Christ gave us. Christ left the disciples with one commandment. Go and love others as I have loved you. That's the new commandment I give to you. That's the commandment for all Christians and all of Christendom. Go love others as Christ has loved us. And so the conviction of the Holy Spirit towards Christ's likeness and righteousness isn't a conviction of displeasure before God. It's a conviction of, hey, when you do that, you're not loving other people well. When you engage in that behavior, you're not obeying the command to love others as I have loved you. Look at Peter. He says, stop, knock it off with the dietary restrictions. Why? Because those restrictions are prohibiting you from loving Cornelius in a way that he needs to be loved. He thinks he's unacceptable to God because you won't eat with him. So stop it, man. You can't love Cornelius well. This is what convicts me. This is an unconvincing statement. I know. I need to be healthier. I have young kids. I'm old. I did the math the other day. I'm 42. When my grandma was 42, I was two. I was John's age. My son, that's nuts. I'm going to be 70 when he has a career and meets someone. I would like to meet his kids. So I got to knock it off with the red meat. I got to knock it off with filet of fish, which is going to be a tough battle. Those are good. That's the Holy Spirit's conviction. Not because those things are displeasing before the Lord, but because if I want to love my children and the next generation well and be present for them in old age, then I need to do what I need to do now to be ready for that. Now, I don't know what the Lord's timing is, and I don't know what's going to happen between now and then, but I am convicted that I need to do my part to be healthy for my family, and I think that's a good conviction for us to have. Not because what we consume is displeasing before the Lord, but because what we consume doesn't enable us to love the people in our lives the way he's asked us to do that. So when we're convicted to righteousness, what we are convicted towards is Christ's likeness and loving people better. All sin that you have in your life, all unholiness that you have in your life. It's so abhorrent to God because it does displease him, because it does disqualify us, but more than that, it disables you from doing what he's asked you to do, which is to love other people well. So when he convicts towards righteousness, he's convicting us towards love. But the other important part of this is coming to grips with the abhorrence of our sin. And not just the abhorrence of it, but the weight of it, the volume of it. It's right and good for the Holy Spirit to hold up a mirror before us and for us to be crushed underneath the weight of our sin because of the place it brings us to. I came across this as I was doing a little bit of research this week. This is from Charles Spurgeon. Charles Spurgeon was the pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle in London in the late 1800s. He's called by many the prince of preachers. He may have been the greatest preacher that ever lived. He comes to remind them not only of God's loveliness, but of their own unloveliness, of their own enmity and hatred to this God of love, and consequently of their terrible sin and thus ill-using one so infinitely kind. Listen, the Holy Ghost does he want to convict us towards greater love for one another, he does want us to feel the weight of our sin and our utter inability to fight the battle against it alone. When the Holy Spirit has done his job and we have invited him into our hearts to do his work, he will so overwhelm us with the weight of our iniquity that we will cry out to the Father, I am helpless. It will be the cry of Paul in Romans 7, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? If you are here and you think you can just leave this room determined to be more righteous, then you will not be more righteous. And if by some miracle you succeed in breaking the chains of one sin in your life, you will usher in the new chain of pride at having done it on your own. Congratulations. The Holy Spirit pushes us towards love of others and helps us feel the weight of our sins that we might be reliant on him and his work rather than ourselves. That's how he convicts of righteousness. Now, how does he convict of judgment? What does it mean to convict us of judgment? Because the time of the evil one is coming. Let's sum it up like this. The Holy Spirit convicts concerning judgment by reminding us that good will triumph over evil. When Paul, we see this in Acts, when Paul goes to the Greek Areopagus, Mars Hill, he interacts with the philosophers there who like to talk about ideas. And a lot of you guys know the story. They say you have monuments to all the gods. I see here you have a monument to an unknown God. I know who that God is. That's actually Jesus. And he goes on to share the gospel with them. And then the end of that passage in Acts chapter 10, it says that they were convicted by the Spirit about who Jesus was and an assurance of the judgment to come. An assurance of where they would go when they died. We see the Holy Spirit doing that work in Acts. And the Holy Spirit does that work now. When we say that his job is to convict us of judgment, it means his job is to remind us that there is a time coming when that judgment will happen. And if you are not a believer, that judgment is terrifying and wrathful and awful, and you ought to be terrified of it. But when you are a Christian, we can look forward to that judgment with hopeful anticipation. That moment that I preach about often when Jesus comes crashing down out of the clouds in Revelation 19 and on his leg is righteous and true and he comes back to restore creation and to redeem us and to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. As Christians we cling to the hope of that moment. It's what gets us through death. It's what gets us through trials. It's what gets us through hard times is the belief in the arctic hope and the assurance that one day Jesus will do what he says he's going to do as the Holy Spirit seeks to link the great works of Christ, not just from his death and resurrection, but links the church age to the return of Christ when it's all said and done to tell us die for, when he comes back to get us. So the Holy Spirit is constantly, constantly, constantly pointing you to Christ. In sin, he points us to who Christ is to believe in him. In righteousness, he points us to the character of Christ to become more like him. And in judgment, he points us to the future of Christ in hope that we might cling to these things in life. That's the role of the Holy Spirit, to point you to Jesus, past, present, and future. To assure you, while you watch someone you know fade away, that you will see them again in glory and they will not look like this. To assure you, when you watch your children struggling through something you can't fix, that there's more to the story than this, it ends better. To assure you that the people you know that have been degenerated by illness or mental issues or whatever, that one day you will get to meet a healthy, loving version of them. The Holy Spirit points us back to the victory on the cross, to the victory of Easter, where all the crud that you deal with was broken and defeated. If only we can place our faith there. So that's the role of the book of Acts. That's the role of the Spirit in the book of Acts and now. And what's wonderful about Acts is it's the only book in the Bible that ends with an ellipsis. Acts isn't finished, and neither is the Spirit. The book of Acts isn't done being written. We're still in the book of Acts. Now, I'm not getting crazy. I'm not saying we're adding stuff to the Bible. All right, relax. But we're still into the church age that was ushered in at the ascension of Christ that awaits the return of Christ. We are still writing the story of the church and the Holy Spirit is still moving in the writing of that story. And he's still moving in you to convict you of your belief in Christ, of your Christ-like character and of your hope in what he will do one day. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the church and the gift that it is to us. Thank you for all the expressions of the church happening all over our community and all over the world today. God, I pray that each person in this service and the service next door and the service across the country and across the globe, that each person is somehow convicted by your spirit today, is somehow warmed by the hope of your spirit, by the promises of your spirit, is somehow moved closer to love through the spirit opening their eyes. God, I pray that the people who sit in the services today who don't yet believe you because they don't see you for who you are would have their eyes opened even just a little bit more today. We thank you for the church and what it is. We thank you for the church age. We thank you for your spirit, for your helper, who points us constantly to your son. And it's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you've been coming in July and never before that, and I'm new to you, they gave me the month off, and they were very, very kind to do that. So again, as I iterated in the Grace Vine this week, thank you so much for being the kind of church that allows me to take a month off and be with my family and be present with my kids. When I came back to work this week and I said bye to the kids, my daughter Lily was actually disappointed, which I feel is probably a good thing. I guess that means the month went well. It would probably be bad news if she was like, praise the Lord, he's leaving again. That may be how Jen felt, but Lily was sad. And just to set the expectations for this morning, I heard comments and things as I was wrapping up the month of June to take sabbatical and then some stuff during the month and even some stuff this morning about like, oh man, this is going to be a good sermon. You had six weeks to get this one ready. Like you used to come back and light our faces on fire. No, no. I didn't think about this sermon for one single second in the month of July. Not a single one. I didn't even know that I was preaching. This is the book of Acts this morning. I didn't even know I was preaching on the book of Acts until Tuesday when I decided that it would be the book of Acts. And then some stuff happened in my week. I ended up having to go back out of town. I wrote this sermon on my parents' dinner table at 10 o'clock on Thursday night. I'm essentially winging this, and I'm rusty. So let's just tamp down expectations of good and hope for brief, and then later I'll be good. If you really want to hear the sermon that I've been thinking about all month, then you should come on September the 10th. On September the 10th, we're going to roll out the plans that we have for the church. We're almost done. We're ready to show you. We're very excited. We're going to launch the campaign in earnest. It's going to be an update, and I've been really thinking a lot about what I want to share with you guys that Sunday morning about the future of grace and what we hope for. So that's the one that I hope is really good. This is going to be fine. With that being said, you can open your Bibles not to the book of Acts, but to John chapter 16. We will get there in a second. As I think about the book of Acts and what I want you to do with Acts, so we're going to be focused on just kind of an overview of Acts. What is it? How do we use it? Why is it there? What can it teach us? One of the things to know contextually about Acts is that it's essentially the second half of the book of Luke. Luke wrote the gospel of Luke and then he wrote the Acts of the Spirit or the Acts of the Apostles, depending on which strand of the church you come from. But they're both written to a guy named Theophilus. So they're basically part one and part two of the accounts of Christ and then the accounts of the Spirit. And when I think of the book of Acts, I think of it this way as it fits into the New Testament. From a narrative perspective, the book of Acts is an atlas. I think we have that in your notes. Yes, in a narrative sense, Acts serves as an atlas. Now, here's what I mean. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember this, to know what this is. I see you don't know. You know lots of it. You have no clue. You never touched this in your life. Then here's what you don't know. If you're too young to know what this is, I have been entrusted with a church, the leadership of a church, with children, young lives to mold, a marriage, various stations of responsibility throughout my life. I have never felt a deeper sense of responsibility than when I was in the back seat of our 1985 Maxima with automatic seat belts and my dad would tell me to open up the Atlas and tell me where I need to turn next. That is fully locked in. I've never felt a greater sense of responsibility because you can't just let any of the kids do that. You let my sister do it, we're going to be in Kansas. It's going to be a disaster. I have to do it. And the family is relying on me. So atlases hold a great place in my heart. And when you look at an atlas, when I open this to North Carolina, the way that an atlas works, I know you guys can't see it, but you can see enough for this to work. When you look at North Carolina, it's just the whole state, right? It's an overview of the whole state. And then what you get is you get these little windows where different cities are blown up. So like Charlotte is there. Charlotte's there. But then this is Charlotte for when you get in the city, you need more detail. And then Raleigh gets its own on the next page there. This is back before 540. I was actually looking at it this morning. Yeah, this is 1995. I had to email some people who are not in the millennial demographic to get my hands on one of these. But that's how atlases work, right? There's an overview of the whole state, and then where more detail is required, there's these little windows, these little blow-ups that accompany it to give you more detail for certain parts of the map. And that's how I think about the book of Acts and how it interacts with the New Testament. When you think about the story, the narrative arc of the New Testament, from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospel telling the story of Christ, to the end of the book, Revelation, and you think about chronologically, how does that flow? Acts is, from a narrative perspective, the atlas. It gives the overview. It's the state overview of the New Testament. And then the letters that we see subsequent to Acts, the Pauline epistles, Paul's letters, Romans and Corinthians and Galatians, Ephesians, and all down through Philemon, those serve to me as windows into the goings on in the book of Acts. When you read through Acts, you'll see Paul go to Philippi and Thessalonica and Corinth and all the places. And then you can turn to those letters and you can get a greater detail about what's going on in those churches. And the same with the general epistles. They're kind of tucked into the narrative story of Acts. So as we approach the Bible and we think about the New Testament, the composition of it, the book of Acts serves as kind of the atlas of the roadmap that gives you the narrative arc from the Gospels to Revelation. And that's helpful for me as I think about the structure of my Bible. But far more importantly than what Acts does for the Bible in a narrative sense is what the book of Acts does in an ecclesiastical sense, in a sense that pertains to the church and to the theology of the church. So in an ecclesiastical sense, Acts serves as a telling of the great work of the Holy Spirit that links the two great works of Jesus. So an ecclesiastical church, as it pertains to the church, as it pertains to church life, as it pertains to theology and how we understand God moving and acting and working in his church, the book of Acts serves to tell the story of the great work of the Spirit, of the age of the Spirit, as that work links the two great works of Christ. Now, admittedly, theologically, for those of you who think about these things, I struggled with that sentence because Christ, according to John 1, was involved in creation. That's a great work. Christ is still at work right now as our high priest interceding on our behalf. Christ will rule forever. So I don't mean to reduce the life of Christ and the works of Christ to the death and resurrection and then his return. Those are just what I'm calling the two great works of Christ. And so in the church age that we are in, in the age of the spirit in which we find ourselves, we constantly look back to Christ on the cross, that great work, and we anticipate the next great work, the return of Christ. And the book of Acts serves as a descriptor of the age of the Holy Spirit, whose work links the two great works of Christ as the Spirit grows the church. So that's how we think about the book of Acts, and that's what it sets out to describe for us, is the work of the Spirit, the age of the Spirit and of the church, the thing that Jesus came to build. So if we want to know, okay, it's the age of the Spirit. Acts details the acts of the Spirit in this church age. Then what is the Holy Spirit supposed to do? What is its job? What can we expect of it? What are we looking for as we look at the works of the Spirit? The best answer to this question actually comes in John chapter 16. I know it might feel weird that the highlighted verse on a sermon on the book of Acts is from the Gospel of John, but I think after we read it together, it will make more sense to you. This verse, this passage, is Jesus talking. John 15, 16, and 17 is this long discourse from Jesus just to the disciples. It's some good, intimate, revelatory teaching. It's capped off at the end of it by the high priestly prayer when Jesus, it's the longest recorded prayer of Christ where he prays for them and the church to come. And he prays for you and for me if we have placed our faith in Jesus. And in the midst of that discourse, Jesus tells them, I know you're sad that I'm leaving, but it's actually better that I am. And here's what he says in John chapter 16, verses 6 through 11. He will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. It's a threefold purpose. Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. Concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you will see me no longer. Concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. So Jesus outlines to his disciples and to us this threefold purpose of the Holy Spirit. And what I want you to see this morning is what that means. What does it mean to convict the world of sin, to convict the world of righteousness, to convict the world of judgment? And then how does that show up in the book of Acts? And then not only in the book of Acts, but in our lives as well. So if we look at the first one, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of sin. And then he gives detail of this down in verse 8. And when he comes, he will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Verse 9, concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. This is the apex sin, to not believe in Christ. It's the one that can't be fixed. It's the thing that we have to do. And so when we ask what it means for the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, I think it means this. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin by helping people believe in Jesus. And I know I already taught you ecclesiastical. Now I'm throwing in salvific. That just means something that has the power to save. And so this repentance of who Jesus is, repenting of who you thought he was and accepting who he says he is, is the fundamental repentance to enter Christendom. It is the foundational repentance for anyone who would seek to become a Christian. It's why I articulate as often as I can that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. The fundamental repentance to become a Christian is to repent of who you thought Jesus was and accept who he says he is. And I believe this to be true because of how the Holy Spirit works in the book of Acts to bring this repentance about in the crowds of the people of Jerusalem. If you look in your Bible in Acts chapter 2, what you'll see is that Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's milled about for 40 days interacting with people and freaking people out, and then he ascends into heaven. And when he ascends into heaven, he tells the disciples to wait until the appointed time and they'll know what to do. So the disciples are assembled in this upper room and they don't know what to do. They're just looking at each other going, what do we do now? I don't know. He just said, wait. Wait on what? I don't know. We'll know when it happens. Meanwhile, Jerusalem is abuzz. They're trying to figure out what's going on with this guy and what these guys are doing in this upper room. So they're all milling around outside, thousands of people just waiting to see what the disciples are going to do. And one day at Pentecost, the flaming tongues descend down from heaven and light on the disciples and they are given the gift of tongues and they go out onto the balcony, onto the portico, and they preach to the crowds that are gathered there. Peter preaches in his own language and each person hears it in their language. That's the gift of tongues that we see in Acts. And they're all convicted and they all want to be saved. Peter goes out and he preaches the gospel. He tells them who Jesus is. And their response is, we believe, what do we do? And Peter's response, my Bible scholars already know, repent and be baptized. And this is something that I've chewed on for years. But repent of what? We're tempted to say, we often say, repent of your sins. Sure. All of them? Perfectly? This is the line of delineation for salvation? I should repent of everything I've ever done and am doing and I should repent perfectly and if I can't do that then I cannot enter the kingdom of heaven? Certainly perfect repentance of all the things isn't the line because there would be no one saved but Christ. Because of that I am convinced more and more that what Peter is telling them to do is repent of who you thought he was before you killed him and when you killed him. This crowd is the same crowd that was surrounding the courts of Pilate when Pilate was going, we don't need to kill this guy. He hasn't done anything. Why don't you just let me release him and kill Barabbas? And the crowd said, no, give us Barabbas and kill Jesus. And Pilate says, well, this isn't on me. And the crowd says, well, his blood is on our hands and on the hands of our children. It's that same crowd. I don't know if it's one for one, but a majority of them are in the same place. It's that same ethic, that same group of people. And so Peter is telling them, repent of who you thought Jesus was, that guy that you killed, and confess that he is the Lord, that he is who he says he is, and then be baptized. It is salvific repentance. It is foundational repentance for all people for all time. And the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of the sin of not seeing Jesus and accepting him for who he says he is. And he is still doing this work today. If you have a friend that you are trying to love towards the kingdom of heaven and share the gospel with, it is we work, we say words, we pray, we do. It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict and to open up eyes to see Jesus for who he says he is. And often, in our culture, in this day and age, in a nation that is very close to post-Christian, where everyone has heard the name of Jesus, and if they're not following Jesus, they probably have a reason, and here's the thing, it's probably a good one. In our culture now, the Holy Spirit has to do a lot of the same work that he had to do back in the church age, back in the age of Christ. What did he have to do to help them see that Jesus was who he says he was? He had to knock off the scales of religiosity and tradition and poor teaching and well-meaning teachers who were slightly askew and led them to an expectation of Christ that he never set for himself. And so the Holy Spirit is doing that same work today in our hearts and in our lives. I read a stat this week that over the last 20 years or 25 years, over 40 million Americans have stopped going to church. Why is that the case? Why are we living in this deconstructed culture? Well, part of it is on them. Part of it is they had great pastors and great teachers and great people in their life, and they just weren't listening. And that's part of the deal. But a larger part is because we've done church really badly, because we've depicted Jesus as who he isn't, because we put expectations on him that he didn't ask for. And so people are growing up in the church blind to who Jesus really is because the teaching in the church has been so bad. And the Holy Spirit has to convict us in our adulthood and help us knock the scales off of the Jesus that we were taught and help us see the Jesus that presents himself in scripture and in the hearts of people who love us well. So the Holy Spirit is still doing that work. And I'm not so ignorant as to believe that he's not doing that work for some of us in here today who have our doubts. I would just posit to you that maybe your doubts about who Jesus is aren't because of who he said he was, but because of what someone else told you that he was. And maybe the Holy Spirit can help open your eyes to see past those things. Then Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of righteousness. What does it mean to convict of righteousness? I think of it like this. Jesus says that he convicts of righteousness because he is going to be with the Father, and that's a little bit mysterious. And so for this one, I did, I did my research, which I know, I know it's a surprise for everyone, but I did my research and I think it's easiest to understand it like this. The Holy Spirit convicts those who believe to grow in Christ likeness. So once, once he's convicted you to believe and you see Jesus for who he is, then he convicts you to grow in Christ-likeness, to grow in your own righteousness. This is the process that the Bible and theologians call sanctification. The sanctification process is to become more like Christ in character. I grew up thinking of salvation as this moment, as this point of inflection in time where you were saved or you were not, and that is still partially true. But now as an adult, I think of salvation as a process from the moment God opens our eyes in faith to the moment he claims us in eternity and secures us in his kingdom forever. That is a process as we live the rest of our lives as Christians. And in that process, in our time of living, God sanctifies us. He convicts us of places where we're not righteous, where we're not Christ-like. And he shows us where we need to be more righteous and more like Christ. The Holy Spirit convicts. Now that we have opened our eyes and we believe in him, then the Holy Spirit says, good, that's step one. Now step two, I'm going to convict you of where you're not righteous so that you can become more righteous and more like Christ in character. We see him doing this to Peter in the book of Acts. We see the Holy Spirit acting this way in Acts. In Acts chapter 10, there's a conversation between Peter and Cornelius, and Peter receives a vision. Peter was a good Jew. He was a Jew's Jew. And in this time, there was several dietary restrictions that had religious connotations to the Jew. There was things he could and could not eat and people he could and could not eat with. And the Holy Spirit comes to him in a dream, gives him a vision, and basically says, hey, you can leave those rules behind. Knock it off with that. Eat with Cornelius. And Paul has to end up getting on to him. You eat with Gentiles when no one else is around, but when Jews are around, you won't do it because you're a hypocrite and you're scared of other people and you need to knock it off and quit being a sissy. It's this moment of conviction for Peter. And what I love about that moment of conviction, and it's so important for us in our moments of conviction, I think conviction can sometimes have a negative or judgmental connotation. That we feel that when we're convicted of a sin, that that's somehow God telling us, hey, you're not pleasing me right now. That's the spirit in your ear saying, you should stop that behavior because it's not pleasing to the Lord. It displeases God for you to do that. Over sabbatical, I got the fresh conviction of get off your phone and engage with your children, right? Well, the conviction doesn't come from the spirit because me being on my phone and reading the New York Times or my Kindle app or whatever it is, is sinful. And God wants me to stop doing that because it displeases him. And the holy watchdog is disappointed in me. He's convicted me of that because he's saying, hey, by doing that, you're not loving your kids as well as you could be. So love your kids. And this all makes sense when you consider the new commandment that Christ gave us. Christ left the disciples with one commandment. Go and love others as I have loved you. That's the new commandment I give to you. That's the commandment for all Christians and all of Christendom. Go love others as Christ has loved us. And so the conviction of the Holy Spirit towards Christ's likeness and righteousness isn't a conviction of displeasure before God. It's a conviction of, hey, when you do that, you're not loving other people well. When you engage in that behavior, you're not obeying the command to love others as I have loved you. Look at Peter. He says, stop, knock it off with the dietary restrictions. Why? Because those restrictions are prohibiting you from loving Cornelius in a way that he needs to be loved. He thinks he's unacceptable to God because you won't eat with him. So stop it, man. You can't love Cornelius well. This is what convicts me. This is an unconvincing statement. I know. I need to be healthier. I have young kids. I'm old. I did the math the other day. I'm 42. When my grandma was 42, I was two. I was John's age. My son, that's nuts. I'm going to be 70 when he has a career and meets someone. I would like to meet his kids. So I got to knock it off with the red meat. I got to knock it off with filet of fish, which is going to be a tough battle. Those are good. That's the Holy Spirit's conviction. Not because those things are displeasing before the Lord, but because if I want to love my children and the next generation well and be present for them in old age, then I need to do what I need to do now to be ready for that. Now, I don't know what the Lord's timing is, and I don't know what's going to happen between now and then, but I am convicted that I need to do my part to be healthy for my family, and I think that's a good conviction for us to have. Not because what we consume is displeasing before the Lord, but because what we consume doesn't enable us to love the people in our lives the way he's asked us to do that. So when we're convicted to righteousness, what we are convicted towards is Christ's likeness and loving people better. All sin that you have in your life, all unholiness that you have in your life. It's so abhorrent to God because it does displease him, because it does disqualify us, but more than that, it disables you from doing what he's asked you to do, which is to love other people well. So when he convicts towards righteousness, he's convicting us towards love. But the other important part of this is coming to grips with the abhorrence of our sin. And not just the abhorrence of it, but the weight of it, the volume of it. It's right and good for the Holy Spirit to hold up a mirror before us and for us to be crushed underneath the weight of our sin because of the place it brings us to. I came across this as I was doing a little bit of research this week. This is from Charles Spurgeon. Charles Spurgeon was the pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle in London in the late 1800s. He's called by many the prince of preachers. He may have been the greatest preacher that ever lived. He comes to remind them not only of God's loveliness, but of their own unloveliness, of their own enmity and hatred to this God of love, and consequently of their terrible sin and thus ill-using one so infinitely kind. Listen, the Holy Ghost does he want to convict us towards greater love for one another, he does want us to feel the weight of our sin and our utter inability to fight the battle against it alone. When the Holy Spirit has done his job and we have invited him into our hearts to do his work, he will so overwhelm us with the weight of our iniquity that we will cry out to the Father, I am helpless. It will be the cry of Paul in Romans 7, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? If you are here and you think you can just leave this room determined to be more righteous, then you will not be more righteous. And if by some miracle you succeed in breaking the chains of one sin in your life, you will usher in the new chain of pride at having done it on your own. Congratulations. The Holy Spirit pushes us towards love of others and helps us feel the weight of our sins that we might be reliant on him and his work rather than ourselves. That's how he convicts of righteousness. Now, how does he convict of judgment? What does it mean to convict us of judgment? Because the time of the evil one is coming. Let's sum it up like this. The Holy Spirit convicts concerning judgment by reminding us that good will triumph over evil. When Paul, we see this in Acts, when Paul goes to the Greek Areopagus, Mars Hill, he interacts with the philosophers there who like to talk about ideas. And a lot of you guys know the story. They say you have monuments to all the gods. I see here you have a monument to an unknown God. I know who that God is. That's actually Jesus. And he goes on to share the gospel with them. And then the end of that passage in Acts chapter 10, it says that they were convicted by the Spirit about who Jesus was and an assurance of the judgment to come. An assurance of where they would go when they died. We see the Holy Spirit doing that work in Acts. And the Holy Spirit does that work now. When we say that his job is to convict us of judgment, it means his job is to remind us that there is a time coming when that judgment will happen. And if you are not a believer, that judgment is terrifying and wrathful and awful, and you ought to be terrified of it. But when you are a Christian, we can look forward to that judgment with hopeful anticipation. That moment that I preach about often when Jesus comes crashing down out of the clouds in Revelation 19 and on his leg is righteous and true and he comes back to restore creation and to redeem us and to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. As Christians we cling to the hope of that moment. It's what gets us through death. It's what gets us through trials. It's what gets us through hard times is the belief in the arctic hope and the assurance that one day Jesus will do what he says he's going to do as the Holy Spirit seeks to link the great works of Christ, not just from his death and resurrection, but links the church age to the return of Christ when it's all said and done to tell us die for, when he comes back to get us. So the Holy Spirit is constantly, constantly, constantly pointing you to Christ. In sin, he points us to who Christ is to believe in him. In righteousness, he points us to the character of Christ to become more like him. And in judgment, he points us to the future of Christ in hope that we might cling to these things in life. That's the role of the Holy Spirit, to point you to Jesus, past, present, and future. To assure you, while you watch someone you know fade away, that you will see them again in glory and they will not look like this. To assure you, when you watch your children struggling through something you can't fix, that there's more to the story than this, it ends better. To assure you that the people you know that have been degenerated by illness or mental issues or whatever, that one day you will get to meet a healthy, loving version of them. The Holy Spirit points us back to the victory on the cross, to the victory of Easter, where all the crud that you deal with was broken and defeated. If only we can place our faith there. So that's the role of the book of Acts. That's the role of the Spirit in the book of Acts and now. And what's wonderful about Acts is it's the only book in the Bible that ends with an ellipsis. Acts isn't finished, and neither is the Spirit. The book of Acts isn't done being written. We're still in the book of Acts. Now, I'm not getting crazy. I'm not saying we're adding stuff to the Bible. All right, relax. But we're still into the church age that was ushered in at the ascension of Christ that awaits the return of Christ. We are still writing the story of the church and the Holy Spirit is still moving in the writing of that story. And he's still moving in you to convict you of your belief in Christ, of your Christ-like character and of your hope in what he will do one day. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the church and the gift that it is to us. Thank you for all the expressions of the church happening all over our community and all over the world today. God, I pray that each person in this service and the service next door and the service across the country and across the globe, that each person is somehow convicted by your spirit today, is somehow warmed by the hope of your spirit, by the promises of your spirit, is somehow moved closer to love through the spirit opening their eyes. God, I pray that the people who sit in the services today who don't yet believe you because they don't see you for who you are would have their eyes opened even just a little bit more today. We thank you for the church and what it is. We thank you for the church age. We thank you for your spirit, for your helper, who points us constantly to your son. And it's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you've been coming in July and never before that, and I'm new to you, they gave me the month off, and they were very, very kind to do that. So again, as I iterated in the Grace Vine this week, thank you so much for being the kind of church that allows me to take a month off and be with my family and be present with my kids. When I came back to work this week and I said bye to the kids, my daughter Lily was actually disappointed, which I feel is probably a good thing. I guess that means the month went well. It would probably be bad news if she was like, praise the Lord, he's leaving again. That may be how Jen felt, but Lily was sad. And just to set the expectations for this morning, I heard comments and things as I was wrapping up the month of June to take sabbatical and then some stuff during the month and even some stuff this morning about like, oh man, this is going to be a good sermon. You had six weeks to get this one ready. Like you used to come back and light our faces on fire. No, no. I didn't think about this sermon for one single second in the month of July. Not a single one. I didn't even know that I was preaching. This is the book of Acts this morning. I didn't even know I was preaching on the book of Acts until Tuesday when I decided that it would be the book of Acts. And then some stuff happened in my week. I ended up having to go back out of town. I wrote this sermon on my parents' dinner table at 10 o'clock on Thursday night. I'm essentially winging this, and I'm rusty. So let's just tamp down expectations of good and hope for brief, and then later I'll be good. If you really want to hear the sermon that I've been thinking about all month, then you should come on September the 10th. On September the 10th, we're going to roll out the plans that we have for the church. We're almost done. We're ready to show you. We're very excited. We're going to launch the campaign in earnest. It's going to be an update, and I've been really thinking a lot about what I want to share with you guys that Sunday morning about the future of grace and what we hope for. So that's the one that I hope is really good. This is going to be fine. With that being said, you can open your Bibles not to the book of Acts, but to John chapter 16. We will get there in a second. As I think about the book of Acts and what I want you to do with Acts, so we're going to be focused on just kind of an overview of Acts. What is it? How do we use it? Why is it there? What can it teach us? One of the things to know contextually about Acts is that it's essentially the second half of the book of Luke. Luke wrote the gospel of Luke and then he wrote the Acts of the Spirit or the Acts of the Apostles, depending on which strand of the church you come from. But they're both written to a guy named Theophilus. So they're basically part one and part two of the accounts of Christ and then the accounts of the Spirit. And when I think of the book of Acts, I think of it this way as it fits into the New Testament. From a narrative perspective, the book of Acts is an atlas. I think we have that in your notes. Yes, in a narrative sense, Acts serves as an atlas. Now, here's what I mean. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember this, to know what this is. I see you don't know. You know lots of it. You have no clue. You never touched this in your life. Then here's what you don't know. If you're too young to know what this is, I have been entrusted with a church, the leadership of a church, with children, young lives to mold, a marriage, various stations of responsibility throughout my life. I have never felt a deeper sense of responsibility than when I was in the back seat of our 1985 Maxima with automatic seat belts and my dad would tell me to open up the Atlas and tell me where I need to turn next. That is fully locked in. I've never felt a greater sense of responsibility because you can't just let any of the kids do that. You let my sister do it, we're going to be in Kansas. It's going to be a disaster. I have to do it. And the family is relying on me. So atlases hold a great place in my heart. And when you look at an atlas, when I open this to North Carolina, the way that an atlas works, I know you guys can't see it, but you can see enough for this to work. When you look at North Carolina, it's just the whole state, right? It's an overview of the whole state. And then what you get is you get these little windows where different cities are blown up. So like Charlotte is there. Charlotte's there. But then this is Charlotte for when you get in the city, you need more detail. And then Raleigh gets its own on the next page there. This is back before 540. I was actually looking at it this morning. Yeah, this is 1995. I had to email some people who are not in the millennial demographic to get my hands on one of these. But that's how atlases work, right? There's an overview of the whole state, and then where more detail is required, there's these little windows, these little blow-ups that accompany it to give you more detail for certain parts of the map. And that's how I think about the book of Acts and how it interacts with the New Testament. When you think about the story, the narrative arc of the New Testament, from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospel telling the story of Christ, to the end of the book, Revelation, and you think about chronologically, how does that flow? Acts is, from a narrative perspective, the atlas. It gives the overview. It's the state overview of the New Testament. And then the letters that we see subsequent to Acts, the Pauline epistles, Paul's letters, Romans and Corinthians and Galatians, Ephesians, and all down through Philemon, those serve to me as windows into the goings on in the book of Acts. When you read through Acts, you'll see Paul go to Philippi and Thessalonica and Corinth and all the places. And then you can turn to those letters and you can get a greater detail about what's going on in those churches. And the same with the general epistles. They're kind of tucked into the narrative story of Acts. So as we approach the Bible and we think about the New Testament, the composition of it, the book of Acts serves as kind of the atlas of the roadmap that gives you the narrative arc from the Gospels to Revelation. And that's helpful for me as I think about the structure of my Bible. But far more importantly than what Acts does for the Bible in a narrative sense is what the book of Acts does in an ecclesiastical sense, in a sense that pertains to the church and to the theology of the church. So in an ecclesiastical sense, Acts serves as a telling of the great work of the Holy Spirit that links the two great works of Jesus. So an ecclesiastical church, as it pertains to the church, as it pertains to church life, as it pertains to theology and how we understand God moving and acting and working in his church, the book of Acts serves to tell the story of the great work of the Spirit, of the age of the Spirit, as that work links the two great works of Christ. Now, admittedly, theologically, for those of you who think about these things, I struggled with that sentence because Christ, according to John 1, was involved in creation. That's a great work. Christ is still at work right now as our high priest interceding on our behalf. Christ will rule forever. So I don't mean to reduce the life of Christ and the works of Christ to the death and resurrection and then his return. Those are just what I'm calling the two great works of Christ. And so in the church age that we are in, in the age of the spirit in which we find ourselves, we constantly look back to Christ on the cross, that great work, and we anticipate the next great work, the return of Christ. And the book of Acts serves as a descriptor of the age of the Holy Spirit, whose work links the two great works of Christ as the Spirit grows the church. So that's how we think about the book of Acts, and that's what it sets out to describe for us, is the work of the Spirit, the age of the Spirit and of the church, the thing that Jesus came to build. So if we want to know, okay, it's the age of the Spirit. Acts details the acts of the Spirit in this church age. Then what is the Holy Spirit supposed to do? What is its job? What can we expect of it? What are we looking for as we look at the works of the Spirit? The best answer to this question actually comes in John chapter 16. I know it might feel weird that the highlighted verse on a sermon on the book of Acts is from the Gospel of John, but I think after we read it together, it will make more sense to you. This verse, this passage, is Jesus talking. John 15, 16, and 17 is this long discourse from Jesus just to the disciples. It's some good, intimate, revelatory teaching. It's capped off at the end of it by the high priestly prayer when Jesus, it's the longest recorded prayer of Christ where he prays for them and the church to come. And he prays for you and for me if we have placed our faith in Jesus. And in the midst of that discourse, Jesus tells them, I know you're sad that I'm leaving, but it's actually better that I am. And here's what he says in John chapter 16, verses 6 through 11. He will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. It's a threefold purpose. Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. Concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you will see me no longer. Concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. So Jesus outlines to his disciples and to us this threefold purpose of the Holy Spirit. And what I want you to see this morning is what that means. What does it mean to convict the world of sin, to convict the world of righteousness, to convict the world of judgment? And then how does that show up in the book of Acts? And then not only in the book of Acts, but in our lives as well. So if we look at the first one, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of sin. And then he gives detail of this down in verse 8. And when he comes, he will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Verse 9, concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. This is the apex sin, to not believe in Christ. It's the one that can't be fixed. It's the thing that we have to do. And so when we ask what it means for the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, I think it means this. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin by helping people believe in Jesus. And I know I already taught you ecclesiastical. Now I'm throwing in salvific. That just means something that has the power to save. And so this repentance of who Jesus is, repenting of who you thought he was and accepting who he says he is, is the fundamental repentance to enter Christendom. It is the foundational repentance for anyone who would seek to become a Christian. It's why I articulate as often as I can that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. The fundamental repentance to become a Christian is to repent of who you thought Jesus was and accept who he says he is. And I believe this to be true because of how the Holy Spirit works in the book of Acts to bring this repentance about in the crowds of the people of Jerusalem. If you look in your Bible in Acts chapter 2, what you'll see is that Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's milled about for 40 days interacting with people and freaking people out, and then he ascends into heaven. And when he ascends into heaven, he tells the disciples to wait until the appointed time and they'll know what to do. So the disciples are assembled in this upper room and they don't know what to do. They're just looking at each other going, what do we do now? I don't know. He just said, wait. Wait on what? I don't know. We'll know when it happens. Meanwhile, Jerusalem is abuzz. They're trying to figure out what's going on with this guy and what these guys are doing in this upper room. So they're all milling around outside, thousands of people just waiting to see what the disciples are going to do. And one day at Pentecost, the flaming tongues descend down from heaven and light on the disciples and they are given the gift of tongues and they go out onto the balcony, onto the portico, and they preach to the crowds that are gathered there. Peter preaches in his own language and each person hears it in their language. That's the gift of tongues that we see in Acts. And they're all convicted and they all want to be saved. Peter goes out and he preaches the gospel. He tells them who Jesus is. And their response is, we believe, what do we do? And Peter's response, my Bible scholars already know, repent and be baptized. And this is something that I've chewed on for years. But repent of what? We're tempted to say, we often say, repent of your sins. Sure. All of them? Perfectly? This is the line of delineation for salvation? I should repent of everything I've ever done and am doing and I should repent perfectly and if I can't do that then I cannot enter the kingdom of heaven? Certainly perfect repentance of all the things isn't the line because there would be no one saved but Christ. Because of that I am convinced more and more that what Peter is telling them to do is repent of who you thought he was before you killed him and when you killed him. This crowd is the same crowd that was surrounding the courts of Pilate when Pilate was going, we don't need to kill this guy. He hasn't done anything. Why don't you just let me release him and kill Barabbas? And the crowd said, no, give us Barabbas and kill Jesus. And Pilate says, well, this isn't on me. And the crowd says, well, his blood is on our hands and on the hands of our children. It's that same crowd. I don't know if it's one for one, but a majority of them are in the same place. It's that same ethic, that same group of people. And so Peter is telling them, repent of who you thought Jesus was, that guy that you killed, and confess that he is the Lord, that he is who he says he is, and then be baptized. It is salvific repentance. It is foundational repentance for all people for all time. And the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of the sin of not seeing Jesus and accepting him for who he says he is. And he is still doing this work today. If you have a friend that you are trying to love towards the kingdom of heaven and share the gospel with, it is we work, we say words, we pray, we do. It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict and to open up eyes to see Jesus for who he says he is. And often, in our culture, in this day and age, in a nation that is very close to post-Christian, where everyone has heard the name of Jesus, and if they're not following Jesus, they probably have a reason, and here's the thing, it's probably a good one. In our culture now, the Holy Spirit has to do a lot of the same work that he had to do back in the church age, back in the age of Christ. What did he have to do to help them see that Jesus was who he says he was? He had to knock off the scales of religiosity and tradition and poor teaching and well-meaning teachers who were slightly askew and led them to an expectation of Christ that he never set for himself. And so the Holy Spirit is doing that same work today in our hearts and in our lives. I read a stat this week that over the last 20 years or 25 years, over 40 million Americans have stopped going to church. Why is that the case? Why are we living in this deconstructed culture? Well, part of it is on them. Part of it is they had great pastors and great teachers and great people in their life, and they just weren't listening. And that's part of the deal. But a larger part is because we've done church really badly, because we've depicted Jesus as who he isn't, because we put expectations on him that he didn't ask for. And so people are growing up in the church blind to who Jesus really is because the teaching in the church has been so bad. And the Holy Spirit has to convict us in our adulthood and help us knock the scales off of the Jesus that we were taught and help us see the Jesus that presents himself in scripture and in the hearts of people who love us well. So the Holy Spirit is still doing that work. And I'm not so ignorant as to believe that he's not doing that work for some of us in here today who have our doubts. I would just posit to you that maybe your doubts about who Jesus is aren't because of who he said he was, but because of what someone else told you that he was. And maybe the Holy Spirit can help open your eyes to see past those things. Then Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of righteousness. What does it mean to convict of righteousness? I think of it like this. Jesus says that he convicts of righteousness because he is going to be with the Father, and that's a little bit mysterious. And so for this one, I did, I did my research, which I know, I know it's a surprise for everyone, but I did my research and I think it's easiest to understand it like this. The Holy Spirit convicts those who believe to grow in Christ likeness. So once, once he's convicted you to believe and you see Jesus for who he is, then he convicts you to grow in Christ-likeness, to grow in your own righteousness. This is the process that the Bible and theologians call sanctification. The sanctification process is to become more like Christ in character. I grew up thinking of salvation as this moment, as this point of inflection in time where you were saved or you were not, and that is still partially true. But now as an adult, I think of salvation as a process from the moment God opens our eyes in faith to the moment he claims us in eternity and secures us in his kingdom forever. That is a process as we live the rest of our lives as Christians. And in that process, in our time of living, God sanctifies us. He convicts us of places where we're not righteous, where we're not Christ-like. And he shows us where we need to be more righteous and more like Christ. The Holy Spirit convicts. Now that we have opened our eyes and we believe in him, then the Holy Spirit says, good, that's step one. Now step two, I'm going to convict you of where you're not righteous so that you can become more righteous and more like Christ in character. We see him doing this to Peter in the book of Acts. We see the Holy Spirit acting this way in Acts. In Acts chapter 10, there's a conversation between Peter and Cornelius, and Peter receives a vision. Peter was a good Jew. He was a Jew's Jew. And in this time, there was several dietary restrictions that had religious connotations to the Jew. There was things he could and could not eat and people he could and could not eat with. And the Holy Spirit comes to him in a dream, gives him a vision, and basically says, hey, you can leave those rules behind. Knock it off with that. Eat with Cornelius. And Paul has to end up getting on to him. You eat with Gentiles when no one else is around, but when Jews are around, you won't do it because you're a hypocrite and you're scared of other people and you need to knock it off and quit being a sissy. It's this moment of conviction for Peter. And what I love about that moment of conviction, and it's so important for us in our moments of conviction, I think conviction can sometimes have a negative or judgmental connotation. That we feel that when we're convicted of a sin, that that's somehow God telling us, hey, you're not pleasing me right now. That's the spirit in your ear saying, you should stop that behavior because it's not pleasing to the Lord. It displeases God for you to do that. Over sabbatical, I got the fresh conviction of get off your phone and engage with your children, right? Well, the conviction doesn't come from the spirit because me being on my phone and reading the New York Times or my Kindle app or whatever it is, is sinful. And God wants me to stop doing that because it displeases him. And the holy watchdog is disappointed in me. He's convicted me of that because he's saying, hey, by doing that, you're not loving your kids as well as you could be. So love your kids. And this all makes sense when you consider the new commandment that Christ gave us. Christ left the disciples with one commandment. Go and love others as I have loved you. That's the new commandment I give to you. That's the commandment for all Christians and all of Christendom. Go love others as Christ has loved us. And so the conviction of the Holy Spirit towards Christ's likeness and righteousness isn't a conviction of displeasure before God. It's a conviction of, hey, when you do that, you're not loving other people well. When you engage in that behavior, you're not obeying the command to love others as I have loved you. Look at Peter. He says, stop, knock it off with the dietary restrictions. Why? Because those restrictions are prohibiting you from loving Cornelius in a way that he needs to be loved. He thinks he's unacceptable to God because you won't eat with him. So stop it, man. You can't love Cornelius well. This is what convicts me. This is an unconvincing statement. I know. I need to be healthier. I have young kids. I'm old. I did the math the other day. I'm 42. When my grandma was 42, I was two. I was John's age. My son, that's nuts. I'm going to be 70 when he has a career and meets someone. I would like to meet his kids. So I got to knock it off with the red meat. I got to knock it off with filet of fish, which is going to be a tough battle. Those are good. That's the Holy Spirit's conviction. Not because those things are displeasing before the Lord, but because if I want to love my children and the next generation well and be present for them in old age, then I need to do what I need to do now to be ready for that. Now, I don't know what the Lord's timing is, and I don't know what's going to happen between now and then, but I am convicted that I need to do my part to be healthy for my family, and I think that's a good conviction for us to have. Not because what we consume is displeasing before the Lord, but because what we consume doesn't enable us to love the people in our lives the way he's asked us to do that. So when we're convicted to righteousness, what we are convicted towards is Christ's likeness and loving people better. All sin that you have in your life, all unholiness that you have in your life. It's so abhorrent to God because it does displease him, because it does disqualify us, but more than that, it disables you from doing what he's asked you to do, which is to love other people well. So when he convicts towards righteousness, he's convicting us towards love. But the other important part of this is coming to grips with the abhorrence of our sin. And not just the abhorrence of it, but the weight of it, the volume of it. It's right and good for the Holy Spirit to hold up a mirror before us and for us to be crushed underneath the weight of our sin because of the place it brings us to. I came across this as I was doing a little bit of research this week. This is from Charles Spurgeon. Charles Spurgeon was the pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle in London in the late 1800s. He's called by many the prince of preachers. He may have been the greatest preacher that ever lived. He comes to remind them not only of God's loveliness, but of their own unloveliness, of their own enmity and hatred to this God of love, and consequently of their terrible sin and thus ill-using one so infinitely kind. Listen, the Holy Ghost does he want to convict us towards greater love for one another, he does want us to feel the weight of our sin and our utter inability to fight the battle against it alone. When the Holy Spirit has done his job and we have invited him into our hearts to do his work, he will so overwhelm us with the weight of our iniquity that we will cry out to the Father, I am helpless. It will be the cry of Paul in Romans 7, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? If you are here and you think you can just leave this room determined to be more righteous, then you will not be more righteous. And if by some miracle you succeed in breaking the chains of one sin in your life, you will usher in the new chain of pride at having done it on your own. Congratulations. The Holy Spirit pushes us towards love of others and helps us feel the weight of our sins that we might be reliant on him and his work rather than ourselves. That's how he convicts of righteousness. Now, how does he convict of judgment? What does it mean to convict us of judgment? Because the time of the evil one is coming. Let's sum it up like this. The Holy Spirit convicts concerning judgment by reminding us that good will triumph over evil. When Paul, we see this in Acts, when Paul goes to the Greek Areopagus, Mars Hill, he interacts with the philosophers there who like to talk about ideas. And a lot of you guys know the story. They say you have monuments to all the gods. I see here you have a monument to an unknown God. I know who that God is. That's actually Jesus. And he goes on to share the gospel with them. And then the end of that passage in Acts chapter 10, it says that they were convicted by the Spirit about who Jesus was and an assurance of the judgment to come. An assurance of where they would go when they died. We see the Holy Spirit doing that work in Acts. And the Holy Spirit does that work now. When we say that his job is to convict us of judgment, it means his job is to remind us that there is a time coming when that judgment will happen. And if you are not a believer, that judgment is terrifying and wrathful and awful, and you ought to be terrified of it. But when you are a Christian, we can look forward to that judgment with hopeful anticipation. That moment that I preach about often when Jesus comes crashing down out of the clouds in Revelation 19 and on his leg is righteous and true and he comes back to restore creation and to redeem us and to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. As Christians we cling to the hope of that moment. It's what gets us through death. It's what gets us through trials. It's what gets us through hard times is the belief in the arctic hope and the assurance that one day Jesus will do what he says he's going to do as the Holy Spirit seeks to link the great works of Christ, not just from his death and resurrection, but links the church age to the return of Christ when it's all said and done to tell us die for, when he comes back to get us. So the Holy Spirit is constantly, constantly, constantly pointing you to Christ. In sin, he points us to who Christ is to believe in him. In righteousness, he points us to the character of Christ to become more like him. And in judgment, he points us to the future of Christ in hope that we might cling to these things in life. That's the role of the Holy Spirit, to point you to Jesus, past, present, and future. To assure you, while you watch someone you know fade away, that you will see them again in glory and they will not look like this. To assure you, when you watch your children struggling through something you can't fix, that there's more to the story than this, it ends better. To assure you that the people you know that have been degenerated by illness or mental issues or whatever, that one day you will get to meet a healthy, loving version of them. The Holy Spirit points us back to the victory on the cross, to the victory of Easter, where all the crud that you deal with was broken and defeated. If only we can place our faith there. So that's the role of the book of Acts. That's the role of the Spirit in the book of Acts and now. And what's wonderful about Acts is it's the only book in the Bible that ends with an ellipsis. Acts isn't finished, and neither is the Spirit. The book of Acts isn't done being written. We're still in the book of Acts. Now, I'm not getting crazy. I'm not saying we're adding stuff to the Bible. All right, relax. But we're still into the church age that was ushered in at the ascension of Christ that awaits the return of Christ. We are still writing the story of the church and the Holy Spirit is still moving in the writing of that story. And he's still moving in you to convict you of your belief in Christ, of your Christ-like character and of your hope in what he will do one day. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the church and the gift that it is to us. Thank you for all the expressions of the church happening all over our community and all over the world today. God, I pray that each person in this service and the service next door and the service across the country and across the globe, that each person is somehow convicted by your spirit today, is somehow warmed by the hope of your spirit, by the promises of your spirit, is somehow moved closer to love through the spirit opening their eyes. God, I pray that the people who sit in the services today who don't yet believe you because they don't see you for who you are would have their eyes opened even just a little bit more today. We thank you for the church and what it is. We thank you for the church age. We thank you for your spirit, for your helper, who points us constantly to your son. And it's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.