John 10

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors of grace. Somebody over there is stinky because this side is full. You guys, I don't know what you're avoiding over here, but this is ridiculous. It's good to see you. Thanks for coming in May in the rain. I keep expecting for us to get over. There's always a bump in attendance in the spring, January, February, March. And that usually lasts until Easter. And then you guys go to the beach like for the whole until August. I don't see you again. So I keep expecting that every week and you keep showing up. So I'm just I'm going to threaten you with this. You keep showing up. We're going to two services in the fall. OK, you just have to deal with it. I also just want to praise God sincerely for this. Gibby, our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, Gibby. We have too many Aarons around here, so I have to give them all nicknames, except for Aaron Buchanan. He's just Aaron, which makes sense. If you know him, that fits. Gibby's sick as a dog this morning. Like legit could barely talk to me when he got in this morning. He was late. He was later than he normally is because he's sick. So he can sneeze in the lobby now. But you wouldn't believe how often we look at each other on a Sunday morning and go, I feel terrible. I don't know if I can preach. I don't know if I can sing. And we just pray for God to give us 30 good minutes. And He always does. He always does. That was fantastic. I was moved to tears. It's so fun and good to be a singing church, especially since I inherited a bunch of frozen Presbyterians eight years ago. We've had to work on that a little bit. If you know, you know. This morning we continue in our series that Haley mentioned called FAQs, where we sourced some questions out to the small groups, solicited some responses, and just said, hey, what is it that you're curious about? What do you want to know? What questions do you have? And so we took kind of the most common ones and we said, let's talk about these on a Sunday. And I'm particularly excited to talk about this topic this morning because I feel it's so important. And it came up a lot in a bunch of different ways. But it's basically questions about understanding the doctrine of salvation. What does it mean to be saved? How do I know I'm going to heaven? Am I going to be saved forever? Can I lose it? Why does the question we're going to focus on at the beginning of our time this morning is why does God accept deathbed confessions, which is an interesting question, but there was a lot of questions around this doctrine of salvation and seeking to understand what it does mean to be saved and having a better understanding around that. And I think it's such an important question because once we get into church world, we kind of stop asking about salvation because I think we feel like we're supposed to know. And so we're embarrassed to ask. But here's what I know is that my understanding of salvation has worked progressively through my life that with each year or decade that passes, I come to understand salvation and what it is a little bit better. And I think that your understanding of salvation should progress as well. Even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, there's a reason you're in church on a random May in the rain. And it has to be because you're at least curious. You're at least thoughtful about it. And so I would love to have the opportunity to tell you more about what it means to be a Christian. And I want the Christians in the room to understand their salvation more deeply. Because it's my suspicion that everybody here who is a Christian has at some point in their life, and many of you, and I have to, I hope that you'll trust me this morning that I'm not trying to be hard on anybody. I'm not trying to make you feel small for the way that you think. I'm not trying to make you feel uneducated or dumb. I just think this is a necessary phase of our understanding of our salvation that every Christian goes through. And I also know from experience that many Christians spend their entire life kind of misunderstanding the doctrine of salvation and being overly reductive about the incredible miracle that it is and what it actually means. And so this morning, what I'm hoping to do is to give us all a more rich understanding of our salvation. So either we're kind of locked into how we initially understand it, and this will kind of open up our minds and help us understand it better, God and more grateful to him for the miraculous event and process of our salvation. So that's where we're going this morning. That's what I want to do. To get there, I want to start with this question that came up in our emails, which is why does God accept a deathbed confession? This is an interesting question because it belies the motives behind it. And the motives behind that question generate a lot of the other questions that we have around salvation. This question comes most of the time from a sense of jealousy or resentment or entitlement or frustration. This question is most likely, and if you're the one that asked this, please hear me. It makes sense to ask it. I understand why you would. Every Christian has asked it. It's asked so often that Jesus talks about it in the Bible, and we're about to go to exactly where Jesus answers this question. But I want us to understand why we're asking it first. Let's just put it out there and be honest about it, because all of us do it. And again, I don't want anyone to feel bad for asking this question. I just want to understand why it comes up. The main motive in my estimation behind this question, why would God accept a deathbed confession, is essentially this, if we're going to use real language. I've been saved for decades. And I've been denying myself and keeping it between the ditches and trying to follow God's rules for years. And I've lived without the freedom of a pagan. And I'm going to use the word pagan this morning because a pagan is someone who doesn't believe in God. I'm not trying to be dismissive of those people, of non-believers. It's just pagans easier to say than non-believer? So we as Christians, and we know this, especially those of us that were Christians in high school and college, we are jealous of the freedom of the pagan, right? We're jealous of what they get to do and what we can't do. We've spent our life trying to follow the rules, trying to do the right things, trying to live the right way. And now here's this person who spent their life as a free pagan doing whatever they wanted to do, following any rules that they felt like they needed to follow, never committed to God, no fidelity, didn't put in the work that I did. And now at the very end, they're just going to slip in the door and we're going to the same heaven. That's not fair. I know it's hard to hear that out loud, but I can see about half of you grinning at me right now. You'll all have these smirks on your face like, yeah, that's pretty true. You got me. We've all thought that, and it's okay to think that. It makes sense why we would. It makes sense that we would think that. But here's Jesus' answer to that question. Why does he accept deathbed confessions? This is actually a parable. In the Gospel of Matthew, you can turn to chapter 20 if you want to. I'm going to read you verses 13 through 16, but first I need to tell you what's going on. Somebody comes up to Jesus and they ask this question. And so Jesus tells this story. He says there's an owner of a vineyard and he goes out one day where he can get some day laborers. And I've told you before, Israel was a poor country. They were impoverished. And so there was hubs where you would go and you could get men to come and put in a day's labor at whatever business you owned. And this was their livelihood. This was all that. They just hope they got picked that day. That was their livelihood. And so there's these people and the owner goes and he says, hey, I need y'all to come work for me in my vineyard. I'm going to pay you one denarius. I don't know how much that is. I could have done the research on what it was, but that feels like a waste of time. Google it if you care. I'm going to give you one denarius. And they're like, okay, great deal. So they go with him, they get in the Ford Ranger and they go to the vineyard and they start to work, right? And I don't know why Ford Ranger is funny, but it is. And they start to work and they're working all day. About the middle of the day, some other workers come by the field and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we help you today? And the owner says, yeah, sure. Come on. You can work for me. And so they start working by the middle of the day. And then about the last hour of the day, some other workers show up and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we work for you? The owner says, that's great. Yeah, come on. And they're working for him. So then when the work's done, the owner lines them up and begins to pay them. And he starts with the first group of workers that he hired that morning. Here's your one denarius for your day's labor. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired in the middle. And he says, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired with just an hour to go. And he said, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And the guys that have been working all day are ticked. Like, that's not fair. I worked eight hours for my denarius. That dude worked two hours, worked one hour. He had missed the smoke breaks and the lunch break and everything and just came in during the last hour. That's not fair. And the owner responds to them like this in verse 13. But he answered one of them, I am not being unfair to unfair to you friend didn't you agree to work for a denarius take your pay and go I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money or are you envious because I am generous so So the last will be first. And the first will be last. I love that response. They go, hey, that's not fair. We've been working for eight hours. They've been working for one hour. And you're giving us the same pay. And he goes, what do you care? That's basically the answer. It's my money. Do you care what I do with my own possession? Do you care what I do with my own resources? What right is it of yours to tell me what I should do? I chose to be generous to him. Are you envious of my generosity? You agreed to a denarius. I gave you a denarius. They agreed to this. I gave them this. It's my resources to do with what I want. And so to our question of why does God accept a deathbed confession where the implication is, hey, I've been laboring in the vineyard all day, my whole life. I've been working at this for decades. I put in a full eight hours. And I get my salvation. I get my eternity in heaven. I get my utopia. But they just slid in at the last minute. They don't deserve what I deserve. Maybe we can believe in purgatory so they have to suffer a little bit before they get the glory that I get. This is the jealousy that we express. And in that is implied exactly what the workers were frustrated about. Hey, that's not fair. I've put in my time and my effort. I've done my work. And the pay shouldn't be the same. And here's what this does. When we ask that question and we think that way. And here's what I wanted to talk about. When we think like that, we make salvation something that we think of in terms of being in or out. And very often, there's a lot of questions that Christians ask about salvation, and the motivation behind that question is, am I in or am I out? Did I say the prayer the right way? Am I in or am I out? Am I in heaven or am I burning in hell forever? That's what we're asking. How much sinning can I do and still be saved? Can I lose my salvation or does God hold on to me and I can't lose my salvation? That's an in or out question. How do I, if I feel like I lost my salvation, can I get it back? If someone wanders away, were they ever truly saved? All these questions that we ask about salvation are indicative of this thought process of in or out. And that's how we think about our salvation. And this is the place where many of us get stuck for our whole lives. But what I want us to see is that in or out salvation is a small salvation. Thinking of it that way reduces it to something that it should have never been. And if you're there, if you think about it this way, if you've thought about it that way, I don't want you to feel bad because that in or out mentality was probably handed to you by a well-meaning teacher in your church who also adopted that, who never got a more expansive view of salvation. I got saved when I was four. I was four and a half years old. We went to a special service on Sunday night, and the teacher taught us about the doctrine of hell. And I don't know if Aaron Winston's in here, but if I find out that we're teaching our four-year-olds about hell and scaring them into salvation, that's not going to be okay. They taught us about hell. They told us what it was. And they said, do you want to go there? No. No way. That sounds terrible. What's in heaven? Well, you sing a lot. I mean, that's better than hell. Okay. What do I have to do to go to heaven? Well, you have to believe in Jesus. Deal. What do I do to believe in Jesus? Will you repeat this prayer after me? Okay. You say the words and I'll do them too. And I was saved into an in or out understanding of salvation. What four-year-old isn't going to take out a fire insurance policy by threat of hell. Of course I got saved. God in his goodness has progressed my understanding of what salvation is over the decades. But many of us get saved into this kind of faith where for us it's a matter of are we in or are we out? And when we think of it that way, we become the jealous workers in the vineyard that get upset that we've been, and some of you will understand this reference, we've been the good brother in Luke 15, the one that stayed home and worked. And then the prodigal son comes home and God lets him into heaven and throws a party for him too. And we're like, what in the world? I've been doing my part the whole time. Because for us, salvation is, am I in? Am I going to heaven? Or am I not? And many of us get saved. And with this reductive view of what salvation is, we spend the rest of our lives just trying to stay in and trying to understand what's going to keep us there. But I think that there is a much bigger, better view of salvation. And I think it's presented to us in plain language in the greatest chapter in the Bible, Romans chapter 8. I'm going to read to you what Paul writes about what salvation is. But before I do, I want you to understand where we're picking this up. The first eight chapters of Romans, the first seven chapters of Romans, are a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. It's a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. Now, also, I want to pause here before I read. I forgot to say this, and I want to make sure that we're clear on this. When I talk about salvation, when I say saved or not, I want to just pause and be very clear that we understand what this means together, okay? The way that we explain salvation at grace, and when I say we, I mean me, because I'm the one that does it. The way that we explain salvation at grace is to say, to be saved, to be a Christian means that we believe Jesus is who he says he is. He says he's the son of God who's come to take away the sins of the world. We believe that. We believe that it means that Jesus did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life. He died a perfect death and he resurrected and rescued us from death and sin and shame. And it means that we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which in Revelation 19 is to come crashing through the clouds to reclaim us and his creation and restore it back to himself and its original glory. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And that to become a Christian, all we need to engage in is the fundamental repentance of Christianity, which Peter describes to us in Acts. He's preaching a sermon. Jesus has been crucified. They're hanging out in the upper room for 40 days trying to figure out what to do. The Holy Spirit descends on them. Peter goes out to the crowd and he preaches. And the sermon is, hey, that guy that you killed was the Messiah and he came to save you. And the crowd believes him. And they say, what do we do? We messed up. And Peter says, repent and be baptized. Repent of what? I believe it's the fundamental repentance of salvation, which is to repent of who you thought Jesus was before you came to agree with him about who he says he is. So to be saved, we repent of who we thought Jesus was before we moved into this moment and this process of salvation. And we accept who he says he is from his word. That's what being a Christian is. Now, Romans is the most detailed theological lesson we get in the Bible. And the first seven chapters are written to help us understand what salvation is and what God did in it and what his responsibility is, what our responsibility is. Then in Romans 8, he culminates that seven chapter argument with what I think is the greatest chapter of the Bible and the culmination of the glory of salvation. And he proclaims to us what salvation is. So I want you to hear how Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 8 and see if this can't begin to expand our view of salvation. I've got my old Bible out. This is the ESV. I was reading this passage this morning in the NIV as I was going through the sermon. Sorry, sorry, DeVos. I know I bought you a Bible and now I'm ruining it. And I just didn't, I don't like the way the NIV reads. This is way better. So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to read you from the ESV. This is the soaring doctrine of salvation that Paul gives us. Verse 19. And I'm going to read all the way down through verse 30, so buckle up. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons in God. The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it. In hopes that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what he sees, but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Okay, lock in. You may have faded away, and you're not paying attention to the words anymore, but these three verses are super important. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And this is the important part. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. This is Paul's soaring description of what it means to be saved and what salvation is seeking to do and what God is seeking to work in that salvation. So the first thing that we see is in the very first verse where Paul says, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. What Paul is saying here is, whatever we had to suffer to be Christians, whatever we had to suffer to be in and to build God's kingdom, whatever that work was for the day in the vineyard, and we've put in our time, whatever suffering we've endured for the sake of the kingdom and for the sake of God is not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us. In other words, there is no possible way you will spend any time at all being saved, being a Christian, being a child of God, and come to regret it. It is impossible that you would be a Christian your whole life and serve God your whole life and get to heaven and be jealous of the people who partied in college. That will not happen. As a matter of fact, what I want us to see, and Paul's talking to a persecuted church, to people who actually suffer. Very few of us, if any, have suffered for our faith. The bar to entry in the American evangelical church is so low that it costs us nothing to come. We have not suffered. Furthermore, the Bible makes it very clear that life with God is the best life possible. Scripture is replete of verses and passages that remind us that being a Christian is the best life possible. And I can go through the Rolodex, John 10.10, that I talk about all the time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy. But Jesus says, I have come that you might have life and have it to the full, have the most rich, full life possible. We're told in Psalms that at God's right hand are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence, there is a fullness of joy. We're told again in Psalms that one day in his courts is better than thousands elsewhere. We're told that we serve a God in Ephesians that is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. We're told in John that from his fullness, we receive grace upon grace. We're told these things over and over again in scripture, that life with God is the best life possible. It's the fullest life possible. And so the reality is that if you're a Christian who's been saved your whole life and someone slips in at the last minute and they get to go to heaven too, you shouldn't feel jealousy. You should feel empathy because you just got to live your whole life with God and they missed out on all that joy. It is to our advantage to be picked up early and work in the vineyard all day. It's the life that we should desire and what we want. We should not feel jealousy to the deathbed conversion. We should feel empathy because they had to go through their whole life without God. And that's what salvation is. It's not in or out. It's with or without. You understand? It's not am I in, am I in, am I going or am I not? It's do I, am I living life with God? Am I abiding in him or am I not? And when someone is not saved, when someone doesn't know the Lord, the great tragedy is that they go through their life without experiencing the joy of the Lord and the joy of heaven. Without experiencing that relationship with him and the richness and fullness of life. We should not be jealous of that. We should be empathetic and continue to invite them in because through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. We needn't be jealous of the people who don't put in the work that we do. Because there is joy in that work. So right off the bat, Paul's not talking about in or out. Paul says with or without. And that there is no suffering that will not make it worth the glory that is to be revealed to us. Then, in the rest of this passage, we see this. And this is an important phrase. I want us to rest on it for a little bit. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. This is why this is important. Those words, process is important, restoration, renewal is important, and I want to show you why. But first, we're going to go to that word process. Because I think that many of us think about salvation as this moment in time. I wasn't saved. I prayed the prayer, said the confession, did whatever moment you look to where your belief changed. I wasn't saved. Then I prayed the prayer. I am saved. Done. And that's not true. Salvation is a process. And we know that salvation is a process because of what Paul writes in verse 30 that I said was really important. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. That's a process. So let's walk through it so we understand it. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom God knew before time were going to accept his invitation to salvation, he also called them to himself. With the urging of the Holy Spirit, he called you to himself. It wasn't your work that found God. It was God calling you to himself through his love and through his kindness and through his goodness. Now, I know that some of you in the room are Calvinist and you care deeply about these words. I am not and I don't. So I'm not going to last a long time there. OK, but those whom he predestined, he also called those whom he called. He also justified that justification is what many of us think of as the moment of our salvation. That's when you were set righteous. You were clothed in the righteousness of Christ. You were set right in the court of God. You were justified before him. You are no longer guilty. You were absolved from your sin because Jesus died, lived a perfect life and died a perfect death. You are now justified before God. And the good news is that in the culmination of this chapter, there's this incredibly powerful verse of the assurance of salvation where Paul writes, So once you are justified, Paul says, I am convinced that nothing can unjustify you. Nothing can unsave you. But the process doesn't stop there. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he also justified. Those whom he justified, he also glorified. Now Paul speaks as if it's already been done because the work has been done. But we are not yet glorified. We are glorified when we occupy our bodies in heaven. We are glorified when we sit in the presence of God. I love that verse that he sneaks in there in the middle. We do not hope for what we see. We hope for what we do not see. So we wait for it with patience. Meaning, when we get to heaven, we don't need faith and hope anymore because we have God there. So he says that glorification is coming later. So what I want you to understand about your salvation is that it is in process. It's not done. When you are justified, you're secure. You will not be unjustified. But there is another step. And that doesn't happen until eternity. And that's what's in this text. So it's a process, I said, and that's the process. It starts at predestination, at call, at justification, and it's finished at glorification when we're in eternity with God forever. But it's also a process of renewal and restoration. We think about salvation as just our issue. It's just me and God. It's just for me. Jesus died for me, but that's not what we see in the text. In the text, we see that we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies, the completion of the salvation process. But so does the world groans in the pains of childbirth waiting for its redemption and restoration as well. So what I want us to understand about salvation is it's bigger than you. It's about restoring all of creation. When God made heaven and earth in Genesis, he made it perfect. He was pleased with it. And I am convinced that it looks completely different than our earth now. And we have mucked up this earth with sin and brokenness. And that one day he will restore all things. He will return and he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he will be with us and we will be with our God and the former things will have passed away. And he'll create a new heaven and a new earth. And he will have restored creation back to himself and its original purpose. So when Jesus dies on the cross, he's not just dying for souls. He's dying for everything that he created to restore it back to himself. Because we're told in Romans that all of creation groans for the return of the king. The earth groans for God. And when we think about salvation as being in or being out, we miss virtually everything that's said in Romans 8. We make it so overly reductive as if to think that what we're teaching the kids over there is the greatest understanding that we ever need of this incredible doctrine. And we miss out on what it truly means to be saved. Here's the last thing that I want us to understand about salvation. Being saved allows us to experience glimpses of heaven here and now. If being in heaven is being with God and not being in heaven is being without God, then as people, we are literally experiencing either hell on earth or heaven on earth. Sometimes we get glimpses of what it is when we're in God's presence, at moments with our children, a hike, a sunset, a hug, singing. When we raise our voices, every time we sing and you guys sing loud and Aaron backs off and it's just us, every time that happens, I have to stop singing because I start crying. Because that's what heaven will be like. We will sing together. And so in being believers, we get these glimpses of heaven and what it will be like. And we usher God into our life and and we invite him in, and we allow him in. This is, again, why we should not be envious of the person who gets saved on their deathbed and got, oh, you got this whole life of freedom. No, we're actually taught in Romans that we are slaves to sin. We're slaves to this bondage of corruption, but that by being saved, we are finally free from sin. We live with more freedom than anyone. We should have more joy than anyone. I said this on Easter. Easter is the most joyful day and we are the most joyful people because of the hope that we have in Christ. So I want you to see this morning. I don't know if you can tell I'm fired up about it because I really want you to understand what it means to be saved it's not it's it's too small to understand it as am I going to heaven or am I not am I in or am I out with all gentleness that's a childlike understanding of our faith. And as we grow, and as we move towards glorification through our sanctification, we should allow God to deepen our understanding of what it means to be his child. And we should understand that he's going to restore all of creation to himself, not just us. And we should understand that every day we get to live as Christians is a day that we spend in the presence of God. And at his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. In his presence, there is fullness of joy. We should be happy and proud and grateful if we're already laboring in the vineyard because of our understanding of what salvation is and how much God loves us through it. So let's progress in that and develop a far more deep, rich, helpful, gratitude-inducing understanding of what it means to be saved. Let's pray. Father, thank you for saving us. Thank you for sending your son. Thank you for sharing him with us. Thank you for watching him suffer for us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore creation. Thank you for who you are. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that your Holy Spirit would beckon them even now to desire to be with you and begin to experience glimpses of eternity here in this life. For those of us who are saved, God, thank you. Thank you for calling us to work early. Thank you for letting us labor in your vineyard. Thank you for the joy that it brings in what it is. God, we pray all these things in the name of your son, Jesus. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors of grace. Somebody over there is stinky because this side is full. You guys, I don't know what you're avoiding over here, but this is ridiculous. It's good to see you. Thanks for coming in May in the rain. I keep expecting for us to get over. There's always a bump in attendance in the spring, January, February, March. And that usually lasts until Easter. And then you guys go to the beach like for the whole until August. I don't see you again. So I keep expecting that every week and you keep showing up. So I'm just I'm going to threaten you with this. You keep showing up. We're going to two services in the fall. OK, you just have to deal with it. I also just want to praise God sincerely for this. Gibby, our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, Gibby. We have too many Aarons around here, so I have to give them all nicknames, except for Aaron Buchanan. He's just Aaron, which makes sense. If you know him, that fits. Gibby's sick as a dog this morning. Like legit could barely talk to me when he got in this morning. He was late. He was later than he normally is because he's sick. So he can sneeze in the lobby now. But you wouldn't believe how often we look at each other on a Sunday morning and go, I feel terrible. I don't know if I can preach. I don't know if I can sing. And we just pray for God to give us 30 good minutes. And He always does. He always does. That was fantastic. I was moved to tears. It's so fun and good to be a singing church, especially since I inherited a bunch of frozen Presbyterians eight years ago. We've had to work on that a little bit. If you know, you know. This morning we continue in our series that Haley mentioned called FAQs, where we sourced some questions out to the small groups, solicited some responses, and just said, hey, what is it that you're curious about? What do you want to know? What questions do you have? And so we took kind of the most common ones and we said, let's talk about these on a Sunday. And I'm particularly excited to talk about this topic this morning because I feel it's so important. And it came up a lot in a bunch of different ways. But it's basically questions about understanding the doctrine of salvation. What does it mean to be saved? How do I know I'm going to heaven? Am I going to be saved forever? Can I lose it? Why does the question we're going to focus on at the beginning of our time this morning is why does God accept deathbed confessions, which is an interesting question, but there was a lot of questions around this doctrine of salvation and seeking to understand what it does mean to be saved and having a better understanding around that. And I think it's such an important question because once we get into church world, we kind of stop asking about salvation because I think we feel like we're supposed to know. And so we're embarrassed to ask. But here's what I know is that my understanding of salvation has worked progressively through my life that with each year or decade that passes, I come to understand salvation and what it is a little bit better. And I think that your understanding of salvation should progress as well. Even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, there's a reason you're in church on a random May in the rain. And it has to be because you're at least curious. You're at least thoughtful about it. And so I would love to have the opportunity to tell you more about what it means to be a Christian. And I want the Christians in the room to understand their salvation more deeply. Because it's my suspicion that everybody here who is a Christian has at some point in their life, and many of you, and I have to, I hope that you'll trust me this morning that I'm not trying to be hard on anybody. I'm not trying to make you feel small for the way that you think. I'm not trying to make you feel uneducated or dumb. I just think this is a necessary phase of our understanding of our salvation that every Christian goes through. And I also know from experience that many Christians spend their entire life kind of misunderstanding the doctrine of salvation and being overly reductive about the incredible miracle that it is and what it actually means. And so this morning, what I'm hoping to do is to give us all a more rich understanding of our salvation. So either we're kind of locked into how we initially understand it, and this will kind of open up our minds and help us understand it better, God and more grateful to him for the miraculous event and process of our salvation. So that's where we're going this morning. That's what I want to do. To get there, I want to start with this question that came up in our emails, which is why does God accept a deathbed confession? This is an interesting question because it belies the motives behind it. And the motives behind that question generate a lot of the other questions that we have around salvation. This question comes most of the time from a sense of jealousy or resentment or entitlement or frustration. This question is most likely, and if you're the one that asked this, please hear me. It makes sense to ask it. I understand why you would. Every Christian has asked it. It's asked so often that Jesus talks about it in the Bible, and we're about to go to exactly where Jesus answers this question. But I want us to understand why we're asking it first. Let's just put it out there and be honest about it, because all of us do it. And again, I don't want anyone to feel bad for asking this question. I just want to understand why it comes up. The main motive in my estimation behind this question, why would God accept a deathbed confession, is essentially this, if we're going to use real language. I've been saved for decades. And I've been denying myself and keeping it between the ditches and trying to follow God's rules for years. And I've lived without the freedom of a pagan. And I'm going to use the word pagan this morning because a pagan is someone who doesn't believe in God. I'm not trying to be dismissive of those people, of non-believers. It's just pagans easier to say than non-believer? So we as Christians, and we know this, especially those of us that were Christians in high school and college, we are jealous of the freedom of the pagan, right? We're jealous of what they get to do and what we can't do. We've spent our life trying to follow the rules, trying to do the right things, trying to live the right way. And now here's this person who spent their life as a free pagan doing whatever they wanted to do, following any rules that they felt like they needed to follow, never committed to God, no fidelity, didn't put in the work that I did. And now at the very end, they're just going to slip in the door and we're going to the same heaven. That's not fair. I know it's hard to hear that out loud, but I can see about half of you grinning at me right now. You'll all have these smirks on your face like, yeah, that's pretty true. You got me. We've all thought that, and it's okay to think that. It makes sense why we would. It makes sense that we would think that. But here's Jesus' answer to that question. Why does he accept deathbed confessions? This is actually a parable. In the Gospel of Matthew, you can turn to chapter 20 if you want to. I'm going to read you verses 13 through 16, but first I need to tell you what's going on. Somebody comes up to Jesus and they ask this question. And so Jesus tells this story. He says there's an owner of a vineyard and he goes out one day where he can get some day laborers. And I've told you before, Israel was a poor country. They were impoverished. And so there was hubs where you would go and you could get men to come and put in a day's labor at whatever business you owned. And this was their livelihood. This was all that. They just hope they got picked that day. That was their livelihood. And so there's these people and the owner goes and he says, hey, I need y'all to come work for me in my vineyard. I'm going to pay you one denarius. I don't know how much that is. I could have done the research on what it was, but that feels like a waste of time. Google it if you care. I'm going to give you one denarius. And they're like, okay, great deal. So they go with him, they get in the Ford Ranger and they go to the vineyard and they start to work, right? And I don't know why Ford Ranger is funny, but it is. And they start to work and they're working all day. About the middle of the day, some other workers come by the field and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we help you today? And the owner says, yeah, sure. Come on. You can work for me. And so they start working by the middle of the day. And then about the last hour of the day, some other workers show up and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we work for you? The owner says, that's great. Yeah, come on. And they're working for him. So then when the work's done, the owner lines them up and begins to pay them. And he starts with the first group of workers that he hired that morning. Here's your one denarius for your day's labor. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired in the middle. And he says, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired with just an hour to go. And he said, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And the guys that have been working all day are ticked. Like, that's not fair. I worked eight hours for my denarius. That dude worked two hours, worked one hour. He had missed the smoke breaks and the lunch break and everything and just came in during the last hour. That's not fair. And the owner responds to them like this in verse 13. But he answered one of them, I am not being unfair to unfair to you friend didn't you agree to work for a denarius take your pay and go I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money or are you envious because I am generous so So the last will be first. And the first will be last. I love that response. They go, hey, that's not fair. We've been working for eight hours. They've been working for one hour. And you're giving us the same pay. And he goes, what do you care? That's basically the answer. It's my money. Do you care what I do with my own possession? Do you care what I do with my own resources? What right is it of yours to tell me what I should do? I chose to be generous to him. Are you envious of my generosity? You agreed to a denarius. I gave you a denarius. They agreed to this. I gave them this. It's my resources to do with what I want. And so to our question of why does God accept a deathbed confession where the implication is, hey, I've been laboring in the vineyard all day, my whole life. I've been working at this for decades. I put in a full eight hours. And I get my salvation. I get my eternity in heaven. I get my utopia. But they just slid in at the last minute. They don't deserve what I deserve. Maybe we can believe in purgatory so they have to suffer a little bit before they get the glory that I get. This is the jealousy that we express. And in that is implied exactly what the workers were frustrated about. Hey, that's not fair. I've put in my time and my effort. I've done my work. And the pay shouldn't be the same. And here's what this does. When we ask that question and we think that way. And here's what I wanted to talk about. When we think like that, we make salvation something that we think of in terms of being in or out. And very often, there's a lot of questions that Christians ask about salvation, and the motivation behind that question is, am I in or am I out? Did I say the prayer the right way? Am I in or am I out? Am I in heaven or am I burning in hell forever? That's what we're asking. How much sinning can I do and still be saved? Can I lose my salvation or does God hold on to me and I can't lose my salvation? That's an in or out question. How do I, if I feel like I lost my salvation, can I get it back? If someone wanders away, were they ever truly saved? All these questions that we ask about salvation are indicative of this thought process of in or out. And that's how we think about our salvation. And this is the place where many of us get stuck for our whole lives. But what I want us to see is that in or out salvation is a small salvation. Thinking of it that way reduces it to something that it should have never been. And if you're there, if you think about it this way, if you've thought about it that way, I don't want you to feel bad because that in or out mentality was probably handed to you by a well-meaning teacher in your church who also adopted that, who never got a more expansive view of salvation. I got saved when I was four. I was four and a half years old. We went to a special service on Sunday night, and the teacher taught us about the doctrine of hell. And I don't know if Aaron Winston's in here, but if I find out that we're teaching our four-year-olds about hell and scaring them into salvation, that's not going to be okay. They taught us about hell. They told us what it was. And they said, do you want to go there? No. No way. That sounds terrible. What's in heaven? Well, you sing a lot. I mean, that's better than hell. Okay. What do I have to do to go to heaven? Well, you have to believe in Jesus. Deal. What do I do to believe in Jesus? Will you repeat this prayer after me? Okay. You say the words and I'll do them too. And I was saved into an in or out understanding of salvation. What four-year-old isn't going to take out a fire insurance policy by threat of hell. Of course I got saved. God in his goodness has progressed my understanding of what salvation is over the decades. But many of us get saved into this kind of faith where for us it's a matter of are we in or are we out? And when we think of it that way, we become the jealous workers in the vineyard that get upset that we've been, and some of you will understand this reference, we've been the good brother in Luke 15, the one that stayed home and worked. And then the prodigal son comes home and God lets him into heaven and throws a party for him too. And we're like, what in the world? I've been doing my part the whole time. Because for us, salvation is, am I in? Am I going to heaven? Or am I not? And many of us get saved. And with this reductive view of what salvation is, we spend the rest of our lives just trying to stay in and trying to understand what's going to keep us there. But I think that there is a much bigger, better view of salvation. And I think it's presented to us in plain language in the greatest chapter in the Bible, Romans chapter 8. I'm going to read to you what Paul writes about what salvation is. But before I do, I want you to understand where we're picking this up. The first eight chapters of Romans, the first seven chapters of Romans, are a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. It's a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. Now, also, I want to pause here before I read. I forgot to say this, and I want to make sure that we're clear on this. When I talk about salvation, when I say saved or not, I want to just pause and be very clear that we understand what this means together, okay? The way that we explain salvation at grace, and when I say we, I mean me, because I'm the one that does it. The way that we explain salvation at grace is to say, to be saved, to be a Christian means that we believe Jesus is who he says he is. He says he's the son of God who's come to take away the sins of the world. We believe that. We believe that it means that Jesus did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life. He died a perfect death and he resurrected and rescued us from death and sin and shame. And it means that we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which in Revelation 19 is to come crashing through the clouds to reclaim us and his creation and restore it back to himself and its original glory. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And that to become a Christian, all we need to engage in is the fundamental repentance of Christianity, which Peter describes to us in Acts. He's preaching a sermon. Jesus has been crucified. They're hanging out in the upper room for 40 days trying to figure out what to do. The Holy Spirit descends on them. Peter goes out to the crowd and he preaches. And the sermon is, hey, that guy that you killed was the Messiah and he came to save you. And the crowd believes him. And they say, what do we do? We messed up. And Peter says, repent and be baptized. Repent of what? I believe it's the fundamental repentance of salvation, which is to repent of who you thought Jesus was before you came to agree with him about who he says he is. So to be saved, we repent of who we thought Jesus was before we moved into this moment and this process of salvation. And we accept who he says he is from his word. That's what being a Christian is. Now, Romans is the most detailed theological lesson we get in the Bible. And the first seven chapters are written to help us understand what salvation is and what God did in it and what his responsibility is, what our responsibility is. Then in Romans 8, he culminates that seven chapter argument with what I think is the greatest chapter of the Bible and the culmination of the glory of salvation. And he proclaims to us what salvation is. So I want you to hear how Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 8 and see if this can't begin to expand our view of salvation. I've got my old Bible out. This is the ESV. I was reading this passage this morning in the NIV as I was going through the sermon. Sorry, sorry, DeVos. I know I bought you a Bible and now I'm ruining it. And I just didn't, I don't like the way the NIV reads. This is way better. So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to read you from the ESV. This is the soaring doctrine of salvation that Paul gives us. Verse 19. And I'm going to read all the way down through verse 30, so buckle up. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons in God. The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it. In hopes that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what he sees, but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Okay, lock in. You may have faded away, and you're not paying attention to the words anymore, but these three verses are super important. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And this is the important part. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. This is Paul's soaring description of what it means to be saved and what salvation is seeking to do and what God is seeking to work in that salvation. So the first thing that we see is in the very first verse where Paul says, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. What Paul is saying here is, whatever we had to suffer to be Christians, whatever we had to suffer to be in and to build God's kingdom, whatever that work was for the day in the vineyard, and we've put in our time, whatever suffering we've endured for the sake of the kingdom and for the sake of God is not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us. In other words, there is no possible way you will spend any time at all being saved, being a Christian, being a child of God, and come to regret it. It is impossible that you would be a Christian your whole life and serve God your whole life and get to heaven and be jealous of the people who partied in college. That will not happen. As a matter of fact, what I want us to see, and Paul's talking to a persecuted church, to people who actually suffer. Very few of us, if any, have suffered for our faith. The bar to entry in the American evangelical church is so low that it costs us nothing to come. We have not suffered. Furthermore, the Bible makes it very clear that life with God is the best life possible. Scripture is replete of verses and passages that remind us that being a Christian is the best life possible. And I can go through the Rolodex, John 10.10, that I talk about all the time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy. But Jesus says, I have come that you might have life and have it to the full, have the most rich, full life possible. We're told in Psalms that at God's right hand are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence, there is a fullness of joy. We're told again in Psalms that one day in his courts is better than thousands elsewhere. We're told that we serve a God in Ephesians that is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. We're told in John that from his fullness, we receive grace upon grace. We're told these things over and over again in scripture, that life with God is the best life possible. It's the fullest life possible. And so the reality is that if you're a Christian who's been saved your whole life and someone slips in at the last minute and they get to go to heaven too, you shouldn't feel jealousy. You should feel empathy because you just got to live your whole life with God and they missed out on all that joy. It is to our advantage to be picked up early and work in the vineyard all day. It's the life that we should desire and what we want. We should not feel jealousy to the deathbed conversion. We should feel empathy because they had to go through their whole life without God. And that's what salvation is. It's not in or out. It's with or without. You understand? It's not am I in, am I in, am I going or am I not? It's do I, am I living life with God? Am I abiding in him or am I not? And when someone is not saved, when someone doesn't know the Lord, the great tragedy is that they go through their life without experiencing the joy of the Lord and the joy of heaven. Without experiencing that relationship with him and the richness and fullness of life. We should not be jealous of that. We should be empathetic and continue to invite them in because through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. We needn't be jealous of the people who don't put in the work that we do. Because there is joy in that work. So right off the bat, Paul's not talking about in or out. Paul says with or without. And that there is no suffering that will not make it worth the glory that is to be revealed to us. Then, in the rest of this passage, we see this. And this is an important phrase. I want us to rest on it for a little bit. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. This is why this is important. Those words, process is important, restoration, renewal is important, and I want to show you why. But first, we're going to go to that word process. Because I think that many of us think about salvation as this moment in time. I wasn't saved. I prayed the prayer, said the confession, did whatever moment you look to where your belief changed. I wasn't saved. Then I prayed the prayer. I am saved. Done. And that's not true. Salvation is a process. And we know that salvation is a process because of what Paul writes in verse 30 that I said was really important. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. That's a process. So let's walk through it so we understand it. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom God knew before time were going to accept his invitation to salvation, he also called them to himself. With the urging of the Holy Spirit, he called you to himself. It wasn't your work that found God. It was God calling you to himself through his love and through his kindness and through his goodness. Now, I know that some of you in the room are Calvinist and you care deeply about these words. I am not and I don't. So I'm not going to last a long time there. OK, but those whom he predestined, he also called those whom he called. He also justified that justification is what many of us think of as the moment of our salvation. That's when you were set righteous. You were clothed in the righteousness of Christ. You were set right in the court of God. You were justified before him. You are no longer guilty. You were absolved from your sin because Jesus died, lived a perfect life and died a perfect death. You are now justified before God. And the good news is that in the culmination of this chapter, there's this incredibly powerful verse of the assurance of salvation where Paul writes, So once you are justified, Paul says, I am convinced that nothing can unjustify you. Nothing can unsave you. But the process doesn't stop there. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he also justified. Those whom he justified, he also glorified. Now Paul speaks as if it's already been done because the work has been done. But we are not yet glorified. We are glorified when we occupy our bodies in heaven. We are glorified when we sit in the presence of God. I love that verse that he sneaks in there in the middle. We do not hope for what we see. We hope for what we do not see. So we wait for it with patience. Meaning, when we get to heaven, we don't need faith and hope anymore because we have God there. So he says that glorification is coming later. So what I want you to understand about your salvation is that it is in process. It's not done. When you are justified, you're secure. You will not be unjustified. But there is another step. And that doesn't happen until eternity. And that's what's in this text. So it's a process, I said, and that's the process. It starts at predestination, at call, at justification, and it's finished at glorification when we're in eternity with God forever. But it's also a process of renewal and restoration. We think about salvation as just our issue. It's just me and God. It's just for me. Jesus died for me, but that's not what we see in the text. In the text, we see that we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies, the completion of the salvation process. But so does the world groans in the pains of childbirth waiting for its redemption and restoration as well. So what I want us to understand about salvation is it's bigger than you. It's about restoring all of creation. When God made heaven and earth in Genesis, he made it perfect. He was pleased with it. And I am convinced that it looks completely different than our earth now. And we have mucked up this earth with sin and brokenness. And that one day he will restore all things. He will return and he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he will be with us and we will be with our God and the former things will have passed away. And he'll create a new heaven and a new earth. And he will have restored creation back to himself and its original purpose. So when Jesus dies on the cross, he's not just dying for souls. He's dying for everything that he created to restore it back to himself. Because we're told in Romans that all of creation groans for the return of the king. The earth groans for God. And when we think about salvation as being in or being out, we miss virtually everything that's said in Romans 8. We make it so overly reductive as if to think that what we're teaching the kids over there is the greatest understanding that we ever need of this incredible doctrine. And we miss out on what it truly means to be saved. Here's the last thing that I want us to understand about salvation. Being saved allows us to experience glimpses of heaven here and now. If being in heaven is being with God and not being in heaven is being without God, then as people, we are literally experiencing either hell on earth or heaven on earth. Sometimes we get glimpses of what it is when we're in God's presence, at moments with our children, a hike, a sunset, a hug, singing. When we raise our voices, every time we sing and you guys sing loud and Aaron backs off and it's just us, every time that happens, I have to stop singing because I start crying. Because that's what heaven will be like. We will sing together. And so in being believers, we get these glimpses of heaven and what it will be like. And we usher God into our life and and we invite him in, and we allow him in. This is, again, why we should not be envious of the person who gets saved on their deathbed and got, oh, you got this whole life of freedom. No, we're actually taught in Romans that we are slaves to sin. We're slaves to this bondage of corruption, but that by being saved, we are finally free from sin. We live with more freedom than anyone. We should have more joy than anyone. I said this on Easter. Easter is the most joyful day and we are the most joyful people because of the hope that we have in Christ. So I want you to see this morning. I don't know if you can tell I'm fired up about it because I really want you to understand what it means to be saved it's not it's it's too small to understand it as am I going to heaven or am I not am I in or am I out with all gentleness that's a childlike understanding of our faith. And as we grow, and as we move towards glorification through our sanctification, we should allow God to deepen our understanding of what it means to be his child. And we should understand that he's going to restore all of creation to himself, not just us. And we should understand that every day we get to live as Christians is a day that we spend in the presence of God. And at his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. In his presence, there is fullness of joy. We should be happy and proud and grateful if we're already laboring in the vineyard because of our understanding of what salvation is and how much God loves us through it. So let's progress in that and develop a far more deep, rich, helpful, gratitude-inducing understanding of what it means to be saved. Let's pray. Father, thank you for saving us. Thank you for sending your son. Thank you for sharing him with us. Thank you for watching him suffer for us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore creation. Thank you for who you are. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that your Holy Spirit would beckon them even now to desire to be with you and begin to experience glimpses of eternity here in this life. For those of us who are saved, God, thank you. Thank you for calling us to work early. Thank you for letting us labor in your vineyard. Thank you for the joy that it brings in what it is. God, we pray all these things in the name of your son, Jesus. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors of grace. Somebody over there is stinky because this side is full. You guys, I don't know what you're avoiding over here, but this is ridiculous. It's good to see you. Thanks for coming in May in the rain. I keep expecting for us to get over. There's always a bump in attendance in the spring, January, February, March. And that usually lasts until Easter. And then you guys go to the beach like for the whole until August. I don't see you again. So I keep expecting that every week and you keep showing up. So I'm just I'm going to threaten you with this. You keep showing up. We're going to two services in the fall. OK, you just have to deal with it. I also just want to praise God sincerely for this. Gibby, our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, Gibby. We have too many Aarons around here, so I have to give them all nicknames, except for Aaron Buchanan. He's just Aaron, which makes sense. If you know him, that fits. Gibby's sick as a dog this morning. Like legit could barely talk to me when he got in this morning. He was late. He was later than he normally is because he's sick. So he can sneeze in the lobby now. But you wouldn't believe how often we look at each other on a Sunday morning and go, I feel terrible. I don't know if I can preach. I don't know if I can sing. And we just pray for God to give us 30 good minutes. And He always does. He always does. That was fantastic. I was moved to tears. It's so fun and good to be a singing church, especially since I inherited a bunch of frozen Presbyterians eight years ago. We've had to work on that a little bit. If you know, you know. This morning we continue in our series that Haley mentioned called FAQs, where we sourced some questions out to the small groups, solicited some responses, and just said, hey, what is it that you're curious about? What do you want to know? What questions do you have? And so we took kind of the most common ones and we said, let's talk about these on a Sunday. And I'm particularly excited to talk about this topic this morning because I feel it's so important. And it came up a lot in a bunch of different ways. But it's basically questions about understanding the doctrine of salvation. What does it mean to be saved? How do I know I'm going to heaven? Am I going to be saved forever? Can I lose it? Why does the question we're going to focus on at the beginning of our time this morning is why does God accept deathbed confessions, which is an interesting question, but there was a lot of questions around this doctrine of salvation and seeking to understand what it does mean to be saved and having a better understanding around that. And I think it's such an important question because once we get into church world, we kind of stop asking about salvation because I think we feel like we're supposed to know. And so we're embarrassed to ask. But here's what I know is that my understanding of salvation has worked progressively through my life that with each year or decade that passes, I come to understand salvation and what it is a little bit better. And I think that your understanding of salvation should progress as well. Even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, there's a reason you're in church on a random May in the rain. And it has to be because you're at least curious. You're at least thoughtful about it. And so I would love to have the opportunity to tell you more about what it means to be a Christian. And I want the Christians in the room to understand their salvation more deeply. Because it's my suspicion that everybody here who is a Christian has at some point in their life, and many of you, and I have to, I hope that you'll trust me this morning that I'm not trying to be hard on anybody. I'm not trying to make you feel small for the way that you think. I'm not trying to make you feel uneducated or dumb. I just think this is a necessary phase of our understanding of our salvation that every Christian goes through. And I also know from experience that many Christians spend their entire life kind of misunderstanding the doctrine of salvation and being overly reductive about the incredible miracle that it is and what it actually means. And so this morning, what I'm hoping to do is to give us all a more rich understanding of our salvation. So either we're kind of locked into how we initially understand it, and this will kind of open up our minds and help us understand it better, God and more grateful to him for the miraculous event and process of our salvation. So that's where we're going this morning. That's what I want to do. To get there, I want to start with this question that came up in our emails, which is why does God accept a deathbed confession? This is an interesting question because it belies the motives behind it. And the motives behind that question generate a lot of the other questions that we have around salvation. This question comes most of the time from a sense of jealousy or resentment or entitlement or frustration. This question is most likely, and if you're the one that asked this, please hear me. It makes sense to ask it. I understand why you would. Every Christian has asked it. It's asked so often that Jesus talks about it in the Bible, and we're about to go to exactly where Jesus answers this question. But I want us to understand why we're asking it first. Let's just put it out there and be honest about it, because all of us do it. And again, I don't want anyone to feel bad for asking this question. I just want to understand why it comes up. The main motive in my estimation behind this question, why would God accept a deathbed confession, is essentially this, if we're going to use real language. I've been saved for decades. And I've been denying myself and keeping it between the ditches and trying to follow God's rules for years. And I've lived without the freedom of a pagan. And I'm going to use the word pagan this morning because a pagan is someone who doesn't believe in God. I'm not trying to be dismissive of those people, of non-believers. It's just pagans easier to say than non-believer? So we as Christians, and we know this, especially those of us that were Christians in high school and college, we are jealous of the freedom of the pagan, right? We're jealous of what they get to do and what we can't do. We've spent our life trying to follow the rules, trying to do the right things, trying to live the right way. And now here's this person who spent their life as a free pagan doing whatever they wanted to do, following any rules that they felt like they needed to follow, never committed to God, no fidelity, didn't put in the work that I did. And now at the very end, they're just going to slip in the door and we're going to the same heaven. That's not fair. I know it's hard to hear that out loud, but I can see about half of you grinning at me right now. You'll all have these smirks on your face like, yeah, that's pretty true. You got me. We've all thought that, and it's okay to think that. It makes sense why we would. It makes sense that we would think that. But here's Jesus' answer to that question. Why does he accept deathbed confessions? This is actually a parable. In the Gospel of Matthew, you can turn to chapter 20 if you want to. I'm going to read you verses 13 through 16, but first I need to tell you what's going on. Somebody comes up to Jesus and they ask this question. And so Jesus tells this story. He says there's an owner of a vineyard and he goes out one day where he can get some day laborers. And I've told you before, Israel was a poor country. They were impoverished. And so there was hubs where you would go and you could get men to come and put in a day's labor at whatever business you owned. And this was their livelihood. This was all that. They just hope they got picked that day. That was their livelihood. And so there's these people and the owner goes and he says, hey, I need y'all to come work for me in my vineyard. I'm going to pay you one denarius. I don't know how much that is. I could have done the research on what it was, but that feels like a waste of time. Google it if you care. I'm going to give you one denarius. And they're like, okay, great deal. So they go with him, they get in the Ford Ranger and they go to the vineyard and they start to work, right? And I don't know why Ford Ranger is funny, but it is. And they start to work and they're working all day. About the middle of the day, some other workers come by the field and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we help you today? And the owner says, yeah, sure. Come on. You can work for me. And so they start working by the middle of the day. And then about the last hour of the day, some other workers show up and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we work for you? The owner says, that's great. Yeah, come on. And they're working for him. So then when the work's done, the owner lines them up and begins to pay them. And he starts with the first group of workers that he hired that morning. Here's your one denarius for your day's labor. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired in the middle. And he says, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired with just an hour to go. And he said, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And the guys that have been working all day are ticked. Like, that's not fair. I worked eight hours for my denarius. That dude worked two hours, worked one hour. He had missed the smoke breaks and the lunch break and everything and just came in during the last hour. That's not fair. And the owner responds to them like this in verse 13. But he answered one of them, I am not being unfair to unfair to you friend didn't you agree to work for a denarius take your pay and go I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money or are you envious because I am generous so So the last will be first. And the first will be last. I love that response. They go, hey, that's not fair. We've been working for eight hours. They've been working for one hour. And you're giving us the same pay. And he goes, what do you care? That's basically the answer. It's my money. Do you care what I do with my own possession? Do you care what I do with my own resources? What right is it of yours to tell me what I should do? I chose to be generous to him. Are you envious of my generosity? You agreed to a denarius. I gave you a denarius. They agreed to this. I gave them this. It's my resources to do with what I want. And so to our question of why does God accept a deathbed confession where the implication is, hey, I've been laboring in the vineyard all day, my whole life. I've been working at this for decades. I put in a full eight hours. And I get my salvation. I get my eternity in heaven. I get my utopia. But they just slid in at the last minute. They don't deserve what I deserve. Maybe we can believe in purgatory so they have to suffer a little bit before they get the glory that I get. This is the jealousy that we express. And in that is implied exactly what the workers were frustrated about. Hey, that's not fair. I've put in my time and my effort. I've done my work. And the pay shouldn't be the same. And here's what this does. When we ask that question and we think that way. And here's what I wanted to talk about. When we think like that, we make salvation something that we think of in terms of being in or out. And very often, there's a lot of questions that Christians ask about salvation, and the motivation behind that question is, am I in or am I out? Did I say the prayer the right way? Am I in or am I out? Am I in heaven or am I burning in hell forever? That's what we're asking. How much sinning can I do and still be saved? Can I lose my salvation or does God hold on to me and I can't lose my salvation? That's an in or out question. How do I, if I feel like I lost my salvation, can I get it back? If someone wanders away, were they ever truly saved? All these questions that we ask about salvation are indicative of this thought process of in or out. And that's how we think about our salvation. And this is the place where many of us get stuck for our whole lives. But what I want us to see is that in or out salvation is a small salvation. Thinking of it that way reduces it to something that it should have never been. And if you're there, if you think about it this way, if you've thought about it that way, I don't want you to feel bad because that in or out mentality was probably handed to you by a well-meaning teacher in your church who also adopted that, who never got a more expansive view of salvation. I got saved when I was four. I was four and a half years old. We went to a special service on Sunday night, and the teacher taught us about the doctrine of hell. And I don't know if Aaron Winston's in here, but if I find out that we're teaching our four-year-olds about hell and scaring them into salvation, that's not going to be okay. They taught us about hell. They told us what it was. And they said, do you want to go there? No. No way. That sounds terrible. What's in heaven? Well, you sing a lot. I mean, that's better than hell. Okay. What do I have to do to go to heaven? Well, you have to believe in Jesus. Deal. What do I do to believe in Jesus? Will you repeat this prayer after me? Okay. You say the words and I'll do them too. And I was saved into an in or out understanding of salvation. What four-year-old isn't going to take out a fire insurance policy by threat of hell. Of course I got saved. God in his goodness has progressed my understanding of what salvation is over the decades. But many of us get saved into this kind of faith where for us it's a matter of are we in or are we out? And when we think of it that way, we become the jealous workers in the vineyard that get upset that we've been, and some of you will understand this reference, we've been the good brother in Luke 15, the one that stayed home and worked. And then the prodigal son comes home and God lets him into heaven and throws a party for him too. And we're like, what in the world? I've been doing my part the whole time. Because for us, salvation is, am I in? Am I going to heaven? Or am I not? And many of us get saved. And with this reductive view of what salvation is, we spend the rest of our lives just trying to stay in and trying to understand what's going to keep us there. But I think that there is a much bigger, better view of salvation. And I think it's presented to us in plain language in the greatest chapter in the Bible, Romans chapter 8. I'm going to read to you what Paul writes about what salvation is. But before I do, I want you to understand where we're picking this up. The first eight chapters of Romans, the first seven chapters of Romans, are a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. It's a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. Now, also, I want to pause here before I read. I forgot to say this, and I want to make sure that we're clear on this. When I talk about salvation, when I say saved or not, I want to just pause and be very clear that we understand what this means together, okay? The way that we explain salvation at grace, and when I say we, I mean me, because I'm the one that does it. The way that we explain salvation at grace is to say, to be saved, to be a Christian means that we believe Jesus is who he says he is. He says he's the son of God who's come to take away the sins of the world. We believe that. We believe that it means that Jesus did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life. He died a perfect death and he resurrected and rescued us from death and sin and shame. And it means that we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which in Revelation 19 is to come crashing through the clouds to reclaim us and his creation and restore it back to himself and its original glory. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And that to become a Christian, all we need to engage in is the fundamental repentance of Christianity, which Peter describes to us in Acts. He's preaching a sermon. Jesus has been crucified. They're hanging out in the upper room for 40 days trying to figure out what to do. The Holy Spirit descends on them. Peter goes out to the crowd and he preaches. And the sermon is, hey, that guy that you killed was the Messiah and he came to save you. And the crowd believes him. And they say, what do we do? We messed up. And Peter says, repent and be baptized. Repent of what? I believe it's the fundamental repentance of salvation, which is to repent of who you thought Jesus was before you came to agree with him about who he says he is. So to be saved, we repent of who we thought Jesus was before we moved into this moment and this process of salvation. And we accept who he says he is from his word. That's what being a Christian is. Now, Romans is the most detailed theological lesson we get in the Bible. And the first seven chapters are written to help us understand what salvation is and what God did in it and what his responsibility is, what our responsibility is. Then in Romans 8, he culminates that seven chapter argument with what I think is the greatest chapter of the Bible and the culmination of the glory of salvation. And he proclaims to us what salvation is. So I want you to hear how Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 8 and see if this can't begin to expand our view of salvation. I've got my old Bible out. This is the ESV. I was reading this passage this morning in the NIV as I was going through the sermon. Sorry, sorry, DeVos. I know I bought you a Bible and now I'm ruining it. And I just didn't, I don't like the way the NIV reads. This is way better. So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to read you from the ESV. This is the soaring doctrine of salvation that Paul gives us. Verse 19. And I'm going to read all the way down through verse 30, so buckle up. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons in God. The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it. In hopes that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what he sees, but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Okay, lock in. You may have faded away, and you're not paying attention to the words anymore, but these three verses are super important. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And this is the important part. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. This is Paul's soaring description of what it means to be saved and what salvation is seeking to do and what God is seeking to work in that salvation. So the first thing that we see is in the very first verse where Paul says, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. What Paul is saying here is, whatever we had to suffer to be Christians, whatever we had to suffer to be in and to build God's kingdom, whatever that work was for the day in the vineyard, and we've put in our time, whatever suffering we've endured for the sake of the kingdom and for the sake of God is not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us. In other words, there is no possible way you will spend any time at all being saved, being a Christian, being a child of God, and come to regret it. It is impossible that you would be a Christian your whole life and serve God your whole life and get to heaven and be jealous of the people who partied in college. That will not happen. As a matter of fact, what I want us to see, and Paul's talking to a persecuted church, to people who actually suffer. Very few of us, if any, have suffered for our faith. The bar to entry in the American evangelical church is so low that it costs us nothing to come. We have not suffered. Furthermore, the Bible makes it very clear that life with God is the best life possible. Scripture is replete of verses and passages that remind us that being a Christian is the best life possible. And I can go through the Rolodex, John 10.10, that I talk about all the time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy. But Jesus says, I have come that you might have life and have it to the full, have the most rich, full life possible. We're told in Psalms that at God's right hand are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence, there is a fullness of joy. We're told again in Psalms that one day in his courts is better than thousands elsewhere. We're told that we serve a God in Ephesians that is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. We're told in John that from his fullness, we receive grace upon grace. We're told these things over and over again in scripture, that life with God is the best life possible. It's the fullest life possible. And so the reality is that if you're a Christian who's been saved your whole life and someone slips in at the last minute and they get to go to heaven too, you shouldn't feel jealousy. You should feel empathy because you just got to live your whole life with God and they missed out on all that joy. It is to our advantage to be picked up early and work in the vineyard all day. It's the life that we should desire and what we want. We should not feel jealousy to the deathbed conversion. We should feel empathy because they had to go through their whole life without God. And that's what salvation is. It's not in or out. It's with or without. You understand? It's not am I in, am I in, am I going or am I not? It's do I, am I living life with God? Am I abiding in him or am I not? And when someone is not saved, when someone doesn't know the Lord, the great tragedy is that they go through their life without experiencing the joy of the Lord and the joy of heaven. Without experiencing that relationship with him and the richness and fullness of life. We should not be jealous of that. We should be empathetic and continue to invite them in because through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. We needn't be jealous of the people who don't put in the work that we do. Because there is joy in that work. So right off the bat, Paul's not talking about in or out. Paul says with or without. And that there is no suffering that will not make it worth the glory that is to be revealed to us. Then, in the rest of this passage, we see this. And this is an important phrase. I want us to rest on it for a little bit. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. This is why this is important. Those words, process is important, restoration, renewal is important, and I want to show you why. But first, we're going to go to that word process. Because I think that many of us think about salvation as this moment in time. I wasn't saved. I prayed the prayer, said the confession, did whatever moment you look to where your belief changed. I wasn't saved. Then I prayed the prayer. I am saved. Done. And that's not true. Salvation is a process. And we know that salvation is a process because of what Paul writes in verse 30 that I said was really important. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. That's a process. So let's walk through it so we understand it. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom God knew before time were going to accept his invitation to salvation, he also called them to himself. With the urging of the Holy Spirit, he called you to himself. It wasn't your work that found God. It was God calling you to himself through his love and through his kindness and through his goodness. Now, I know that some of you in the room are Calvinist and you care deeply about these words. I am not and I don't. So I'm not going to last a long time there. OK, but those whom he predestined, he also called those whom he called. He also justified that justification is what many of us think of as the moment of our salvation. That's when you were set righteous. You were clothed in the righteousness of Christ. You were set right in the court of God. You were justified before him. You are no longer guilty. You were absolved from your sin because Jesus died, lived a perfect life and died a perfect death. You are now justified before God. And the good news is that in the culmination of this chapter, there's this incredibly powerful verse of the assurance of salvation where Paul writes, So once you are justified, Paul says, I am convinced that nothing can unjustify you. Nothing can unsave you. But the process doesn't stop there. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he also justified. Those whom he justified, he also glorified. Now Paul speaks as if it's already been done because the work has been done. But we are not yet glorified. We are glorified when we occupy our bodies in heaven. We are glorified when we sit in the presence of God. I love that verse that he sneaks in there in the middle. We do not hope for what we see. We hope for what we do not see. So we wait for it with patience. Meaning, when we get to heaven, we don't need faith and hope anymore because we have God there. So he says that glorification is coming later. So what I want you to understand about your salvation is that it is in process. It's not done. When you are justified, you're secure. You will not be unjustified. But there is another step. And that doesn't happen until eternity. And that's what's in this text. So it's a process, I said, and that's the process. It starts at predestination, at call, at justification, and it's finished at glorification when we're in eternity with God forever. But it's also a process of renewal and restoration. We think about salvation as just our issue. It's just me and God. It's just for me. Jesus died for me, but that's not what we see in the text. In the text, we see that we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies, the completion of the salvation process. But so does the world groans in the pains of childbirth waiting for its redemption and restoration as well. So what I want us to understand about salvation is it's bigger than you. It's about restoring all of creation. When God made heaven and earth in Genesis, he made it perfect. He was pleased with it. And I am convinced that it looks completely different than our earth now. And we have mucked up this earth with sin and brokenness. And that one day he will restore all things. He will return and he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he will be with us and we will be with our God and the former things will have passed away. And he'll create a new heaven and a new earth. And he will have restored creation back to himself and its original purpose. So when Jesus dies on the cross, he's not just dying for souls. He's dying for everything that he created to restore it back to himself. Because we're told in Romans that all of creation groans for the return of the king. The earth groans for God. And when we think about salvation as being in or being out, we miss virtually everything that's said in Romans 8. We make it so overly reductive as if to think that what we're teaching the kids over there is the greatest understanding that we ever need of this incredible doctrine. And we miss out on what it truly means to be saved. Here's the last thing that I want us to understand about salvation. Being saved allows us to experience glimpses of heaven here and now. If being in heaven is being with God and not being in heaven is being without God, then as people, we are literally experiencing either hell on earth or heaven on earth. Sometimes we get glimpses of what it is when we're in God's presence, at moments with our children, a hike, a sunset, a hug, singing. When we raise our voices, every time we sing and you guys sing loud and Aaron backs off and it's just us, every time that happens, I have to stop singing because I start crying. Because that's what heaven will be like. We will sing together. And so in being believers, we get these glimpses of heaven and what it will be like. And we usher God into our life and and we invite him in, and we allow him in. This is, again, why we should not be envious of the person who gets saved on their deathbed and got, oh, you got this whole life of freedom. No, we're actually taught in Romans that we are slaves to sin. We're slaves to this bondage of corruption, but that by being saved, we are finally free from sin. We live with more freedom than anyone. We should have more joy than anyone. I said this on Easter. Easter is the most joyful day and we are the most joyful people because of the hope that we have in Christ. So I want you to see this morning. I don't know if you can tell I'm fired up about it because I really want you to understand what it means to be saved it's not it's it's too small to understand it as am I going to heaven or am I not am I in or am I out with all gentleness that's a childlike understanding of our faith. And as we grow, and as we move towards glorification through our sanctification, we should allow God to deepen our understanding of what it means to be his child. And we should understand that he's going to restore all of creation to himself, not just us. And we should understand that every day we get to live as Christians is a day that we spend in the presence of God. And at his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. In his presence, there is fullness of joy. We should be happy and proud and grateful if we're already laboring in the vineyard because of our understanding of what salvation is and how much God loves us through it. So let's progress in that and develop a far more deep, rich, helpful, gratitude-inducing understanding of what it means to be saved. Let's pray. Father, thank you for saving us. Thank you for sending your son. Thank you for sharing him with us. Thank you for watching him suffer for us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore creation. Thank you for who you are. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that your Holy Spirit would beckon them even now to desire to be with you and begin to experience glimpses of eternity here in this life. For those of us who are saved, God, thank you. Thank you for calling us to work early. Thank you for letting us labor in your vineyard. Thank you for the joy that it brings in what it is. God, we pray all these things in the name of your son, Jesus. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here for part six of our series in John. We've been in John for a while and we'll continue to be in John until the week after Easter. I'm really excited about this series. I hope I've been encouraging you guys to grab a reading plan on the information table as you leave. There's only two tables out there. One of them has coffee on them and the other one doesn't. So I trust you to figure out which is which. And on that table, there is the reading plan so that you can be reading along through the gospel of John with us. Because I've been saying the whole time, it's not good to only get my perspective on John and on Jesus through John. You need to put your own head and your own heart and your own emotions into it so that you can process Jesus on your own and then supplement it with this and what you're talking about, hopefully, in your small groups. We've been going through John because John was, for all intents and purposes, one of Jesus' closest friends and offers us a unique perspective of Jesus. This week, we arrive at my favorite verse in the Bible. Now, some of you have already gotten on to me this morning because you say I have a lot of favorite verses. Because like every other week, I'll put in the grace find. This is one of my favorite passages. I'm super excited. And now I'm starting to get a hard time. Like all of the passages are my favorite passages. But shame on you for being mad at your pastor for loving the Bible. I expect more of you, Grace. But no, that's my bad. I'm the boy who cried favorite. But this really is my favorite. I love this verse. It's hanging up in my house. I believe that when we understand this verse, when we choose to believe it, it really changes everything. And this is one that I weave into just about every sermon that I do. I love this passage. To understand this verse, I want to come at it from a different angle and share with you a conversation that my wife Jen and I had last week. Last week, we were talking about something, and she lovingly and fairly pointed out that maybe there's a chance that I have a little bit of an authority issue. It's possible that I don't care for authority or being told what to do. There's a chance of that. And I push back on that a little bit. I say, I don't have an issue with authority. I just have an issue with unreasonable and dumb authority. I mean, that seems fair. If you're telling me to do something that doesn't make sense, I'm not going to do that thing. If your authority was given to you by something that I don't recognize, like, say, putting a stop sign in a shopping center parking lot, I don't recognize that authority. I'm not going to stop. I don't care. That's on you, Kroger, right? That's not my authority. So I don't have a problem with authority. I just have a problem with unreasonable authority, right? And there's plenty of examples of this, but I think back to Snotnose High School, Nate, in Mrs. Parks' ninth grade algebra class. Now, Mrs. Parks is a wonderful lady. She's incredibly sweet. She still teaches high school math at Killian Hill Christian School in Lilburn, Georgia, where I went. It was a small private school. I graduated with 26 other people. I don't like to brag a lot, but I did graduate 24th in my class, so higher than most of you probably. That's actually true. My parents' greatest frustration in life is my academic career, but joke's on them. I'm living the dream. Who cares? She taught me in high school all four years. She teaches everybody all four years, and I can remember a conversation in ninth grade that went something like this. It's not exactly how it went, but it went a lot like this. I took a test, and in that test, there's some simple algebra problems. Like, I don't know, X plus three equals five. And I just write down on my paper, two. X equals two, that's pretty easy. You know, any more brain busters? And so then I hand in my test. I get it back, and she's taking points off that question. So she says, if anybody has any questions, you can come talk to me at my desk. And I'm like, I got a question for you, buddy. I need to see this. So I go up to Mrs. Parks. I'm like, hey, I don't understand. I got this question right, but you took points off of my test. What gives? And she said, well, you didn't show your work. I need you to show the steps. And I'm like, why? I got the question right. I don't need the steps. Your steps are for dummies. I don't need them. And she says, well, I need you to show your steps because in future tests, if you get a question wrong, but you do the work right, I can give you partial credit. And then all my immature 15-year-old bluster, I said, well, I tell you what, how about I just write down the right answer and you give me full credit? What do you think about that? And she kind of did the thing that you guys are doing right now, like, oh my gosh, what's the matter with this kid? And she did it. She was gracious and she was like, all right, that's how you want to do this thing. And when I did it right in my head, she gave me full credit. The problem was geometry. Geometry, I can no longer do it in my head. And all of us, some of us are good at math, but there always comes a point in which we can no longer do it in our head. We have to follow the steps. And I didn't know how to do the steps because I had rejected them and thought that they were dumb, and I didn't follow them. And so I ended up failing geometry because I didn't know how to do the steps. Turns out she was right, and guess what? I was wrong. I have plenty of stories like that in my life where an authority has said something, and I said, I'm not going to do it your way. I'm going to do it the other way, like the stop sign in my neighborhood. Or like I've gotten counsel for something from somebody who probably knew more about that thing than I did, but I said, you know what? I'm going to trust my wisdom more on this one than your wisdom. I'm going to do my own thing. And there are some of you here who can totally identify with me. When I say, I don't really care for authority to be told what to do, you're like, me neither, buddy. And there are some of you who just judged me, and that's fine. I can handle that. Some of you who are a lot like my wife, Jen, my sweet wife, Jen, who, she follows authority, there's security in rules and structure and that's fine. And you tell me what to do and I'll do it. And some of you are absolutely like that and you're hugely uncomfortable operating outside of authority. But what I want us to see is that I, the problem that I have is the problem that we all have, because at some point in your life, even those of you who love and respect authority and appreciate the structure that it brings you and feel safe within that structure, all of us at some point have broken the rules and rejected authority. All of us. If you haven't, then you're sinless and you should be the pastor of the church. I'd be excited to learn from you. We've all, at some point or another, rejected authority, gone our own way, done what we thought we needed to do. We've all, at some point, said, your rules don't make the most sense right here. I'm not going to do those rules. Or your counsel, the advice that you're giving me is a counsel that I reject. I don't care for it. Even though you probably know more about it than I do, I'm going to reject that counsel and do what I think is best in this situation. And I want us to see that when we do that, that implicit in our rejection of authority or counsel is an admission that we think we know better. You see, we've all done this. We've all rejected authority in our life at different times for different reasons. And we've all rejected counsel in our life at different times for different reasons. And that's all well and good because sometimes all authority shouldn't be followed. But when we do that, when we reject authority or counsel, there is an admission in that that we believe our way is better, right? To take it to the next level. A lot of times when that authority is a moral authority, when that counsel is moral counsel, a lot of times when we reject moral authority or moral counsel, we do it in favor of a pursuit of our own happiness. We believe that we're experiencing a happy, joyful life and that the thing that we want to pursue is actually outside of that authority that is being levied over us. And so we push off the authority that would have us act in a certain way in favor of pursuing our own happiness because we don't believe that submission to that authority will bring about our happiness. I said it like this. We reject authority when we do not believe submission will lead to happiness. You see this? When you're a kid, your parents tell you to do something and and you reject that authority, because we're not going to have more fun if I follow that authority. This is actually going to lead to greater happiness if I reject that authority and do what I want. I think back to when I was about 17 years old. My dad, mom and dad said, forget it with the curfew. Just tell us if you're going to be home that night, and let us know when you get wherever you're going. But no curfew. You do what you like. But here's the thing. My dad always said this. Nothing good happens after midnight. Son, go do what you want. But listen, nothing good happens after midnight. And I thought, that is a stupid idea. All the best things happen after midnight, right? All the fun stuff happens after midnight. That's when you get the best stories, right? So he says you need to, yeah, she knows. What are you doing over there, five-year-old? That's great. That's right, baby. He says you need to stay, you need to be in, you need to be safe, you need to make wise choices. And I think that's not going to lead to my happiness. That's not going to lead to fun. I'm going to choose this over here. And so I reject, I believe that submission to that authority will prevent me from being happy. And so I'm going to pursue it over here in rebellion of that authority, right? And here's the thing. Those two ideas that to reject authority or counsel is to say implicitly that we believe that we know better, and to reject moral authority and moral counsel is to say that I don't believe my happiness can be pursued in submission to that, so I believe that my happiness is best pursued in rebellion to that authority. It's through this grid that all of us, in one way or another, view God. You see? If you think about it from a non-Christian's perspective, and if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, I am thrilled that you're here. I'm thrilled that you're dipping your toe in the water to see if we're actually a bunch of weirdies or if maybe we're kind of like you and just trying to figure out life. I appreciate the fact that you're here and that you're exploring. That's wonderful. But for those of us who know people who aren't believers, or if perhaps you are not a believer, I think one of the things we could agree upon is, if you live in the South, first of all, you've been exposed to the gospel. You've heard about the Bible. You've heard about Jesus. You've probably sat in a church service. There's not many people wandering around our culture who haven't at least been presented the story of Jesus, right? And so it's been an active decision to keep Jesus at arm's length. And people do this for different reasons. But a lot of the reasons can be boiled down to a simple rejection of authority. I'm not interested in submitting to that authority in my life right now. Because people who are not believers tend to believe that to become a Christian means I'm going to have to stop doing some things that I really enjoy doing and I'm going to have to start doing some stuff that I really don't want to do. Right? If we think about ourselves and our journey and coming to a place where we submitted to God and said, yeah, I'll live my life under the authority of God's word. If we think of some of the people we know who may be on the fence about it, I would be willing to bet that a big contention that they have is to be a Christian, to live under the authority of God's word means to stop doing some things that bring me joy and to start doing some things that I don't think will bring me joy. So what we see is they're choosing their pursuit of their own happiness over what God's happiness will be for them, right? They think they know a better way than God does, and so no thanks. But here's the thing, even as believers, we continue to do this. We have these pockets of exceptions that we make for ourselves in our life. If you're here this morning and you're a believer, then most of you would say that you live your life under the authority of this word, that if God's word says something, that you try to acquiesce to that, you try to live in submission to it. And yeah, we mess up from time to time. Nobody's perfect, but I do try to live my life under the authority of God. But here's the thing, even as believers, we all have pockets and we all have places where we don't really submit to God's word. We're over here, we're submitted to God's authority and we're pursuing his happiness and the good life that he has for us here. But over here, what we believe is I'm going to hold on to these sins and these things because I really do believe that my happiness will be found here more than it will be found with God. And so we hang on to these things. An easy example of this is the biblical admonishment that we should confess our sins to one another. Scripture teaches over and over again in the Old Testament and in the New Testament that we should confess our sins to loving brothers and sisters, that we should take the dark things that are in our life and shed light on them. Because when we put them in the light and we allow God's people, God's children who love us and who love Jesus to see what's happening in the dark recesses of our life and of our heart that to do that sheds light on a sin and will destroy that sin and break that foothold that is in our life. We know this to be true. If you've been a Christian for any time, you've heard that teaching. But here's the thing. Most Christians I know are really bad at that. When's the last time, I'm being honest, those of you who have been walking with the Lord for a long time, when's the last time you had an egregious sin in your life that was eating your lunch and that you sat down and endured the shame and told somebody who loved you and who loved Jesus, hey man, this is kicking my tail? When's the last time you did that? When's the last time someone did that to you? When was the last time someone called you to coffee or called you on the phone and said, hey, I just need your help with this. This is going on in my life and I don't want it to be a part of my life anymore. For most of us, that hasn't happened in a long time because even though God's word teaches it, we don't like to do it. Why don't we like to do it? Because to do that would cause shame. There would be potential ramifications in our marriages, in our finances, in our standing, perhaps in our careers. It would cost us a lot to have to confess the thing that's going on in our life that we don't want to admit to. And so what we do is, instead of submitting to God's authority and confessing that to somebody who loves us, who can help walk us through it, is we convince ourselves that I'm going to handle this on my own. I tell you what, God, I have a better way. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to get over this sin on my own, and then I'll never need to confess it to anyone. No one will ever need to know about this part of my life and my heart. And then I'll move past it, and it'll just be a thing that used to exist. Sound familiar? And we know that God's word says that we need to confess, but we go, no, I have a better way. If I do that, that will make me unhappy. I will lose things that are sources of joy, so I'm going to pursue my happiness here. We all do this with God. And it's to this mindset, to those of us who may not be believers who hold Christ at arm's length because we believe that to follow him would cost us a quality of life that we're not willing to give up, or those of us who are following Jesus but we hold him at arm's length in certain areas of our life because we don't want to give up that portion of our life because we don't think that it will really make us happier if we follow him. We think that we're living the best life possible now because we trust our judgment more than we trust his. It's to that mindset that Jesus speaks in John chapter 10. In John chapter 10, if you have a Bible, you can open there. He uses another one of these great I am statements, these big statements that he says throughout the gospel of John that makes it unique from the other gospels. The other gospels, we have parables. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have parables, stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. We don't have any of those in John. In John, we have I am statements. A couple weeks ago, Kyle preached about him being the living, he says, I am the living water. Last week, we looked at him saying he is the bread of life. This week, he says he is the good shepherd. And the picture here with the good shepherd, and Jesus often paints himself as the good shepherd, is that he is the shepherd of the flock. The flock is us, his church, his children. And the idea with sheep is they're pretty helpless without their shepherd. They're not going to find their way to food. They're not going to find their way to water. They're not going to find their way to flourishing without their shepherd guiding them. They're going to be totally defenseless against predators without their shepherd there to protect them. And so Jesus sets himself up as our shepherd who is there to guide us, to lead us into good water, to lead us into good pastures, and to protect us. And in this verse, he talks about being the gate for the sheep. In town, when you're a shepherd in town, when you're at your house or your farm or whatever it is, there's like a big structure. There's wood and a structure and a swinging gate and hinges and the whole deal, and he can lock the sheep in there and everybody's good. But out on the hillside in the country, a little bit away from the town where the sheep might be grazing, if you need to stay overnight, the shepherd has to make kind of a makeshift pen. He has to set up rocks and sticks and things like that to keep the sheep hemmed in. And then because he doesn't carry a gate with hinges in his pocket, he's got to make a gate. And so what the shepherd will do out in the hillside is he will sleep in front of the opening of the gate, of the pen, and serve as the physical personification of the gate so that nothing can get to his sheep unless it comes through him. And then he talks about this idea of a thief that might try to get into the gate in any other way by jumping in or coming into the pen by any way that isn't him. Okay? And so that's kind of the context for this verse that has become my favorite verse. John 10, 10, Jesus says this, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly. The thief is Satan. He is the enemy. We're going to talk about him in a second. But Jesus says, listen, to a room full of people who we at different points in our life for different reasons have all rejected the authority of Jesus in our life at one time or another. To a room full of people who have all at different points chosen our own version of happiness and our own judgment over his to pursue what we think is going to be the best life possible for us. To a room full of people who have done that, Jesus says, I am the gate. I am the good shepherd. And if it comes into your life through me, then the promise is you will have life and have it abundantly. Other translations say have it to the full. The original language, the word there means to have a super abundance of a thing. Jesus tells you, those of us who doubt his authority, who choose our own version of happiness over his version of happiness, he tells us, I promise you that standard is working to bring about the greatest possible happiness and joy and fulfillment for you. If it's counsel from my word or from someone who loves me and loves my word and they're speaking this into your life, I promise you that counsel, even if it's counterintuitive, will be working to bring about for you the greatest possible life that you can have in this life and the next. Jesus promises us that anything that comes from him is working to bring about your greatest happiness. And then he says, but the thief, which is anything that gets to you that isn't through me, is working to steal and to kill and to destroy your life. And we understand that that thief is Satan. And we don't talk a lot about Satan here. We don't talk a lot about the devil. And actually, it's such a big part of the scripture. He's addressed so much that I really do believe at some point or another, we're gonna do a whole series on the devil. I'll wear a double-breasted suit every Sunday and a handkerchief and I'll dab my forehead a lot and yell at you, okay? It'd be great. We need to address him. He's a big part of Scripture, but for the purposes of this morning, what we need to know is Satan is real, he is effective, and he is against you. And Jesus says, anything that gets into your life that is not from me is from him. And it is working to steal and to kill and to destroy your life. And many of us know that this is true experient the thief can derail our life, can steal our life from us, there's easy examples of this. We immediately think of the egregious sins, right? We think of maybe an addiction. Maybe there was somebody who had a surgery, the surgery of the recovery of which required some pain medication. And so they began to take that medication and they liked the way that made them feel. There was more of it than they needed, and we fast forward two, three years down the road, and they've developed an addiction, and that's how Satan steals our lives. I have a dear, dear friend whose wife developed one of these, and it has wrecked their life. He has had portions of his life stolen from him from a sin that isn't even his. We've seen this work in our lives and in the lives of others, right? Sometimes it's a secret sin. It's an affair or an issue or a private thing that we have going on that we won't confess, that we won't let other people know about. And Proverbs tells us that we can't hold hot coals against our chest and not be burned. And sometimes, eventually, that secret sin will fester up and manifest itself and do damage in our life that is irreparable, and Satan will have successfully stolen that portion of our life from us from some egregious secret thing or from some addiction. But for most of us, that is not how Satan is going to steal our life. The Bible says he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking who he may devour. And for some of us, that's how he picks us off. But for many of us, most of us, I think Satan's most pernicious tactic is to simply distract us, to keep us focused on all sorts of things as we go through life that aren't from God, that ultimately don't matter. I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with people in their 50s and 60s who have poured their life into their career and been very successful into that career, in that career, only to find that they don't have the relationship with their children or their spouse that they would really like because Satan distracted them for so many years and they poured their life into a thing that ultimately doesn't matter very much. We pour ourselves into hobbies that don't matter. We get really good at a thing that has no eternal value And most of that is a masking mechanism because we're not happy with what our home life looks like. And what we really need to do is work on that. But it's easier to be distracted by these other shiny things that are going off in our life. And so we pursue those. We pursue the house that we want. We pursue the family that we want. We pursue all these things that at the end of the day might not matter very much, but Satan has successfully distracted us with things going on in our world and in our culture that don't matter for eternity, and he steals your life from you. Some of you walked in here today, and you are in the middle of having your life stolen. And for you, I hope if nothing else happens as a result of this this morning, that you will recognize that that's taking place. And you'll put your foot on the ground and you'll say, no more. I'm not going to allow my life to be stolen from me in this way. But what I want us to trust is that if it comes from Jesus, even if it's counterintuitive, that it is working to bring about our greatest happiness. There's plenty of examples of how this works. I think of marriage, right? Most of us in the room are married, and if you're married, what do you want? You want your marriage to be vibrant and happy and fulfilling and loving and filled with joy. That's what you want. The problem is not very many of us or not most of us would use those words to describe our marriages because marriage is hard, and to get to that place, it takes a lot of work, and sometimes it's easier to just fulfill the needs of marriage outside of that marriage because that takes a lot less work, right? Sometimes when we're not having our needs met within a marriage, we go outside the marriage to another person or a thing or a hobby or a group of people or some sort of masking activity from what we're lacking in our home. And what Scripture teaches us is that our greatest happiness is found in our marriage. If you are married right now, I'm not talking about in the past, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad. If you are married right now, I can tell you it is God's will that you would be happy and flourishing in that marriage. It is God's will that you would remain married. I know that to be the case. And so what God really wants us to do, even though sometimes when marriage gets hard, it looks like it would be easier to just go outside the marriage and have our needs met in different ways and keep everything intact. The better thing to do, the harder thing to do, is to lean harder into our marriage and do the hard work that it takes to bring vibrancy there because that is the path through which our greatest happiness and fulfillment will be found. That's what Jesus promises. Another easy one is the confession. When we don't confess, we don't do it because we're afraid of the shame that it's going to bring us. And so we try to work on this thing privately, and it never gets any better. And we never experience the grace of other people loving us without judgment and without shame and seeking to build us up. And so we never obey God and confess our sins to one another, and that thing festers. Instead, if we would just do the difficult thing and shed light on the dark places, we would watch the love of God and the grace of God through His children rush into our life and heal us of this thing that's been eating our lunch forever. Right? Example after example of things that seem counterintuitive, if we follow the authority of Christ, it can't possibly make me happy. It can't possibly make me happy to give away a minimum of 10% of my money. That does not seem very smart. But God promises us that if we do that, if we'll be generous people, that we will experience life as conduits of his generosity and experience the joy that comes from that. Jesus promises us in John 10.10 that even when it doesn't make any sense, if it gets into your life from him, then it is working to bring about the greatest life you could possibly imagine.10? Do you believe John 10.10? Do you believe that Jesus is telling the truth? Do you believe that Jesus cares deeply about your joy and your happiness and the quality of your life now? And do you believe if he does care about that, that he alone knows how to bring about your greatest joy? Do you believe that? Because if you do, if you believe it, then our whole life changes. There's never a reason to sin again. There's never a reason to throw off his authority again, because we know that we trust that God is working to bring about our happiness. When we get to those crossroads in life, where it would be far easier to just do the easy thing, the simple thing, to do the thing that is a rejection of God's authority, or it would be difficult to choose God's authority. When we get to those crossroads, if we believe John 10.10, it will be easier to choose Jesus' authority than our own because we know we can trust him with our happiness and with our joy. If we believe John 10.10, here's the thing, there's no reason to ever sin again when we really think that it's true. And when we really think that we can trust it, it changes everything. So here's how we want to finish. I would love for you to think through, where is God trying to bring me joy? Where am I allowing my life to be stolen from me? What lies am I believing in pursuing happiness outside of God's will that will never make me happy? Where am I allowing my life to be stolen from me? And what would it look like if I actually chose submission to God, glad and happy obedience, and pursued the happiness that he promises me through everything that enters into my life through him as it works to bring about our greatest joy and the greatest life possible, a super abundance of the thing. This week, as you go throughout your days and you hit those crossroads where you realize it's a choice between my authority and my version of good and Jesus' authority and his version of good, whose will you choose? And really, the question as you leave this morning is, who do you trust with your life and with your happiness? Yourself or Jesus? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your son who loved us so well, who was so patient with us, who was so gracious with us, who is our good shepherd, who always leads us to the good places. God, I pray that we would trust him with our lives, that we would trust him in submission to you, that we wouldn't be, frankly, so arrogant as to choose our own way, but that we would submit to the founder and perfecter of our faith, to the author of the universe, that we would trust that you have our best interest at heart and you know exactly how to bring that about. Father, let us trust you more. Let us choose your judgment and your authority over our own. Let us believe what your son says in John 10.10. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and if I hadn't got a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that. Thanks for coming on Time Change Sunday. I know that we're all, our wagons are dragging a little bit, but that's all right. Before I just launch into the sermon, I do have a bit of a retraction to print. Last week, I maliciously and falsely accused my wife, Jen, of smoking a cigar in college. We did not agree on the story, and that afternoon, she texted her friend Carla, her roommate, and I know Carla very well, and she asked her to confirm her side of the story, and Carla said, no, I was there. You pretended and gave it to me, and I'm the one that smoked it. It was a black and mild. It was disgusting. So I was wrong. Jen, as usual, was right. She's at home now with a sick kid. So anyways, if you see her, let her know that her character has been restored. One thing that is true that Jen and I do, and I bet that you've had the same conversation with your spouse if you have one of those or you're a good friend or something like that but I don't know about y'all but for us every time the a Powerball lottery gets up but like a ridiculous amount like 330 million dollars or something like that like so much it gets so big that your mom starts buying lottery tickets just in case it's God's will that she have that money to use it for his kingdom. You know, that's how we Christians justify the lottery ticket purchases. But every time we see that, when we'll see the billboard or mention it or something like that, then what conversation do we immediately have? Right, nodding heads. What would we do if we won the money, right? So then we get to have that fun conversation, and it goes, by now we've had it enough times that it goes in some very predictable ways. Out of the gates, you know, you have to sweep aside, get rid of the practicalities. Like, don't tell me how you're going to invest it. That's boring. Don't be a nerd. Like, what's the fun stuff you're going to do? What are the extravagances that you're going to allow yourself? And it always starts small with us because we're trying to be humble because we're trying to be humble people. We're not going to be ostentatious. But the one extravagance I always lead with, this one's consistent for me, is a private chef. I want a private chef to just live at my house and make me food all the time. That's what I would like. Jen will eventually admit that she wants to get a condo in Manhattan. And those are our extravagances. And then I'll be like, and maybe, you know, I mean, the car's got a lot of miles on it. So maybe I need a new car. Maybe you need a top of the line Honda Odyssey. You know. You guys know that's what I want. Maybe for travel, we should just buy into a private jet, like a share, not our own, but maybe we'll just share. We try to stay humble, and then as we have the conversation, it just gets more and more absurd until we're the Kardashians, so then you just laugh and whatever. But those are, that's fun to do. That's a fun game to play. What would life be like if? And then you imagine this life that maybe you would have one day, and I don't know what you guys would do if you hit it big, but it's fun to play that game of imagining what life could be like if. But one of the things that we all do, even if you're not ridiculous like Jen and I and daydream about what it would be like to win the Powerball, what I am convinced of is that every person in this room, every person who can hear my voice, does have plans and hopes and dreams for their life that are real, that are substantive, that actually matter to you because they're actually attainable. This is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have a name for it. It's the American dream. People move to this country in pursuit of what you have access to because we live in a place where we are allowed to dream our own dreams, we are allowed to make our own plans, and we are allowed to begin to pursue those. And so everybody here has hopes and plans and dreams for their life. And those are less funny. Because I'm probably never going to have a private chef. Probably not. I might be able to hire one for ad night to make me stay. I'm probably not going to ever have a private chef. I'm not going to mourn that. We'll probably never have a condo in Manhattan. I'm not going to mourn the loss of that potential condo, but I do have hopes and dreams in my life that if they don't come to fruition, I will mourn that. If I don't get to do Lily's wedding, that's going to make me sad. If I don't get to meet my grandchildren, that's going to make me sad. If I'm not still married to Jen in 30 years, that's going to make me sad. So we all have hopes and dreams that we marshal our resources around, that we pursue with our life, that we intend to execute. And some of us are less detailed than others. Like I've got a good friend in Chicago, and they were as meticulous as when they were first married before they had kids, they moved to Chicago and she had an opportunity to get her master's at Northwestern, get her MBA there, which is an expensive prospect. And they basically said, hey, if we do this, and we're going to borrow that money, then we are committed to both of us having full-time jobs and using our resources to pay for a nanny. That's just how our family is going to be. And they said okay, and they executed that plan and they've done that. And now they have three kids and a two bedroom condo in Chicago off of Lake Michigan. And their plan now is in 2026 or maybe 2027, they're going to move to the Atlanta suburbs to be closer to his family, to be closer to his mom. So they've got their plans mapped out like that. And maybe that's how you do your plans, and maybe it's not. But you all have them. You all have, if you have kids, you have hopes and dreams for your kids. It could be as minuscule as the kind of job you want them to have. It could be as broad as the kind of person that you want them to be. If you're married, you have hopes and dreams for that. If you have a career, you have hopes and dreams for that. But we all do this. As soon as we kind of come online somewhere in adolescence and realize that one day our life is going to be our own, we begin to imagine how we want to build it. Nobody in this space doesn't have plans and hopes and dreams for themselves, however broad or humble they might be. And I bring this up because the passage that we're looking at today in Mark chapter 8, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through 37 is where we're going to be focused. As we continue to move through Mark, we arrive this morning at one of the most challenging teachings in scripture. It's this incredibly high bar of demand that Jesus sets on our life. And it is one that we may not even be familiar with. It's one that I am certain that we don't consider enough, that we don't come back to enough, that we haven't wrestled with enough. It is one of the most impossibly high bars that Jesus sets in his ministry. And what we see in that bar is this, is that God has a dream for you, and it's better than yours. You have hopes and dreams for your life. You have things that you want to see come to fruition. Maybe you want to have a long marriage. Maybe you want to have a good career. Maybe you want to be a generous person. Maybe you want to be a good friend and a good member of the community. Maybe you want to see your kids flourish. These are all good things. Very few of you, if any, have terrible dreams for your life where you want to go do evil things. I'd like to be like Vladimir Putin. I don't think anybody's doing that. We all have good things that we want to see come to fruition. But here's what I'm telling you, and here's what I want you to begin to think about this morning. God has different plans for you, and they're better than yours. All right? With that preamble, let's look at, bless you, let's look at what Jesus has to say as he's teaching the crowds and the disciples, and let's look at what this high bar is for us. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Here's what Jesus says. He gathers the crowd around him. He gathers the disciples around him. And he says, if anybody wants to be my disciple, they must take up their cross and follow me. Now there's a lot about that statement that we need to understand. As kind of an aside to the flow of the sermon to where I want to go, I do want to stop here. And I want to look at that word that Jesus chose to use. Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to be my disciple must do what I'm about to ask you to do. And one of the things that we've done in Christianity, in Christian culture and church world, is we've taken the terms Christian and disciple and we've made them mean two different things. We've said that a Christian is someone who's got their foot in the door. A Christian is someone who's going to go to heaven. They are saved. They are in right standing before God. They believe God is their father and Jesus is their savior. The way we talk about what it means to become a Christian at grace is to simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And once we believe those things, we are ushered into the kingdom of God as a Christian. And then at some point in our life, if we want to begin to take our faith very seriously, then we can become a black belt Christian, which is a disciple. Yeah? Like, Christianity is like discipleship light. We've separated those words. We've made them two different things. I'm a Christian. Are you a disciple of Christ? I don't know. That's pretty serious. Let's not get crazy. And listen, you know I'm right about that. And here's the thing. That is not how Jesus defined those terms. Jesus never used the word Christian. They were known as the followers of the way for years after his life. We made up Christian. Jesus called them disciples. And that's what he told the disciples to do. The end of his life, the great commission, go into all the world and make disciples. Right. Not Christians. Not converts. We think Christians are converts and disciples are people who take it seriously and try to make more converts. And to Jesus, he says, no. You are all the way in being a disciple of mine, following me, becoming more like me in character, doing the work that I do, becoming a kingdom builder, building the gospel, reaching people with the gospel. You are all the way in, or you're not following me. But we've made it possible to be a Christian who's not a disciple. And I just want to point out this morning, it's not the point of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop here and point out, that's not how Jesus defined it. So if in our heads we separate those terms, then we don't understand them the way that Jesus does. And we should have to decide if we think we're right or he's right. But he says, if you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Meaning, you must take up your life, you must take up your sacrifice, you must take everything that you have and walk it to Calvary with me. And sacrifice your life with me for the sake of the gospel. The way we say it here is you must become a kingdom builder. Quit trying to build your own kingdom. Start getting on board with building God's kingdom by growing it in breadth and depth. He says, if you want to be my disciple, it's not about getting in the door and becoming a convert. It's about taking up your cross, taking up your life, taking up everything you thought you wanted, laying it down at the altar and following me and letting me do with your life what I would like to do with it. And he says it. It's very clear. It's explicit in the text. For the sake of the gospel. And he even uses the term, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. Jim Elliott, famous missionary, I believe in the 40s and the 50s and the 1900s, died trying to reach some Ecuadorian tribal people who were cannibals. And he said, prior to that trip in his writings, that he is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. It is absolutely in keeping with this teaching of Christ. If you call yourself my disciple, here's the tax. You give up your life. You give up, listen to me, you give up your hopes and your dreams and your plans. You give up the career you thought you wanted. You give up the goals for your children that you created. You give up who you thought you were going to be. You give up your finances and your time and your treasure. And you set those aside. And you go, Jesus, what would you have me do with these things? Are these the things that you want in my life? Or do you want now to choose a different life for me? But that's why I say that this is an incredibly high bar. Because he says, listen, if you want in, if you want in, let me tell you what the tax is. Let me tell you what it's going to cost you. It's so funny. When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase all the time. Salvation's a free gift. Can't be earned, can't be deserved. And I'd always go like, yeah, but it does cost you something. Jesus tells you. It costs you your life. That American dream that you have, you've got to give that up. That's what Jesus is demanding. In fact, what we see from this text is Jesus insists that we trust his dream more than our own. Jesus in this text insists, you've got to trust my hopes and dreams and plans for your life more than you trust your own. That's the tax. You've got to give up your own. You've got to let me replace my vision for you for your vision for you, and you've got to go. And you've got to get to work sharing the gospel for the sake of the gospel. That's what he asks us to do. And this is a remarkably high bar, particularly for those of us who come into faith as adults, or even for those of us who begin to take our faith seriously as adults, because the toothpaste is out of the tube. We're already down the road. We got a mortgage. We got things that we're responsible for. We already have our life ordered, and so it's a really difficult thing to hand our life plans over to Jesus and go, if you want to change them, if you want me to do something else, if you want us to go somewhere else, to live somewhere else, if you want to change the way I raise my kids and what our values are, if you want to change the way I'm married, whatever you want to do, do it. I trust you. And in a sense, give up our plans for our future. That's a really tough ask. I sat with someone this week, a dear friend who in the last several years, her marriage has just become really, really bad. Just really awful and hard. And it's to a point now where it's very clear that the best thing for her and for her children are to not be in the house with him. Because that's not a good environment. And that's a really tough decision to make. And as I sat with her this week, she said, you know what? I'm not even really sad about him. I fell out of love with him years ago. But I'm grieving the life I thought I was going to have. And finally admitting that I'm not going to have it. She sat in the playroom and watched her children divide up the stuffed animals, deciding which ones were going to mommy's house and which ones were going to daddy's house. That was not her plan. That was not what she wanted to experience. When she walked down that aisle, her hopes and dreams and plans for her life were to be with him for the rest of their life, to see their grandkids and go on trips with them together. That was their hopes and dreams. And so now she's in the middle of mourning what she thought she was going to have. And so it's, I'm acknowledging, it's a big ask, midstream in life, to hand over everything that you had planned for yourself to Jesus. And so you do with this what you want. And if that causes you to mourn something you thought you wanted or you thought you needed or you had marshaled your resources around pursuing, then so be it. But Jesus says, go ahead and mourn. Get it over with. Because we've got work to do. And it's here that I want to say this. As we listen as adults and we try to process this and think through it and how to integrate it into our lives, what do we do with it if we want to apply the truth? As I mentioned a little bit ago, the reality of it is that the older you are, the more challenging this instruction becomes. Until you retire, then it's like, whatever you want, Jesus, I've got all the freedom. At least that's how I assume retirement is. I don't know. But the further down the road you are, the harder this gets to be obedient to. You know, I think about Zach and Haley over here. I just did their wedding in the fall. They don't look at them. They don't know anything about anything. They don't know nothing. But they're also at the cusp of life and can respond to this in a way that has more freedom than the way that others of us can respond to it. So we acknowledge that. Here's what else that implies because we have a lot of parents in the room who are still raising children. You can get ahead of this. You can get ahead of them creating their own hopes and dreams for themselves. You can start to raise them, reminding them all the time, God has plans for you. God made you on purpose. God's gifted you to do things in his kingdom. And it's my sacred duty as your parent to guide you to those. I remind you guys all the time of the verse in Ephesians, Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. My most sacred duty, I believe, as a father, is to tell Lily and to tell John as often as they will listen, you are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that you might walk in them. My sacred duty is to help you see those good works and walk in them. It sounds counterintuitive, especially for Americans. I don't want John and Lily to create their own dreams for their lives. I want their biggest dream for their life to be to walk with God. Hold me close and teach me to abide. We just sang it. I want their biggest goal for their life to be to abide in Christ. And that one day, when they get to heaven, to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what I want for them. I'm really not very interested in them creating their own dreams. Because God has bigger ones for them that are better than theirs. And this makes sense, doesn't it? So I'll get there in a second. But to the parents, you raising your kids, you have a chance to get ahead of it now and to help them become young adults who know my life is not my own and God has plans for it and his plans are better than my plans so I'm going to follow them anyways. We can get ahead of this, guys, for the rest of us, as we try to integrate these things into our life. The problem is, that's exactly what we tend to do, isn't it? That's exactly what we tend to do. This isn't revolutionary information. It might be packaged in a way that we haven't thought about in a while, but it's not revolutionary information that Jesus asked for our life and wants us to live our life according to his plans. But when we hear that, trying to be good Christians who we don't yet know if we're disciples, we try to integrate Jesus' plans into the nooks and crannies of our plans, right? We try to take the life that we're already living and the path that we already chose. And then we try to work Jesus into those things so that being obedient to his word and choosing his dreams over ours doesn't cause very much pain. So we don't have to mourn a possible future. So we don't have to change a lot of things. So we don't get too uncomfortable. We just do a tiny little course correction and we feel better about ourselves because now we're giving Jesus this part of our life when that's not what he asks for. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Follow me. If you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. If you don't, you will lose it. And here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking through this. As we think about the idea of choosing our plans for our life or choosing Jesus' plans for our life. Your plans, I know this is a little whatever. So go with me or don't. But my hunch is your plans are just an amalgamation of who you were in childhood and who your parents were and who your friends were when you were in high school and college and you were developing your values. Your plans are just a hodgepodge of stuff that you receive from the people around you. If you had good parents, you wanted to be like them. If you had bad parents, you didn't want to be like them. And so that's at the correction of your life. If you had good friends in high school and college that had decent values, they pointed you in one direction. If you had bad friends, they pointed you in another direction. Very few of you ever sat down with a legal pad and research and wrote out a plan for your life in a thoughtful, meaningful way. Your plans are an accident, man. That's my point. Whatever you think you chose you wanted to intend, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You stumbled into it by accident of birth and culture. But we cling so tightly to the plans and the dreams that we have for our life that were made by flawed, finite brains. When what Jesus is offering to us are plans that were made by a perfect, divine brain that sees everything all at once. And yet we still stubbornly and ignorantly choose our own. C.S. Lewis once said that the kingdom of God is like you're a child in your backyard. He said making mud pies, which I guess is what you did for fun in like the 1910s, is you're like, mom, I'm going to go play with mud. Okay, be safe. He said it's like being offered to go on a one-year holiday, on a one-year vacation around the world to see all the greatest sights in the world, and instead we choose to sit in the backyard and play with mud. Here's the thing about these plans that Jesus has for you, about his desire for you to spend your life building his kingdom, not your own. And here's why it's okay for him to ask him to give up everything you thought you wanted for what he wants, because they're better than yours. And Jesus is not a tyrant. He's not a dictator. He's not interested in making your life worse at all. In fact, we have verse after verse in Scripture that assures us that Jesus actually wants us to have a good life. One of my favorite verses that's in my office, I use it a lot, it brings me comfort a lot, is John 10.10. The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Christ says. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants you to, literally, he wants you to have the best life possible. Now here's the deal. He probably doesn't define best life like you currently do, but his definition is better than yours. A couple more, and then I'm going to make a point and we'll wrap up. David writes in two different places in Psalms. In one place he writes, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. And then in Psalm 1611 he says, at your right hand, God, there are pleasures forevermore. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Does this sound like a God who's interested in making you miserable? Does this sound like a God that doesn't have better plans for you than you do? Your plans are an accident. His are intentional and divine. Lastly, in Scripture, I often point out to you the Ephesians prayer, Ephesians 3, 14 through 19. We did a whole series on it last January. I pointed it out at the onset of this year. It's my prayer for grace and my prayer for you. And the heart of the prayer is that everything that happens in your life would conspire to bring you closer to God. That's the prayer. But I always stop when we go through it at 19 because you have to stop somewhere. But if you keep reading and you get to 20 and 21, you see one of the most amazing, encouraging little passages in scripture. It says this, it says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. He finishes up that segment of the letter by offering the prayer to God, by him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. I know it's a high bar for Jesus to set, to say, I want all of your hopes and dreams. I want all of your plans. I want you to sit down and prayerfully consider with your career if that's what I want you to be doing. Prayerfully consider with your finances, is that really how I want you to invest in those? Is that really the future that I have dictated to you, or is that what you want? Jesus asked that we sit down and we think through these very difficult things that the answers could potentially make us deeply uncomfortable. But here's what we know. He's going to hand you better plans. He's going to hand you better dreams. And here's what I know experientially. I would never ever pretend to be someone who's always living life according to Jesus' plan. I would never ever pretend to do that. And you may be thinking, you're a pastor. You've committed your life to Jesus' plan. Not really. I became a pastor because I wanted people to respect me and think I was cool. That's why I became a pastor. Just full disclosure, that came out in counseling like six years ago. I know that that's true. God has sanctified those motives. Now I don't care what you think. That's not true either. But God has sanctified those motives and helped me not do this for myself and for the sake of others. So I know what it is to not live according to God's plan. I know it very well. But I've been blessed in my life that there have been pockets where I did accept his plan over mine and I did live his plan for me rather than my own plans and I can tell you without reservation or hesitation or exception when I am living my life according to God's plan my life life is richer, fuller, better, more lovely, more wonderful, more alive. Without exception, my friendships get deeper. Without exception, my marriage is better. Without exception, I find it easier to get up and I'm more motivated to do the things that God has put in front of me that day. Without exception, I hold my children tighter. Without exception, I cry more happy tears and experience a fullness of life that never comes when I live by my plans. And I don't want to paint a falsely rosy picture here. You can live according to God's plans and experience pain. You can mess up and pursue your own plans that weren't God's plans, and as a result, you're in a ditch somewhere. As a result, your life got sidelined. As a result, you were in the middle of great pain and hardship. But make no mistake about it, that's probably not because you were ardently following God's plan for your life. It's probably because you're following your own and he's trying to get your attention. But those of you who have lived your life according to God's plans for even a season cannot deny that that season in your life was one of the best ones. And that those seasons are some of the best ones. And there will be pain in the midst of living according to God's plan. We do not judge the raindrops of tragedy because we're believers. But, on balance, if you invest your life following God's plan for you rather than your own, if you take up your cross and follow Jesus and give up your life for the sake of the kingdom, I promise you, you will live a better life if you do it. I promise you it will be more rich and more full and more lovely. I promise you it will be immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine for yourself. I promise you. So as we finish this simple thought, and then I'll pray. Jesus is asking for your life. Do you trust him with it? Do you trust him with it? Let's pray. Father, you are lovely and good and wonderful and we are grateful. God, it is a scary thing to hand our hopes and dreams over to anyone else outside of our control. But Father, I pray that we would trust you with ours. Help us trust you with our children, with our careers, with our financial goals, with our friendships, with all the things we want to accomplish, all the things we want to acquire, and all the things we want to accumulate, God. I pray that we would trust you with those things. Give us the strength and the courage to ask hard questions and to receive hard answers and replace our cruddy hopes and dreams with your incredible ones and help us be people who live our lives for you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and if I hadn't got a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that. Thanks for coming on Time Change Sunday. I know that we're all, our wagons are dragging a little bit, but that's all right. Before I just launch into the sermon, I do have a bit of a retraction to print. Last week, I maliciously and falsely accused my wife, Jen, of smoking a cigar in college. We did not agree on the story, and that afternoon, she texted her friend Carla, her roommate, and I know Carla very well, and she asked her to confirm her side of the story, and Carla said, no, I was there. You pretended and gave it to me, and I'm the one that smoked it. It was a black and mild. It was disgusting. So I was wrong. Jen, as usual, was right. She's at home now with a sick kid. So anyways, if you see her, let her know that her character has been restored. One thing that is true that Jen and I do, and I bet that you've had the same conversation with your spouse if you have one of those or you're a good friend or something like that but I don't know about y'all but for us every time the a Powerball lottery gets up but like a ridiculous amount like 330 million dollars or something like that like so much it gets so big that your mom starts buying lottery tickets just in case it's God's will that she have that money to use it for his kingdom. You know, that's how we Christians justify the lottery ticket purchases. But every time we see that, when we'll see the billboard or mention it or something like that, then what conversation do we immediately have? Right, nodding heads. What would we do if we won the money, right? So then we get to have that fun conversation, and it goes, by now we've had it enough times that it goes in some very predictable ways. Out of the gates, you know, you have to sweep aside, get rid of the practicalities. Like, don't tell me how you're going to invest it. That's boring. Don't be a nerd. Like, what's the fun stuff you're going to do? What are the extravagances that you're going to allow yourself? And it always starts small with us because we're trying to be humble because we're trying to be humble people. We're not going to be ostentatious. But the one extravagance I always lead with, this one's consistent for me, is a private chef. I want a private chef to just live at my house and make me food all the time. That's what I would like. Jen will eventually admit that she wants to get a condo in Manhattan. And those are our extravagances. And then I'll be like, and maybe, you know, I mean, the car's got a lot of miles on it. So maybe I need a new car. Maybe you need a top of the line Honda Odyssey. You know. You guys know that's what I want. Maybe for travel, we should just buy into a private jet, like a share, not our own, but maybe we'll just share. We try to stay humble, and then as we have the conversation, it just gets more and more absurd until we're the Kardashians, so then you just laugh and whatever. But those are, that's fun to do. That's a fun game to play. What would life be like if? And then you imagine this life that maybe you would have one day, and I don't know what you guys would do if you hit it big, but it's fun to play that game of imagining what life could be like if. But one of the things that we all do, even if you're not ridiculous like Jen and I and daydream about what it would be like to win the Powerball, what I am convinced of is that every person in this room, every person who can hear my voice, does have plans and hopes and dreams for their life that are real, that are substantive, that actually matter to you because they're actually attainable. This is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have a name for it. It's the American dream. People move to this country in pursuit of what you have access to because we live in a place where we are allowed to dream our own dreams, we are allowed to make our own plans, and we are allowed to begin to pursue those. And so everybody here has hopes and plans and dreams for their life. And those are less funny. Because I'm probably never going to have a private chef. Probably not. I might be able to hire one for ad night to make me stay. I'm probably not going to ever have a private chef. I'm not going to mourn that. We'll probably never have a condo in Manhattan. I'm not going to mourn the loss of that potential condo, but I do have hopes and dreams in my life that if they don't come to fruition, I will mourn that. If I don't get to do Lily's wedding, that's going to make me sad. If I don't get to meet my grandchildren, that's going to make me sad. If I'm not still married to Jen in 30 years, that's going to make me sad. So we all have hopes and dreams that we marshal our resources around, that we pursue with our life, that we intend to execute. And some of us are less detailed than others. Like I've got a good friend in Chicago, and they were as meticulous as when they were first married before they had kids, they moved to Chicago and she had an opportunity to get her master's at Northwestern, get her MBA there, which is an expensive prospect. And they basically said, hey, if we do this, and we're going to borrow that money, then we are committed to both of us having full-time jobs and using our resources to pay for a nanny. That's just how our family is going to be. And they said okay, and they executed that plan and they've done that. And now they have three kids and a two bedroom condo in Chicago off of Lake Michigan. And their plan now is in 2026 or maybe 2027, they're going to move to the Atlanta suburbs to be closer to his family, to be closer to his mom. So they've got their plans mapped out like that. And maybe that's how you do your plans, and maybe it's not. But you all have them. You all have, if you have kids, you have hopes and dreams for your kids. It could be as minuscule as the kind of job you want them to have. It could be as broad as the kind of person that you want them to be. If you're married, you have hopes and dreams for that. If you have a career, you have hopes and dreams for that. But we all do this. As soon as we kind of come online somewhere in adolescence and realize that one day our life is going to be our own, we begin to imagine how we want to build it. Nobody in this space doesn't have plans and hopes and dreams for themselves, however broad or humble they might be. And I bring this up because the passage that we're looking at today in Mark chapter 8, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through 37 is where we're going to be focused. As we continue to move through Mark, we arrive this morning at one of the most challenging teachings in scripture. It's this incredibly high bar of demand that Jesus sets on our life. And it is one that we may not even be familiar with. It's one that I am certain that we don't consider enough, that we don't come back to enough, that we haven't wrestled with enough. It is one of the most impossibly high bars that Jesus sets in his ministry. And what we see in that bar is this, is that God has a dream for you, and it's better than yours. You have hopes and dreams for your life. You have things that you want to see come to fruition. Maybe you want to have a long marriage. Maybe you want to have a good career. Maybe you want to be a generous person. Maybe you want to be a good friend and a good member of the community. Maybe you want to see your kids flourish. These are all good things. Very few of you, if any, have terrible dreams for your life where you want to go do evil things. I'd like to be like Vladimir Putin. I don't think anybody's doing that. We all have good things that we want to see come to fruition. But here's what I'm telling you, and here's what I want you to begin to think about this morning. God has different plans for you, and they're better than yours. All right? With that preamble, let's look at, bless you, let's look at what Jesus has to say as he's teaching the crowds and the disciples, and let's look at what this high bar is for us. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Here's what Jesus says. He gathers the crowd around him. He gathers the disciples around him. And he says, if anybody wants to be my disciple, they must take up their cross and follow me. Now there's a lot about that statement that we need to understand. As kind of an aside to the flow of the sermon to where I want to go, I do want to stop here. And I want to look at that word that Jesus chose to use. Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to be my disciple must do what I'm about to ask you to do. And one of the things that we've done in Christianity, in Christian culture and church world, is we've taken the terms Christian and disciple and we've made them mean two different things. We've said that a Christian is someone who's got their foot in the door. A Christian is someone who's going to go to heaven. They are saved. They are in right standing before God. They believe God is their father and Jesus is their savior. The way we talk about what it means to become a Christian at grace is to simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And once we believe those things, we are ushered into the kingdom of God as a Christian. And then at some point in our life, if we want to begin to take our faith very seriously, then we can become a black belt Christian, which is a disciple. Yeah? Like, Christianity is like discipleship light. We've separated those words. We've made them two different things. I'm a Christian. Are you a disciple of Christ? I don't know. That's pretty serious. Let's not get crazy. And listen, you know I'm right about that. And here's the thing. That is not how Jesus defined those terms. Jesus never used the word Christian. They were known as the followers of the way for years after his life. We made up Christian. Jesus called them disciples. And that's what he told the disciples to do. The end of his life, the great commission, go into all the world and make disciples. Right. Not Christians. Not converts. We think Christians are converts and disciples are people who take it seriously and try to make more converts. And to Jesus, he says, no. You are all the way in being a disciple of mine, following me, becoming more like me in character, doing the work that I do, becoming a kingdom builder, building the gospel, reaching people with the gospel. You are all the way in, or you're not following me. But we've made it possible to be a Christian who's not a disciple. And I just want to point out this morning, it's not the point of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop here and point out, that's not how Jesus defined it. So if in our heads we separate those terms, then we don't understand them the way that Jesus does. And we should have to decide if we think we're right or he's right. But he says, if you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Meaning, you must take up your life, you must take up your sacrifice, you must take everything that you have and walk it to Calvary with me. And sacrifice your life with me for the sake of the gospel. The way we say it here is you must become a kingdom builder. Quit trying to build your own kingdom. Start getting on board with building God's kingdom by growing it in breadth and depth. He says, if you want to be my disciple, it's not about getting in the door and becoming a convert. It's about taking up your cross, taking up your life, taking up everything you thought you wanted, laying it down at the altar and following me and letting me do with your life what I would like to do with it. And he says it. It's very clear. It's explicit in the text. For the sake of the gospel. And he even uses the term, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. Jim Elliott, famous missionary, I believe in the 40s and the 50s and the 1900s, died trying to reach some Ecuadorian tribal people who were cannibals. And he said, prior to that trip in his writings, that he is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. It is absolutely in keeping with this teaching of Christ. If you call yourself my disciple, here's the tax. You give up your life. You give up, listen to me, you give up your hopes and your dreams and your plans. You give up the career you thought you wanted. You give up the goals for your children that you created. You give up who you thought you were going to be. You give up your finances and your time and your treasure. And you set those aside. And you go, Jesus, what would you have me do with these things? Are these the things that you want in my life? Or do you want now to choose a different life for me? But that's why I say that this is an incredibly high bar. Because he says, listen, if you want in, if you want in, let me tell you what the tax is. Let me tell you what it's going to cost you. It's so funny. When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase all the time. Salvation's a free gift. Can't be earned, can't be deserved. And I'd always go like, yeah, but it does cost you something. Jesus tells you. It costs you your life. That American dream that you have, you've got to give that up. That's what Jesus is demanding. In fact, what we see from this text is Jesus insists that we trust his dream more than our own. Jesus in this text insists, you've got to trust my hopes and dreams and plans for your life more than you trust your own. That's the tax. You've got to give up your own. You've got to let me replace my vision for you for your vision for you, and you've got to go. And you've got to get to work sharing the gospel for the sake of the gospel. That's what he asks us to do. And this is a remarkably high bar, particularly for those of us who come into faith as adults, or even for those of us who begin to take our faith seriously as adults, because the toothpaste is out of the tube. We're already down the road. We got a mortgage. We got things that we're responsible for. We already have our life ordered, and so it's a really difficult thing to hand our life plans over to Jesus and go, if you want to change them, if you want me to do something else, if you want us to go somewhere else, to live somewhere else, if you want to change the way I raise my kids and what our values are, if you want to change the way I'm married, whatever you want to do, do it. I trust you. And in a sense, give up our plans for our future. That's a really tough ask. I sat with someone this week, a dear friend who in the last several years, her marriage has just become really, really bad. Just really awful and hard. And it's to a point now where it's very clear that the best thing for her and for her children are to not be in the house with him. Because that's not a good environment. And that's a really tough decision to make. And as I sat with her this week, she said, you know what? I'm not even really sad about him. I fell out of love with him years ago. But I'm grieving the life I thought I was going to have. And finally admitting that I'm not going to have it. She sat in the playroom and watched her children divide up the stuffed animals, deciding which ones were going to mommy's house and which ones were going to daddy's house. That was not her plan. That was not what she wanted to experience. When she walked down that aisle, her hopes and dreams and plans for her life were to be with him for the rest of their life, to see their grandkids and go on trips with them together. That was their hopes and dreams. And so now she's in the middle of mourning what she thought she was going to have. And so it's, I'm acknowledging, it's a big ask, midstream in life, to hand over everything that you had planned for yourself to Jesus. And so you do with this what you want. And if that causes you to mourn something you thought you wanted or you thought you needed or you had marshaled your resources around pursuing, then so be it. But Jesus says, go ahead and mourn. Get it over with. Because we've got work to do. And it's here that I want to say this. As we listen as adults and we try to process this and think through it and how to integrate it into our lives, what do we do with it if we want to apply the truth? As I mentioned a little bit ago, the reality of it is that the older you are, the more challenging this instruction becomes. Until you retire, then it's like, whatever you want, Jesus, I've got all the freedom. At least that's how I assume retirement is. I don't know. But the further down the road you are, the harder this gets to be obedient to. You know, I think about Zach and Haley over here. I just did their wedding in the fall. They don't look at them. They don't know anything about anything. They don't know nothing. But they're also at the cusp of life and can respond to this in a way that has more freedom than the way that others of us can respond to it. So we acknowledge that. Here's what else that implies because we have a lot of parents in the room who are still raising children. You can get ahead of this. You can get ahead of them creating their own hopes and dreams for themselves. You can start to raise them, reminding them all the time, God has plans for you. God made you on purpose. God's gifted you to do things in his kingdom. And it's my sacred duty as your parent to guide you to those. I remind you guys all the time of the verse in Ephesians, Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. My most sacred duty, I believe, as a father, is to tell Lily and to tell John as often as they will listen, you are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that you might walk in them. My sacred duty is to help you see those good works and walk in them. It sounds counterintuitive, especially for Americans. I don't want John and Lily to create their own dreams for their lives. I want their biggest dream for their life to be to walk with God. Hold me close and teach me to abide. We just sang it. I want their biggest goal for their life to be to abide in Christ. And that one day, when they get to heaven, to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what I want for them. I'm really not very interested in them creating their own dreams. Because God has bigger ones for them that are better than theirs. And this makes sense, doesn't it? So I'll get there in a second. But to the parents, you raising your kids, you have a chance to get ahead of it now and to help them become young adults who know my life is not my own and God has plans for it and his plans are better than my plans so I'm going to follow them anyways. We can get ahead of this, guys, for the rest of us, as we try to integrate these things into our life. The problem is, that's exactly what we tend to do, isn't it? That's exactly what we tend to do. This isn't revolutionary information. It might be packaged in a way that we haven't thought about in a while, but it's not revolutionary information that Jesus asked for our life and wants us to live our life according to his plans. But when we hear that, trying to be good Christians who we don't yet know if we're disciples, we try to integrate Jesus' plans into the nooks and crannies of our plans, right? We try to take the life that we're already living and the path that we already chose. And then we try to work Jesus into those things so that being obedient to his word and choosing his dreams over ours doesn't cause very much pain. So we don't have to mourn a possible future. So we don't have to change a lot of things. So we don't get too uncomfortable. We just do a tiny little course correction and we feel better about ourselves because now we're giving Jesus this part of our life when that's not what he asks for. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Follow me. If you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. If you don't, you will lose it. And here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking through this. As we think about the idea of choosing our plans for our life or choosing Jesus' plans for our life. Your plans, I know this is a little whatever. So go with me or don't. But my hunch is your plans are just an amalgamation of who you were in childhood and who your parents were and who your friends were when you were in high school and college and you were developing your values. Your plans are just a hodgepodge of stuff that you receive from the people around you. If you had good parents, you wanted to be like them. If you had bad parents, you didn't want to be like them. And so that's at the correction of your life. If you had good friends in high school and college that had decent values, they pointed you in one direction. If you had bad friends, they pointed you in another direction. Very few of you ever sat down with a legal pad and research and wrote out a plan for your life in a thoughtful, meaningful way. Your plans are an accident, man. That's my point. Whatever you think you chose you wanted to intend, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You stumbled into it by accident of birth and culture. But we cling so tightly to the plans and the dreams that we have for our life that were made by flawed, finite brains. When what Jesus is offering to us are plans that were made by a perfect, divine brain that sees everything all at once. And yet we still stubbornly and ignorantly choose our own. C.S. Lewis once said that the kingdom of God is like you're a child in your backyard. He said making mud pies, which I guess is what you did for fun in like the 1910s, is you're like, mom, I'm going to go play with mud. Okay, be safe. He said it's like being offered to go on a one-year holiday, on a one-year vacation around the world to see all the greatest sights in the world, and instead we choose to sit in the backyard and play with mud. Here's the thing about these plans that Jesus has for you, about his desire for you to spend your life building his kingdom, not your own. And here's why it's okay for him to ask him to give up everything you thought you wanted for what he wants, because they're better than yours. And Jesus is not a tyrant. He's not a dictator. He's not interested in making your life worse at all. In fact, we have verse after verse in Scripture that assures us that Jesus actually wants us to have a good life. One of my favorite verses that's in my office, I use it a lot, it brings me comfort a lot, is John 10.10. The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Christ says. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants you to, literally, he wants you to have the best life possible. Now here's the deal. He probably doesn't define best life like you currently do, but his definition is better than yours. A couple more, and then I'm going to make a point and we'll wrap up. David writes in two different places in Psalms. In one place he writes, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. And then in Psalm 1611 he says, at your right hand, God, there are pleasures forevermore. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Does this sound like a God who's interested in making you miserable? Does this sound like a God that doesn't have better plans for you than you do? Your plans are an accident. His are intentional and divine. Lastly, in Scripture, I often point out to you the Ephesians prayer, Ephesians 3, 14 through 19. We did a whole series on it last January. I pointed it out at the onset of this year. It's my prayer for grace and my prayer for you. And the heart of the prayer is that everything that happens in your life would conspire to bring you closer to God. That's the prayer. But I always stop when we go through it at 19 because you have to stop somewhere. But if you keep reading and you get to 20 and 21, you see one of the most amazing, encouraging little passages in scripture. It says this, it says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. He finishes up that segment of the letter by offering the prayer to God, by him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. I know it's a high bar for Jesus to set, to say, I want all of your hopes and dreams. I want all of your plans. I want you to sit down and prayerfully consider with your career if that's what I want you to be doing. Prayerfully consider with your finances, is that really how I want you to invest in those? Is that really the future that I have dictated to you, or is that what you want? Jesus asked that we sit down and we think through these very difficult things that the answers could potentially make us deeply uncomfortable. But here's what we know. He's going to hand you better plans. He's going to hand you better dreams. And here's what I know experientially. I would never ever pretend to be someone who's always living life according to Jesus' plan. I would never ever pretend to do that. And you may be thinking, you're a pastor. You've committed your life to Jesus' plan. Not really. I became a pastor because I wanted people to respect me and think I was cool. That's why I became a pastor. Just full disclosure, that came out in counseling like six years ago. I know that that's true. God has sanctified those motives. Now I don't care what you think. That's not true either. But God has sanctified those motives and helped me not do this for myself and for the sake of others. So I know what it is to not live according to God's plan. I know it very well. But I've been blessed in my life that there have been pockets where I did accept his plan over mine and I did live his plan for me rather than my own plans and I can tell you without reservation or hesitation or exception when I am living my life according to God's plan my life life is richer, fuller, better, more lovely, more wonderful, more alive. Without exception, my friendships get deeper. Without exception, my marriage is better. Without exception, I find it easier to get up and I'm more motivated to do the things that God has put in front of me that day. Without exception, I hold my children tighter. Without exception, I cry more happy tears and experience a fullness of life that never comes when I live by my plans. And I don't want to paint a falsely rosy picture here. You can live according to God's plans and experience pain. You can mess up and pursue your own plans that weren't God's plans, and as a result, you're in a ditch somewhere. As a result, your life got sidelined. As a result, you were in the middle of great pain and hardship. But make no mistake about it, that's probably not because you were ardently following God's plan for your life. It's probably because you're following your own and he's trying to get your attention. But those of you who have lived your life according to God's plans for even a season cannot deny that that season in your life was one of the best ones. And that those seasons are some of the best ones. And there will be pain in the midst of living according to God's plan. We do not judge the raindrops of tragedy because we're believers. But, on balance, if you invest your life following God's plan for you rather than your own, if you take up your cross and follow Jesus and give up your life for the sake of the kingdom, I promise you, you will live a better life if you do it. I promise you it will be more rich and more full and more lovely. I promise you it will be immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine for yourself. I promise you. So as we finish this simple thought, and then I'll pray. Jesus is asking for your life. Do you trust him with it? Do you trust him with it? Let's pray. Father, you are lovely and good and wonderful and we are grateful. God, it is a scary thing to hand our hopes and dreams over to anyone else outside of our control. But Father, I pray that we would trust you with ours. Help us trust you with our children, with our careers, with our financial goals, with our friendships, with all the things we want to accomplish, all the things we want to acquire, and all the things we want to accumulate, God. I pray that we would trust you with those things. Give us the strength and the courage to ask hard questions and to receive hard answers and replace our cruddy hopes and dreams with your incredible ones and help us be people who live our lives for you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and if I hadn't got a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that. Thanks for coming on Time Change Sunday. I know that we're all, our wagons are dragging a little bit, but that's all right. Before I just launch into the sermon, I do have a bit of a retraction to print. Last week, I maliciously and falsely accused my wife, Jen, of smoking a cigar in college. We did not agree on the story, and that afternoon, she texted her friend Carla, her roommate, and I know Carla very well, and she asked her to confirm her side of the story, and Carla said, no, I was there. You pretended and gave it to me, and I'm the one that smoked it. It was a black and mild. It was disgusting. So I was wrong. Jen, as usual, was right. She's at home now with a sick kid. So anyways, if you see her, let her know that her character has been restored. One thing that is true that Jen and I do, and I bet that you've had the same conversation with your spouse if you have one of those or you're a good friend or something like that but I don't know about y'all but for us every time the a Powerball lottery gets up but like a ridiculous amount like 330 million dollars or something like that like so much it gets so big that your mom starts buying lottery tickets just in case it's God's will that she have that money to use it for his kingdom. You know, that's how we Christians justify the lottery ticket purchases. But every time we see that, when we'll see the billboard or mention it or something like that, then what conversation do we immediately have? Right, nodding heads. What would we do if we won the money, right? So then we get to have that fun conversation, and it goes, by now we've had it enough times that it goes in some very predictable ways. Out of the gates, you know, you have to sweep aside, get rid of the practicalities. Like, don't tell me how you're going to invest it. That's boring. Don't be a nerd. Like, what's the fun stuff you're going to do? What are the extravagances that you're going to allow yourself? And it always starts small with us because we're trying to be humble because we're trying to be humble people. We're not going to be ostentatious. But the one extravagance I always lead with, this one's consistent for me, is a private chef. I want a private chef to just live at my house and make me food all the time. That's what I would like. Jen will eventually admit that she wants to get a condo in Manhattan. And those are our extravagances. And then I'll be like, and maybe, you know, I mean, the car's got a lot of miles on it. So maybe I need a new car. Maybe you need a top of the line Honda Odyssey. You know. You guys know that's what I want. Maybe for travel, we should just buy into a private jet, like a share, not our own, but maybe we'll just share. We try to stay humble, and then as we have the conversation, it just gets more and more absurd until we're the Kardashians, so then you just laugh and whatever. But those are, that's fun to do. That's a fun game to play. What would life be like if? And then you imagine this life that maybe you would have one day, and I don't know what you guys would do if you hit it big, but it's fun to play that game of imagining what life could be like if. But one of the things that we all do, even if you're not ridiculous like Jen and I and daydream about what it would be like to win the Powerball, what I am convinced of is that every person in this room, every person who can hear my voice, does have plans and hopes and dreams for their life that are real, that are substantive, that actually matter to you because they're actually attainable. This is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have a name for it. It's the American dream. People move to this country in pursuit of what you have access to because we live in a place where we are allowed to dream our own dreams, we are allowed to make our own plans, and we are allowed to begin to pursue those. And so everybody here has hopes and plans and dreams for their life. And those are less funny. Because I'm probably never going to have a private chef. Probably not. I might be able to hire one for ad night to make me stay. I'm probably not going to ever have a private chef. I'm not going to mourn that. We'll probably never have a condo in Manhattan. I'm not going to mourn the loss of that potential condo, but I do have hopes and dreams in my life that if they don't come to fruition, I will mourn that. If I don't get to do Lily's wedding, that's going to make me sad. If I don't get to meet my grandchildren, that's going to make me sad. If I'm not still married to Jen in 30 years, that's going to make me sad. So we all have hopes and dreams that we marshal our resources around, that we pursue with our life, that we intend to execute. And some of us are less detailed than others. Like I've got a good friend in Chicago, and they were as meticulous as when they were first married before they had kids, they moved to Chicago and she had an opportunity to get her master's at Northwestern, get her MBA there, which is an expensive prospect. And they basically said, hey, if we do this, and we're going to borrow that money, then we are committed to both of us having full-time jobs and using our resources to pay for a nanny. That's just how our family is going to be. And they said okay, and they executed that plan and they've done that. And now they have three kids and a two bedroom condo in Chicago off of Lake Michigan. And their plan now is in 2026 or maybe 2027, they're going to move to the Atlanta suburbs to be closer to his family, to be closer to his mom. So they've got their plans mapped out like that. And maybe that's how you do your plans, and maybe it's not. But you all have them. You all have, if you have kids, you have hopes and dreams for your kids. It could be as minuscule as the kind of job you want them to have. It could be as broad as the kind of person that you want them to be. If you're married, you have hopes and dreams for that. If you have a career, you have hopes and dreams for that. But we all do this. As soon as we kind of come online somewhere in adolescence and realize that one day our life is going to be our own, we begin to imagine how we want to build it. Nobody in this space doesn't have plans and hopes and dreams for themselves, however broad or humble they might be. And I bring this up because the passage that we're looking at today in Mark chapter 8, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through 37 is where we're going to be focused. As we continue to move through Mark, we arrive this morning at one of the most challenging teachings in scripture. It's this incredibly high bar of demand that Jesus sets on our life. And it is one that we may not even be familiar with. It's one that I am certain that we don't consider enough, that we don't come back to enough, that we haven't wrestled with enough. It is one of the most impossibly high bars that Jesus sets in his ministry. And what we see in that bar is this, is that God has a dream for you, and it's better than yours. You have hopes and dreams for your life. You have things that you want to see come to fruition. Maybe you want to have a long marriage. Maybe you want to have a good career. Maybe you want to be a generous person. Maybe you want to be a good friend and a good member of the community. Maybe you want to see your kids flourish. These are all good things. Very few of you, if any, have terrible dreams for your life where you want to go do evil things. I'd like to be like Vladimir Putin. I don't think anybody's doing that. We all have good things that we want to see come to fruition. But here's what I'm telling you, and here's what I want you to begin to think about this morning. God has different plans for you, and they're better than yours. All right? With that preamble, let's look at, bless you, let's look at what Jesus has to say as he's teaching the crowds and the disciples, and let's look at what this high bar is for us. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Here's what Jesus says. He gathers the crowd around him. He gathers the disciples around him. And he says, if anybody wants to be my disciple, they must take up their cross and follow me. Now there's a lot about that statement that we need to understand. As kind of an aside to the flow of the sermon to where I want to go, I do want to stop here. And I want to look at that word that Jesus chose to use. Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to be my disciple must do what I'm about to ask you to do. And one of the things that we've done in Christianity, in Christian culture and church world, is we've taken the terms Christian and disciple and we've made them mean two different things. We've said that a Christian is someone who's got their foot in the door. A Christian is someone who's going to go to heaven. They are saved. They are in right standing before God. They believe God is their father and Jesus is their savior. The way we talk about what it means to become a Christian at grace is to simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And once we believe those things, we are ushered into the kingdom of God as a Christian. And then at some point in our life, if we want to begin to take our faith very seriously, then we can become a black belt Christian, which is a disciple. Yeah? Like, Christianity is like discipleship light. We've separated those words. We've made them two different things. I'm a Christian. Are you a disciple of Christ? I don't know. That's pretty serious. Let's not get crazy. And listen, you know I'm right about that. And here's the thing. That is not how Jesus defined those terms. Jesus never used the word Christian. They were known as the followers of the way for years after his life. We made up Christian. Jesus called them disciples. And that's what he told the disciples to do. The end of his life, the great commission, go into all the world and make disciples. Right. Not Christians. Not converts. We think Christians are converts and disciples are people who take it seriously and try to make more converts. And to Jesus, he says, no. You are all the way in being a disciple of mine, following me, becoming more like me in character, doing the work that I do, becoming a kingdom builder, building the gospel, reaching people with the gospel. You are all the way in, or you're not following me. But we've made it possible to be a Christian who's not a disciple. And I just want to point out this morning, it's not the point of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop here and point out, that's not how Jesus defined it. So if in our heads we separate those terms, then we don't understand them the way that Jesus does. And we should have to decide if we think we're right or he's right. But he says, if you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Meaning, you must take up your life, you must take up your sacrifice, you must take everything that you have and walk it to Calvary with me. And sacrifice your life with me for the sake of the gospel. The way we say it here is you must become a kingdom builder. Quit trying to build your own kingdom. Start getting on board with building God's kingdom by growing it in breadth and depth. He says, if you want to be my disciple, it's not about getting in the door and becoming a convert. It's about taking up your cross, taking up your life, taking up everything you thought you wanted, laying it down at the altar and following me and letting me do with your life what I would like to do with it. And he says it. It's very clear. It's explicit in the text. For the sake of the gospel. And he even uses the term, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. Jim Elliott, famous missionary, I believe in the 40s and the 50s and the 1900s, died trying to reach some Ecuadorian tribal people who were cannibals. And he said, prior to that trip in his writings, that he is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. It is absolutely in keeping with this teaching of Christ. If you call yourself my disciple, here's the tax. You give up your life. You give up, listen to me, you give up your hopes and your dreams and your plans. You give up the career you thought you wanted. You give up the goals for your children that you created. You give up who you thought you were going to be. You give up your finances and your time and your treasure. And you set those aside. And you go, Jesus, what would you have me do with these things? Are these the things that you want in my life? Or do you want now to choose a different life for me? But that's why I say that this is an incredibly high bar. Because he says, listen, if you want in, if you want in, let me tell you what the tax is. Let me tell you what it's going to cost you. It's so funny. When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase all the time. Salvation's a free gift. Can't be earned, can't be deserved. And I'd always go like, yeah, but it does cost you something. Jesus tells you. It costs you your life. That American dream that you have, you've got to give that up. That's what Jesus is demanding. In fact, what we see from this text is Jesus insists that we trust his dream more than our own. Jesus in this text insists, you've got to trust my hopes and dreams and plans for your life more than you trust your own. That's the tax. You've got to give up your own. You've got to let me replace my vision for you for your vision for you, and you've got to go. And you've got to get to work sharing the gospel for the sake of the gospel. That's what he asks us to do. And this is a remarkably high bar, particularly for those of us who come into faith as adults, or even for those of us who begin to take our faith seriously as adults, because the toothpaste is out of the tube. We're already down the road. We got a mortgage. We got things that we're responsible for. We already have our life ordered, and so it's a really difficult thing to hand our life plans over to Jesus and go, if you want to change them, if you want me to do something else, if you want us to go somewhere else, to live somewhere else, if you want to change the way I raise my kids and what our values are, if you want to change the way I'm married, whatever you want to do, do it. I trust you. And in a sense, give up our plans for our future. That's a really tough ask. I sat with someone this week, a dear friend who in the last several years, her marriage has just become really, really bad. Just really awful and hard. And it's to a point now where it's very clear that the best thing for her and for her children are to not be in the house with him. Because that's not a good environment. And that's a really tough decision to make. And as I sat with her this week, she said, you know what? I'm not even really sad about him. I fell out of love with him years ago. But I'm grieving the life I thought I was going to have. And finally admitting that I'm not going to have it. She sat in the playroom and watched her children divide up the stuffed animals, deciding which ones were going to mommy's house and which ones were going to daddy's house. That was not her plan. That was not what she wanted to experience. When she walked down that aisle, her hopes and dreams and plans for her life were to be with him for the rest of their life, to see their grandkids and go on trips with them together. That was their hopes and dreams. And so now she's in the middle of mourning what she thought she was going to have. And so it's, I'm acknowledging, it's a big ask, midstream in life, to hand over everything that you had planned for yourself to Jesus. And so you do with this what you want. And if that causes you to mourn something you thought you wanted or you thought you needed or you had marshaled your resources around pursuing, then so be it. But Jesus says, go ahead and mourn. Get it over with. Because we've got work to do. And it's here that I want to say this. As we listen as adults and we try to process this and think through it and how to integrate it into our lives, what do we do with it if we want to apply the truth? As I mentioned a little bit ago, the reality of it is that the older you are, the more challenging this instruction becomes. Until you retire, then it's like, whatever you want, Jesus, I've got all the freedom. At least that's how I assume retirement is. I don't know. But the further down the road you are, the harder this gets to be obedient to. You know, I think about Zach and Haley over here. I just did their wedding in the fall. They don't look at them. They don't know anything about anything. They don't know nothing. But they're also at the cusp of life and can respond to this in a way that has more freedom than the way that others of us can respond to it. So we acknowledge that. Here's what else that implies because we have a lot of parents in the room who are still raising children. You can get ahead of this. You can get ahead of them creating their own hopes and dreams for themselves. You can start to raise them, reminding them all the time, God has plans for you. God made you on purpose. God's gifted you to do things in his kingdom. And it's my sacred duty as your parent to guide you to those. I remind you guys all the time of the verse in Ephesians, Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. My most sacred duty, I believe, as a father, is to tell Lily and to tell John as often as they will listen, you are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that you might walk in them. My sacred duty is to help you see those good works and walk in them. It sounds counterintuitive, especially for Americans. I don't want John and Lily to create their own dreams for their lives. I want their biggest dream for their life to be to walk with God. Hold me close and teach me to abide. We just sang it. I want their biggest goal for their life to be to abide in Christ. And that one day, when they get to heaven, to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what I want for them. I'm really not very interested in them creating their own dreams. Because God has bigger ones for them that are better than theirs. And this makes sense, doesn't it? So I'll get there in a second. But to the parents, you raising your kids, you have a chance to get ahead of it now and to help them become young adults who know my life is not my own and God has plans for it and his plans are better than my plans so I'm going to follow them anyways. We can get ahead of this, guys, for the rest of us, as we try to integrate these things into our life. The problem is, that's exactly what we tend to do, isn't it? That's exactly what we tend to do. This isn't revolutionary information. It might be packaged in a way that we haven't thought about in a while, but it's not revolutionary information that Jesus asked for our life and wants us to live our life according to his plans. But when we hear that, trying to be good Christians who we don't yet know if we're disciples, we try to integrate Jesus' plans into the nooks and crannies of our plans, right? We try to take the life that we're already living and the path that we already chose. And then we try to work Jesus into those things so that being obedient to his word and choosing his dreams over ours doesn't cause very much pain. So we don't have to mourn a possible future. So we don't have to change a lot of things. So we don't get too uncomfortable. We just do a tiny little course correction and we feel better about ourselves because now we're giving Jesus this part of our life when that's not what he asks for. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Follow me. If you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. If you don't, you will lose it. And here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking through this. As we think about the idea of choosing our plans for our life or choosing Jesus' plans for our life. Your plans, I know this is a little whatever. So go with me or don't. But my hunch is your plans are just an amalgamation of who you were in childhood and who your parents were and who your friends were when you were in high school and college and you were developing your values. Your plans are just a hodgepodge of stuff that you receive from the people around you. If you had good parents, you wanted to be like them. If you had bad parents, you didn't want to be like them. And so that's at the correction of your life. If you had good friends in high school and college that had decent values, they pointed you in one direction. If you had bad friends, they pointed you in another direction. Very few of you ever sat down with a legal pad and research and wrote out a plan for your life in a thoughtful, meaningful way. Your plans are an accident, man. That's my point. Whatever you think you chose you wanted to intend, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You stumbled into it by accident of birth and culture. But we cling so tightly to the plans and the dreams that we have for our life that were made by flawed, finite brains. When what Jesus is offering to us are plans that were made by a perfect, divine brain that sees everything all at once. And yet we still stubbornly and ignorantly choose our own. C.S. Lewis once said that the kingdom of God is like you're a child in your backyard. He said making mud pies, which I guess is what you did for fun in like the 1910s, is you're like, mom, I'm going to go play with mud. Okay, be safe. He said it's like being offered to go on a one-year holiday, on a one-year vacation around the world to see all the greatest sights in the world, and instead we choose to sit in the backyard and play with mud. Here's the thing about these plans that Jesus has for you, about his desire for you to spend your life building his kingdom, not your own. And here's why it's okay for him to ask him to give up everything you thought you wanted for what he wants, because they're better than yours. And Jesus is not a tyrant. He's not a dictator. He's not interested in making your life worse at all. In fact, we have verse after verse in Scripture that assures us that Jesus actually wants us to have a good life. One of my favorite verses that's in my office, I use it a lot, it brings me comfort a lot, is John 10.10. The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Christ says. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants you to, literally, he wants you to have the best life possible. Now here's the deal. He probably doesn't define best life like you currently do, but his definition is better than yours. A couple more, and then I'm going to make a point and we'll wrap up. David writes in two different places in Psalms. In one place he writes, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. And then in Psalm 1611 he says, at your right hand, God, there are pleasures forevermore. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Does this sound like a God who's interested in making you miserable? Does this sound like a God that doesn't have better plans for you than you do? Your plans are an accident. His are intentional and divine. Lastly, in Scripture, I often point out to you the Ephesians prayer, Ephesians 3, 14 through 19. We did a whole series on it last January. I pointed it out at the onset of this year. It's my prayer for grace and my prayer for you. And the heart of the prayer is that everything that happens in your life would conspire to bring you closer to God. That's the prayer. But I always stop when we go through it at 19 because you have to stop somewhere. But if you keep reading and you get to 20 and 21, you see one of the most amazing, encouraging little passages in scripture. It says this, it says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. He finishes up that segment of the letter by offering the prayer to God, by him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. I know it's a high bar for Jesus to set, to say, I want all of your hopes and dreams. I want all of your plans. I want you to sit down and prayerfully consider with your career if that's what I want you to be doing. Prayerfully consider with your finances, is that really how I want you to invest in those? Is that really the future that I have dictated to you, or is that what you want? Jesus asked that we sit down and we think through these very difficult things that the answers could potentially make us deeply uncomfortable. But here's what we know. He's going to hand you better plans. He's going to hand you better dreams. And here's what I know experientially. I would never ever pretend to be someone who's always living life according to Jesus' plan. I would never ever pretend to do that. And you may be thinking, you're a pastor. You've committed your life to Jesus' plan. Not really. I became a pastor because I wanted people to respect me and think I was cool. That's why I became a pastor. Just full disclosure, that came out in counseling like six years ago. I know that that's true. God has sanctified those motives. Now I don't care what you think. That's not true either. But God has sanctified those motives and helped me not do this for myself and for the sake of others. So I know what it is to not live according to God's plan. I know it very well. But I've been blessed in my life that there have been pockets where I did accept his plan over mine and I did live his plan for me rather than my own plans and I can tell you without reservation or hesitation or exception when I am living my life according to God's plan my life life is richer, fuller, better, more lovely, more wonderful, more alive. Without exception, my friendships get deeper. Without exception, my marriage is better. Without exception, I find it easier to get up and I'm more motivated to do the things that God has put in front of me that day. Without exception, I hold my children tighter. Without exception, I cry more happy tears and experience a fullness of life that never comes when I live by my plans. And I don't want to paint a falsely rosy picture here. You can live according to God's plans and experience pain. You can mess up and pursue your own plans that weren't God's plans, and as a result, you're in a ditch somewhere. As a result, your life got sidelined. As a result, you were in the middle of great pain and hardship. But make no mistake about it, that's probably not because you were ardently following God's plan for your life. It's probably because you're following your own and he's trying to get your attention. But those of you who have lived your life according to God's plans for even a season cannot deny that that season in your life was one of the best ones. And that those seasons are some of the best ones. And there will be pain in the midst of living according to God's plan. We do not judge the raindrops of tragedy because we're believers. But, on balance, if you invest your life following God's plan for you rather than your own, if you take up your cross and follow Jesus and give up your life for the sake of the kingdom, I promise you, you will live a better life if you do it. I promise you it will be more rich and more full and more lovely. I promise you it will be immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine for yourself. I promise you. So as we finish this simple thought, and then I'll pray. Jesus is asking for your life. Do you trust him with it? Do you trust him with it? Let's pray. Father, you are lovely and good and wonderful and we are grateful. God, it is a scary thing to hand our hopes and dreams over to anyone else outside of our control. But Father, I pray that we would trust you with ours. Help us trust you with our children, with our careers, with our financial goals, with our friendships, with all the things we want to accomplish, all the things we want to acquire, and all the things we want to accumulate, God. I pray that we would trust you with those things. Give us the strength and the courage to ask hard questions and to receive hard answers and replace our cruddy hopes and dreams with your incredible ones and help us be people who live our lives for you. In Jesus' name, amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. In part two, we encountered Joseph as a teenager and learned his arrogance earned him such resentment from his brothers that they eventually sold him into slavery. This event changed Joseph forever. Joseph believed, based on God-given dreams, that he would one day rule over his brothers. Now, facing the disillusion of those dreams, Joseph must make a choice. A choice that is eventually faced by all of us. Will he choose to resent God because he feels God let him down? Or will he still cling to the hope that even though he can't see it, he knows that God has a plan? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching online. If you are online and you saw that Hootenanny announcement or here, I know that you did. I would add one thing to it that I'm very excited about. There's actually, we have a guy who comes to the church who is a private chef that you can hire and bring into your home. And then we have some other folks who are a part of the church who have worked as professional chefs. And they are conspiring to come up with kind of an elevated grill menu that they're gonna make for us for the Hootenanny. So we're not just gonna have frozen pucks that we melt on the grill and then slap between buns and expect you to call them good. We're gonna have actual good stuff to eat at the Hootenanny. So come on, invite your friends. I think it's going to be a really fun, special time. I'm looking forward to getting to do that together as a church. Last week as a church, we did Grace Serves. And for those who weren't able to make it, we had a really great turnout. I was very much encouraged by it. We did some work at Fox Road. We packed lunches or meals with Rise Against Hunger. And I was told this week, where's Doug Funk? Are you in here? Are you out in the lobby? Okay. Yeah, you're here. Is it 300,000 meals in 20 years? Yes. 350,000. Sorry. Let's just call it 500. Let's just round up 500,000. But no, we were told by Rise Against Hunger that over the course of 20 years that Grace has helped to pack about 350,000 meals for people who need them a whole, whole lot. So I thought that was great. I don't know if it's appropriate to cheer for ourselves. Let's just know that we did that. No, don't cheer. That's great that we did that. And finally, it's kickoff Sunday. This is a good Sunday. If you're here, your team has a chance to be good this year. If you're watching from home, they're going to be terrible. All right? That's what you get. I wish the best of luck to all of you and your teams, unless your teams are the Panthers or the Patriots or whoever's playing the Falcons. Otherwise, best of luck to you. Let's go. This morning, we're focused on Joseph and moving through his life. As we said in the video, that we ended last week with Joseph facing this decision. He was an arrogant teenager that built resentment with his brothers that got him thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. And then we see, we leave Joseph on the back of presumably an ox cart chained, being carried down to Egypt into a life of slavery. Joseph had just received dreams from God that said that he was going to rule over his brothers and rule over even his mom and his dad. He had received these dreams from God, these promises from God, and then the exact opposite of those promises happened to him as he's riding down to Egypt as a slave? How can he possibly rule over his brothers? He will be irrevocably separated from his family and is now bound to live a life of slavery. And so in that moment, he faces a choice that every God follower faces at some point in their life. He's in a place where he feels disillusioned by God. He's in a place where he feels disappointed by God. And you've been in that place too. And if you haven't, you will be. I was taught this about God and yet it's not happening. I read this in God's word. It says, if I did this, then he would do this. And I did this and he's not doing that. To be a believer is to sit in a place at some point or another where you feel like God should do this thing and he's not doing it. And you're disillusioned and you're disappointed. And you feel that maybe God's not going to keep his word to you. And in those moments, we're faced with the same decision that Joseph was faced with as he's going down to Egypt in the ox cart. Do I resent God because he broke his word to me, because I think he's let me down, or do I choose to love God and trust him because I know that he loves me and I know that he has a plan. And even though I can't see how it's going to work out, I know that God is good and he has a plan. And so Joseph chooses, we see as we pick up the story, he chooses to continue to honor God. He chooses to continue to show God favor. And sometimes there are these times in life where we feel like we want to be resentful of God, but we have no other place to go but to run to him. There is this scene with Jesus and his disciples where Jesus offers this really hard teaching and a lot of people fall away from him because they don't expect that that's what Jesus, the Son of God, would teach. And he looks at the disciples and he says, are you going to leave too? And Peter profoundly and wonderfully responds, where else can I go? Where else can I find hope? And so maybe Joseph relates to that. God, I don't understand what you're doing here. I'm on an ox cart in chains to live a life of slavery. I'm supposed to be ruling over my family and be the head of the clan. This is the exact opposite of what you promised, but I don't know where else to go from here. And so we see that Joseph chooses to lean into God, to trust him, and to trust that God loves him. When he gets to Egypt, he's sold into slavery to a man named Potiphar. Many of you know this story, but in case you don't, Potiphar was the chief of Pharaoh's guard. We're told that he was the second most powerful person in Egypt, which makes him the second most powerful person on the planet at the time because Egypt is the superpower during Joseph's day. Potiphar had risen to prominence in the Egyptian empire and was in charge of Pharaoh's guard. He was tasked with keeping Pharaoh alive, which made him the second most powerful man in the nation. And he buys Joseph. And we don't know how many years for sure that he worked for Potiphar. And well, what we don't know is how many years it took to get to this place. But Joseph is bought by this powerful man in Egypt. He is a Hebrew slave. He's a foreign guy. He's about 17 years old and he sold to Potiphar. And remember he was faced with that choice. Do I honor God or do I run away from him? And Joseph chooses to honor God. And this is how we see that he does this. This is what happens to Joseph in Potiphar's house. We're going to be in Genesis chapter 39 and pick up the story in verse 2. If you read on, what you find is that Joseph ran the house so well and so efficiently and Potiphar trusted him with so much that it says that the only thing that Potiphar had to think about every day was what to eat. Joseph took care of Potiphar so well just saying, let's relate to the text a little bit. Wouldn't that be a pretty sweet gig? How would you like it if you had a personal life assistant that was so good at what they did that they ran your life better than you and all you had to do is decide what you wanted to eat. That's pretty good, especially on NFL Sunday. I wish that that was my life on NFL Sunday. That's how much Potiphar trusted Joseph, which I've got to believe. I don't know. Admittedly, I don't know a lot about the slave culture in ancient Egypt. But I'd be willing to bet that there's not many foreign slaves who rose to such a position of prominence as Joseph did. I bet Potiphar had Egyptian slaves that human nature tells us he would have preferred over the Hebrew slave. But for some reason, Joseph was so impressive that he rose to what I would argue is very likely an unprecedented position for someone who came from outside of Egypt. But Joseph chose to honor God. He chose to do the right thing, and God gave him favor. And God made all that he did prosper. You know those people? I've worked with people like that before. I've worked with people on church staff. I got a buddy named Heath. No matter where he got moved around at my old church, he got moved around to different positions every year and a half or two years. And everywhere he went, that ministry grew. He's just good at everything. I wish I had an ounce of what he has. He's good at everything. This is Joseph. Wherever God puts him, it thrives. And so he rises to prominence in Potiphar's house. At some point in his rise, which would have been over the course of years, this was not an overnight thing, Potiphar's wife comes to Joseph and says, would you lay with me? Now, we've covered this story before, and when we did, for this section, I walked over here and I said, this is going to be my reckless speculation box. This is not biblical truth. This is just me guessing. So with that in mind, I would just like to reiterate this point because I think it bears repeating, and many of you didn't hear it when I made it two or three years ago. And I don't want to be untoward with what I'm about to say, but I think that we can admit that this is objectively true in most cases. Potiphar is rich and powerful. Rich and powerful people tend to be good-looking and have good-looking spouses. Yes, you don't have to answer this out loud, but this is just a thing. It's a dynamic. People get money and they get better looking. That's why I look this way. I have an average amount of money. I look average. If I had a lot of money, I would look amazing. I bet Potiphar's wife was pretty. I bet she was. Joseph grew up in a nomadic tribe that wandered the fields and the hillsides and the deserts. You ever seen people who live a life exposed to the elements? They have a face of a catcher's mitt at like 35. They're not a good-looking people. Go to the coast of Maine and look around. You'd be like, that person's a grandpa. No, they're not. They just graduated college. That's what it was like to be a nomad. I'd be willing to bet. Again, this is conjecture. Joseph grew up in a rough and tumble nomadic tribe where all the girls were his cousins. All right, he didn't have a lot of options. And then this Hebrew nomad comes to the most powerful nation in the world, is elevated in the second most powerful home in the nation, and the wife of that home wants to sleep with him. That would be, for any human who's ever lived, a genuinely tempting situation. Right? Put yourself in his shoes and you tell me what you would do. I'm a big person. When we want to start judging people's sins and what they did and how far they fell and gosh, I can't believe that they would have done that or done that to their family or whatever it was. I always go to, okay, that's fine. Let's judge them. Put yourself in their shoes with their circumstances and the way that they grew up and you tell me that you would make different choices because I don't think you would. Put yourself in Joseph's shoes and ask yourself what choice you would make. Even if you didn't go through with it, would you flirt with it a little bit? Would you let it stroke your ego? Would you want to see if she was really serious? Would you just lean into it because it kind of made you feel good that someone like that would like someone like you? Human nature says that we probably would. Human nature suggests that many of us, including me, I'm saying us on purpose, would at least entertain it a little bit. Would at least want to search it out just a little bit. Would maybe want to see how close can I get to the fire without getting burned. But that wasn't Joseph's response. She came to him day after day. And she tried to entice him. And in that, in that day after day enticement, do you think that it was a formal across the room? Mr. Joseph, as you would be so obliged, I would love to engage in some activities with you. I bet she did what she could to make it more and more difficult for him to stand firm. But this is what he said. And this is the remarkable character of Joseph. Look at his response. When she would come to him day after day and try to entice him, look at what his response was. We see it in verse 8, and I'll read through 10. That is some remarkable integrity. She would try to entice him, and he would say to her, how could I possibly do that? Your husband has entrusted me with his very life. He has given me all his authority. He's not even more powerful in this house than I am. How could I betray him and do this to him? And more than that, and I love the way that Joseph phrases this, how could I sin against my God? My God who has been faithful to me, my God who, yes, let me get sold into slavery, but has shown me favor here and given me a position here that I did not think I could attain to and who has helped me to find favor in my master Potiphar's eyes. How could I sin against him, and sin against Potiphar, and sin against myself, and sin against you, and engage myself in this? How could I possibly do that? I wonder what it would look like to see temptations in our life through the lens of God's blessings. If when we are tempted to sin or to go down a path that we shouldn't go down, I wonder what it would look like to call to mind God's blessings in our life. How could I do that to God after all that he's given me and list off the things that we are grateful for? I wonder what kind of impact that would have on our ability to stand firm when we face the tests of temptation. And as we keep reading the story, we find that one day it comes to a critical point where words are no longer enough. One day Joseph goes into the house and he and Potiphar's wife are alone. It seems that normally there was all kinds of servants around, so even if Potiphar's wife was being suggestive, there really wasn't a time or a place where it would be expedient. But this time, there's nobody else around. This time, there's no accountability. It's just him and her. And she apparently grabs hold of him because she was trying to seize the moment. And you know the story. He, in that moment, sets an example for us that rings through the centuries. He, in that moment, does something that I think is incredibly profound. And I wonder what we would do in that moment. We're a slave. We've risen to prominence. We are subjected to Potiphar. This person who we may be very attracted to wants us to cross a line with them. How many of us in our heads in that moment would justify it? What choice do I have? If I don't, she's going to tell on me, I'm going to go to prison or be killed. I may as well just do it. I may as well just follow through because I'm in an impossible situation. But Joseph doesn't do any of that. Again, he sets an example in that moment that rings throughout history. And he runs. He just gets the heck out of there. He runs away. And as he runs, she holds on to his cloak, his tunic, whatever the outer layer of his garments were, and he flings them off and he goes and he gets out of there. And he runs from that temptation. And this didn't even occur to me in my sermon prep. This occurred to me as I was praying about to get up and do the sermon. But do you understand that when he's running from temptation, that he's running directly to Jesus? It may have felt to him like he was running out of the house and to a safe place, but no, no, no, that's not where he's running. He's running away from evil and towards his Savior. When you choose to run like Joseph, you're running away from evil, the things that would seek to tear you down, and you are running towards your Savior. And I think that's a pretty cool picture. But in that moment, Joseph chooses to run. And it's here in the story that I want to ask a couple questions of us as we reflect on and relate to this story. The first question would be this, what tempts me? If you have notes, you can write that down. I'm not asking you to guess what tempts Nate, okay? I'm asking you to make it personal in your life as you think about yourself. I didn't want to say what tempts you because then we're tempted to think about what tempts other people. No, no, no, no, no. What tempts me? Think about it that way. What tempts you? Don't write it down. People around you will see. They'll be weird. What tempts you? Is it the temptation that Joseph faced? Listen, in a church our size, and the number of marriages that are represented here, you're kidding yourself if you think that people aren't currently facing that temptation. You're kidding yourself if you think people aren't currently involved in that temptation. If you think that people aren't flirting with the idea in their mind. Or maybe it's not a temptation that you have now, but it's not because you don't want that temptation. It's because you don't have the option. But you would invite the option if it came. Maybe that's the temptation that you face. If it is, then you're likely sweaty right now. And that's good. That's the Holy Spirit. Don't worry about that. Maybe the temptation we face is some sort of addiction, a reliance on chemicals. Listen, I've heard a lot of jokes over the course of the pandemic, but has there ever been an easier time in our adult life to develop a habit that's not healthy in the privacy of our own home? We work from home, don't have to be anywhere the next day, just have a couple more. Has it ever been easier to push alcohol into an area where it just doesn't need to be, to take that too far? Maybe that's what's tempting us. Maybe, maybe it's not something that is that blatantly corrosive. Maybe it's greed. Maybe the thing that tempts you is just to chase after the next thing, is to get the next job to make a little bit more money so that you can have the next nice thing. So that when you get that nice thing, you can become instantly dissatisfied with that and then want the next nice thing. And if you think I'm making that up, all right, I know that that's something that we all face. A year and a half ago, Jen and I bought a house. We were so proud of it. We were thrilled with it. This is the nicest house we've ever owned. And then within like nine months, we were like, this place is small. We need more space. Lily's asking us constantly, and on the next house, can I paint my walls this color? And I'm like, we don't have any money to do that. So sure, in 10 years. Maybe we just get caught up in greed for the next thing that we want. Maybe for many of us, I was really trying to think this week about what might tempt us. And I think that there's some obvious things, like the things I've already addressed. But I think that many of us face a temptation that maybe we wouldn't address out loud or we wouldn't even conclude ourselves, but I think it very much is one, but it's the sin of complacency or being good enough. Maybe what tempts you is to simply say, I'm good. I'm good enough. Yeah, I mean, I could maybe come to church with more regularity. I know I could get up and I could read my Bible more. Nate's always talking about that. I could try it. I know I could be more prayerful. I know that I could have devotions with my kids. I know that I could pray with my spouse more. I know that I could volunteer more. I know that I could probably give more if I wanted to. Like, I know that there's more that I could do, sure. But I'm pretty good. I'm okay. My life's not going off the rails. I wasn't in the first group. I'm not tempted by affairs or by alcohol. Oh man, those people are terrible. I'm in the good group. We often get to this place of complacency and good enough by playing comparison games, right? I know that I could be better, but at least I wasn't in that first group. I know that I could do more, but at least I'm not as bad as blank. So-and-so hasn't done this in years, and they seem fine. I think I'm fine, too. And so we find favorable comparisons to ourselves to convince ourselves that, yeah, I could be more healthy spiritually, but I'm doing okay. And I would encourage you to do this if this sounds like you. How about don't compare yourself to other people? How about compare yourself to yourself five years ago? To yourself three years ago? If I'm striking a chord with you and sometimes you think to yourself, yeah, sometimes I just think I'm good enough. I know I could do more, but I don't really want to do it. How do you compare? If you're 50 years old, how do you compare to 45 year old you? Are you healthier? Are you more vibrant spiritually? Do you feel a closeness to Jesus that you didn't feel when you're 45? Are you telling more people about Jesus than you did five years ago? Are you talking with your kids about Jesus more than you did five years ago? Are you seeing more people come to faith in your orbit than you did five years ago? Are you more engaged with scripture? Are you more breathing in God's love and God's goodness and breathing that out to other people than you were five years ago? Or are you about the same? Is it just steady and maybe sometimes a little worse? The sin of good enough just convinces us to flatline for our whole lives and not see any growth. And I kept saying, well, at least I'm not in group one, but guess what? All those sins are just as damaging to us. I thought of one more too. Maybe the sin that you struggle with is letting other people tell you who you are instead of your creator tell you who you are. Maybe you have people in your life who tell you that you're not good enough. Maybe you have voices in your head that tell you that you don't matter. That tell you that no one's going to listen to you. That tell you that you can't really change or that you can't really do or that you're not really that important. I don't want to press too hard on this because that's a difficult place to be, but I would just tell you gently as your pastor, that's sinful too. Because God tells you that you're chosen. God tells you that you're fearfully and wonderfully made. God watched his son die on a cross for you. God is orchestrating this whole thing to come back and get you and bring you to his heaven. God loves you dearly. God made you on purpose. God watches you every day and he roots for you and Jesus sits at the right hand of the father and he intercedes for you. And so maybe your temptation is to listen to voices who aren't God's tell you that you're something or someone that you're not instead of listening to who God tells us that we are. Whatever your temptation is, whatever it is, however you identify with that, I'm not all of them, that'd be too difficult, but pick the one that's most pernicious in your life. That's most relevant in your life. And let's think about that one. What does it look like to run from that sin? Joseph ran. He ran away from that sin and he ran to Jesus. So what does it look like in your life to do that? I would simply like to make this point about running as we try to figure out what that means in our own life. That to run is to take the option off the table. When Joseph ran, he was burning a bridge, man. I was just never coming back. This is never going to happen. I'm getting out of here. I'm not leaving any possibility for it. He didn't go to a different room. He didn't try to talk her out of it. He ran. I'm taking this option that you're proposing off the table. That's not possible. We're not doing it. Not happening. So in your life and the temptations that you face, what does it look like to run from them? What does it look like to take those options off the table? That thing is tempting me and I'm going to make it in my life so that it's not even a possibility. What do you have to do to run from it? What accountability do you have to invite into your life about complacency? What do you have to do to burn the bridge about the affair that you're entertaining? And listen to me, if that's your temptation, run, man, run. Get out of there. Run and burn the bridge. If it's substances, what do you have to do to burn that bridge and take it off the table? If it's complacency, if it's believing the wrong voices, if it's greed, if it's whatever it is, what do we have to do to burn bridges and run, to take that option off the table? And now listen. These are not my favorite kinds of sermons. This is a pretty classic sermon. Hey, what is the sin in your life? You should stop it. That's what this sermon is in its most simple form. And I don't really like to harp on stuff like that because I really don't want this to be a house of guilt. I don't want to bring you in every week, make you feel bad about what you're doing, and then send you out here trying to do better. That's really not the point at all. But it's where we are in the text. It's what happens in the story. And it's a theme of the Bible that we are to pursue holiness and purity. So why does this matter so much to God? Why does God want us to run from our temptations? Why does he want us to take those options off the table? Why does that matter so deeply to him? Well, I had a couple thoughts for that. The first is that we're told in Scripture that we should be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, that we should pursue holiness. God values purity, and so we should too. Jesus died to make us pure. And so we should value that purity. We also talked about in the middle of the summer, we focused in on Psalm 1611, that you make known to me the paths of life in your presence. There is fullness of joy at your right hand. There are pleasures forevermore. And we talked about how this full life is found in God. And we talked about this idea of really God invites us on, this is from C.S. Lewis, God invites us on this incredible vacation, this incredible life to live, and we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies thinking this is the apex of all human experience. When we choose to run away from sin and to Jesus, we're leaving the mud pies and we're pursuing the life that he has laid out for us that's far greater than we could ever ask or imagine. John 10.10 says that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it to the full. We find fullness of joy there. We find pleasures forevermore. He makes known to us the paths of life. So when we sin, we forfeit that. But that's not really the reason that I want us to focus on this morning. To me, the most compelling thought about why does purity matter so much and why should we run from the temptations that exist in our life is simply this thought here. What kingdom work can the enemy short-circuit if you give in to your temptations? What kingdom work can the enemy short circuit if you simply give in to the temptations that you face? It's becoming more and more one of my more favorite used thought about verses in my life, Ephesians 2.10, where Paul writes that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. I know some of you might feel like, listen, man, I don't have any great kingdom work to do. Yes, you do. The Bible tells me so. That God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in him, that he has mapped out for you in your life based on your gifts and your abilities and your spiritual gifts and the way that God has uniquely created and crafted you, that he has laid out for you good works, things to do to build his kingdom for all eternity, to live out our purpose for being here, which our purpose for being alive, I don't know if you know this, is to know Jesus and to bring other people with you as you go to him. That's why we exist. That's why he doesn't snap us up to heaven as soon as we get saved. We were created in Christ Jesus for those good works that we might walk in them. So you might say, gosh, Nate, I'm a stay-at-home mom. My life is a two-year-old. I don't have good works. Bull, you're discipling that kid. You're loving on the families that you invite into your home. You're loving on the friends that that kid has. You're volunteering somewhere. You're loving on your neighborhood somewhere. You're coming to church and loving on kids here and loving on other folks here. You're influencing them, and they're seeing the ripples of God in your life. You cannot tell me that your life doesn't matter. God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. He's got a plan to use you if only we open our eyes to see it. And I wonder, what kingdom building do we short circuit when we allow temptations to take over our life? Here's what I mean. If I allow my temptations to take over my life, what does that do to the work that we're doing at Grace? To what God is doing here in this place? How does it short circuit God's kingdom work here? If you give in to the temptations that you have in your life, how does it short circuit your ability to reach your neighbors, your ability to share Christ's love with your coworkers? How does it short circuit your ability to disciple your children if you give in to the temptations that you're facing? How does it short circuit your ability to love on your family members who don't know Jesus yet but you desperately want them to? If you give in to your temptations, how does it short circuit your ability to be used in those ways? I think this is a huge reason that we pursue purity. So that God can do the work in us and through us that he's always wanted to do. And in being used for that work, we find the greatest joy imaginable. There's another point on your notes, but I'm not going to end it like that. I'm going to end it like this. I don't know what tempts you. I don't know how the enemy would seek to short circuit the work that God has for you to do. But I do know this. That the best choice, the wisest choice, the choice you need to make today is to run from it. Run. Take the option off the table and run to it. And your life may get harder for running. Joseph ran and it landed his butt in prison. Your life may get more difficult if you run, but run. Get away from it. Pursue purity. Know God. Experience his pleasures forevermore and know what it is to live a life of service to his kingdom and live in that peace and that contentment and that fulfillment. If you run, you won't regret it. If you stay, you will. Let's pray. Father, you are so good to us. You're so good to us in how you love us. Father, if there's anybody here who just can't hear your voice and they want so desperately to believe that they are who you say they are, would you just shout at them so they can hear you? God, for those tempted with the same temptation that faced Joseph, give us the strength and wherewithal to run. Whatever we're facing, whatever tempts us, however the enemy would seek to take us off course so that we can't know you like we should and we can't show others who you are. God, I just pray that you would give us the strength and the conviction and the determination to run, to run away from that sin and to run towards you and find the joy that you offer us there. God, let us not think for a second that this is somehow about behaving ourselves better. But let us know and understand that this is all about pursuing you and experiencing the life that you have for us. It's in your son's name who provides us that life that I pray. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. In part two, we encountered Joseph as a teenager and learned his arrogance earned him such resentment from his brothers that they eventually sold him into slavery. This event changed Joseph forever. Joseph believed, based on God-given dreams, that he would one day rule over his brothers. Now, facing the disillusion of those dreams, Joseph must make a choice. A choice that is eventually faced by all of us. Will he choose to resent God because he feels God let him down? Or will he still cling to the hope that even though he can't see it, he knows that God has a plan? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching online. If you are online and you saw that Hootenanny announcement or here, I know that you did. I would add one thing to it that I'm very excited about. There's actually, we have a guy who comes to the church who is a private chef that you can hire and bring into your home. And then we have some other folks who are a part of the church who have worked as professional chefs. And they are conspiring to come up with kind of an elevated grill menu that they're gonna make for us for the Hootenanny. So we're not just gonna have frozen pucks that we melt on the grill and then slap between buns and expect you to call them good. We're gonna have actual good stuff to eat at the Hootenanny. So come on, invite your friends. I think it's going to be a really fun, special time. I'm looking forward to getting to do that together as a church. Last week as a church, we did Grace Serves. And for those who weren't able to make it, we had a really great turnout. I was very much encouraged by it. We did some work at Fox Road. We packed lunches or meals with Rise Against Hunger. And I was told this week, where's Doug Funk? Are you in here? Are you out in the lobby? Okay. Yeah, you're here. Is it 300,000 meals in 20 years? Yes. 350,000. Sorry. Let's just call it 500. Let's just round up 500,000. But no, we were told by Rise Against Hunger that over the course of 20 years that Grace has helped to pack about 350,000 meals for people who need them a whole, whole lot. So I thought that was great. I don't know if it's appropriate to cheer for ourselves. Let's just know that we did that. No, don't cheer. That's great that we did that. And finally, it's kickoff Sunday. This is a good Sunday. If you're here, your team has a chance to be good this year. If you're watching from home, they're going to be terrible. All right? That's what you get. I wish the best of luck to all of you and your teams, unless your teams are the Panthers or the Patriots or whoever's playing the Falcons. Otherwise, best of luck to you. Let's go. This morning, we're focused on Joseph and moving through his life. As we said in the video, that we ended last week with Joseph facing this decision. He was an arrogant teenager that built resentment with his brothers that got him thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. And then we see, we leave Joseph on the back of presumably an ox cart chained, being carried down to Egypt into a life of slavery. Joseph had just received dreams from God that said that he was going to rule over his brothers and rule over even his mom and his dad. He had received these dreams from God, these promises from God, and then the exact opposite of those promises happened to him as he's riding down to Egypt as a slave? How can he possibly rule over his brothers? He will be irrevocably separated from his family and is now bound to live a life of slavery. And so in that moment, he faces a choice that every God follower faces at some point in their life. He's in a place where he feels disillusioned by God. He's in a place where he feels disappointed by God. And you've been in that place too. And if you haven't, you will be. I was taught this about God and yet it's not happening. I read this in God's word. It says, if I did this, then he would do this. And I did this and he's not doing that. To be a believer is to sit in a place at some point or another where you feel like God should do this thing and he's not doing it. And you're disillusioned and you're disappointed. And you feel that maybe God's not going to keep his word to you. And in those moments, we're faced with the same decision that Joseph was faced with as he's going down to Egypt in the ox cart. Do I resent God because he broke his word to me, because I think he's let me down, or do I choose to love God and trust him because I know that he loves me and I know that he has a plan. And even though I can't see how it's going to work out, I know that God is good and he has a plan. And so Joseph chooses, we see as we pick up the story, he chooses to continue to honor God. He chooses to continue to show God favor. And sometimes there are these times in life where we feel like we want to be resentful of God, but we have no other place to go but to run to him. There is this scene with Jesus and his disciples where Jesus offers this really hard teaching and a lot of people fall away from him because they don't expect that that's what Jesus, the Son of God, would teach. And he looks at the disciples and he says, are you going to leave too? And Peter profoundly and wonderfully responds, where else can I go? Where else can I find hope? And so maybe Joseph relates to that. God, I don't understand what you're doing here. I'm on an ox cart in chains to live a life of slavery. I'm supposed to be ruling over my family and be the head of the clan. This is the exact opposite of what you promised, but I don't know where else to go from here. And so we see that Joseph chooses to lean into God, to trust him, and to trust that God loves him. When he gets to Egypt, he's sold into slavery to a man named Potiphar. Many of you know this story, but in case you don't, Potiphar was the chief of Pharaoh's guard. We're told that he was the second most powerful person in Egypt, which makes him the second most powerful person on the planet at the time because Egypt is the superpower during Joseph's day. Potiphar had risen to prominence in the Egyptian empire and was in charge of Pharaoh's guard. He was tasked with keeping Pharaoh alive, which made him the second most powerful man in the nation. And he buys Joseph. And we don't know how many years for sure that he worked for Potiphar. And well, what we don't know is how many years it took to get to this place. But Joseph is bought by this powerful man in Egypt. He is a Hebrew slave. He's a foreign guy. He's about 17 years old and he sold to Potiphar. And remember he was faced with that choice. Do I honor God or do I run away from him? And Joseph chooses to honor God. And this is how we see that he does this. This is what happens to Joseph in Potiphar's house. We're going to be in Genesis chapter 39 and pick up the story in verse 2. If you read on, what you find is that Joseph ran the house so well and so efficiently and Potiphar trusted him with so much that it says that the only thing that Potiphar had to think about every day was what to eat. Joseph took care of Potiphar so well just saying, let's relate to the text a little bit. Wouldn't that be a pretty sweet gig? How would you like it if you had a personal life assistant that was so good at what they did that they ran your life better than you and all you had to do is decide what you wanted to eat. That's pretty good, especially on NFL Sunday. I wish that that was my life on NFL Sunday. That's how much Potiphar trusted Joseph, which I've got to believe. I don't know. Admittedly, I don't know a lot about the slave culture in ancient Egypt. But I'd be willing to bet that there's not many foreign slaves who rose to such a position of prominence as Joseph did. I bet Potiphar had Egyptian slaves that human nature tells us he would have preferred over the Hebrew slave. But for some reason, Joseph was so impressive that he rose to what I would argue is very likely an unprecedented position for someone who came from outside of Egypt. But Joseph chose to honor God. He chose to do the right thing, and God gave him favor. And God made all that he did prosper. You know those people? I've worked with people like that before. I've worked with people on church staff. I got a buddy named Heath. No matter where he got moved around at my old church, he got moved around to different positions every year and a half or two years. And everywhere he went, that ministry grew. He's just good at everything. I wish I had an ounce of what he has. He's good at everything. This is Joseph. Wherever God puts him, it thrives. And so he rises to prominence in Potiphar's house. At some point in his rise, which would have been over the course of years, this was not an overnight thing, Potiphar's wife comes to Joseph and says, would you lay with me? Now, we've covered this story before, and when we did, for this section, I walked over here and I said, this is going to be my reckless speculation box. This is not biblical truth. This is just me guessing. So with that in mind, I would just like to reiterate this point because I think it bears repeating, and many of you didn't hear it when I made it two or three years ago. And I don't want to be untoward with what I'm about to say, but I think that we can admit that this is objectively true in most cases. Potiphar is rich and powerful. Rich and powerful people tend to be good-looking and have good-looking spouses. Yes, you don't have to answer this out loud, but this is just a thing. It's a dynamic. People get money and they get better looking. That's why I look this way. I have an average amount of money. I look average. If I had a lot of money, I would look amazing. I bet Potiphar's wife was pretty. I bet she was. Joseph grew up in a nomadic tribe that wandered the fields and the hillsides and the deserts. You ever seen people who live a life exposed to the elements? They have a face of a catcher's mitt at like 35. They're not a good-looking people. Go to the coast of Maine and look around. You'd be like, that person's a grandpa. No, they're not. They just graduated college. That's what it was like to be a nomad. I'd be willing to bet. Again, this is conjecture. Joseph grew up in a rough and tumble nomadic tribe where all the girls were his cousins. All right, he didn't have a lot of options. And then this Hebrew nomad comes to the most powerful nation in the world, is elevated in the second most powerful home in the nation, and the wife of that home wants to sleep with him. That would be, for any human who's ever lived, a genuinely tempting situation. Right? Put yourself in his shoes and you tell me what you would do. I'm a big person. When we want to start judging people's sins and what they did and how far they fell and gosh, I can't believe that they would have done that or done that to their family or whatever it was. I always go to, okay, that's fine. Let's judge them. Put yourself in their shoes with their circumstances and the way that they grew up and you tell me that you would make different choices because I don't think you would. Put yourself in Joseph's shoes and ask yourself what choice you would make. Even if you didn't go through with it, would you flirt with it a little bit? Would you let it stroke your ego? Would you want to see if she was really serious? Would you just lean into it because it kind of made you feel good that someone like that would like someone like you? Human nature says that we probably would. Human nature suggests that many of us, including me, I'm saying us on purpose, would at least entertain it a little bit. Would at least want to search it out just a little bit. Would maybe want to see how close can I get to the fire without getting burned. But that wasn't Joseph's response. She came to him day after day. And she tried to entice him. And in that, in that day after day enticement, do you think that it was a formal across the room? Mr. Joseph, as you would be so obliged, I would love to engage in some activities with you. I bet she did what she could to make it more and more difficult for him to stand firm. But this is what he said. And this is the remarkable character of Joseph. Look at his response. When she would come to him day after day and try to entice him, look at what his response was. We see it in verse 8, and I'll read through 10. That is some remarkable integrity. She would try to entice him, and he would say to her, how could I possibly do that? Your husband has entrusted me with his very life. He has given me all his authority. He's not even more powerful in this house than I am. How could I betray him and do this to him? And more than that, and I love the way that Joseph phrases this, how could I sin against my God? My God who has been faithful to me, my God who, yes, let me get sold into slavery, but has shown me favor here and given me a position here that I did not think I could attain to and who has helped me to find favor in my master Potiphar's eyes. How could I sin against him, and sin against Potiphar, and sin against myself, and sin against you, and engage myself in this? How could I possibly do that? I wonder what it would look like to see temptations in our life through the lens of God's blessings. If when we are tempted to sin or to go down a path that we shouldn't go down, I wonder what it would look like to call to mind God's blessings in our life. How could I do that to God after all that he's given me and list off the things that we are grateful for? I wonder what kind of impact that would have on our ability to stand firm when we face the tests of temptation. And as we keep reading the story, we find that one day it comes to a critical point where words are no longer enough. One day Joseph goes into the house and he and Potiphar's wife are alone. It seems that normally there was all kinds of servants around, so even if Potiphar's wife was being suggestive, there really wasn't a time or a place where it would be expedient. But this time, there's nobody else around. This time, there's no accountability. It's just him and her. And she apparently grabs hold of him because she was trying to seize the moment. And you know the story. He, in that moment, sets an example for us that rings through the centuries. He, in that moment, does something that I think is incredibly profound. And I wonder what we would do in that moment. We're a slave. We've risen to prominence. We are subjected to Potiphar. This person who we may be very attracted to wants us to cross a line with them. How many of us in our heads in that moment would justify it? What choice do I have? If I don't, she's going to tell on me, I'm going to go to prison or be killed. I may as well just do it. I may as well just follow through because I'm in an impossible situation. But Joseph doesn't do any of that. Again, he sets an example in that moment that rings throughout history. And he runs. He just gets the heck out of there. He runs away. And as he runs, she holds on to his cloak, his tunic, whatever the outer layer of his garments were, and he flings them off and he goes and he gets out of there. And he runs from that temptation. And this didn't even occur to me in my sermon prep. This occurred to me as I was praying about to get up and do the sermon. But do you understand that when he's running from temptation, that he's running directly to Jesus? It may have felt to him like he was running out of the house and to a safe place, but no, no, no, that's not where he's running. He's running away from evil and towards his Savior. When you choose to run like Joseph, you're running away from evil, the things that would seek to tear you down, and you are running towards your Savior. And I think that's a pretty cool picture. But in that moment, Joseph chooses to run. And it's here in the story that I want to ask a couple questions of us as we reflect on and relate to this story. The first question would be this, what tempts me? If you have notes, you can write that down. I'm not asking you to guess what tempts Nate, okay? I'm asking you to make it personal in your life as you think about yourself. I didn't want to say what tempts you because then we're tempted to think about what tempts other people. No, no, no, no, no. What tempts me? Think about it that way. What tempts you? Don't write it down. People around you will see. They'll be weird. What tempts you? Is it the temptation that Joseph faced? Listen, in a church our size, and the number of marriages that are represented here, you're kidding yourself if you think that people aren't currently facing that temptation. You're kidding yourself if you think people aren't currently involved in that temptation. If you think that people aren't flirting with the idea in their mind. Or maybe it's not a temptation that you have now, but it's not because you don't want that temptation. It's because you don't have the option. But you would invite the option if it came. Maybe that's the temptation that you face. If it is, then you're likely sweaty right now. And that's good. That's the Holy Spirit. Don't worry about that. Maybe the temptation we face is some sort of addiction, a reliance on chemicals. Listen, I've heard a lot of jokes over the course of the pandemic, but has there ever been an easier time in our adult life to develop a habit that's not healthy in the privacy of our own home? We work from home, don't have to be anywhere the next day, just have a couple more. Has it ever been easier to push alcohol into an area where it just doesn't need to be, to take that too far? Maybe that's what's tempting us. Maybe, maybe it's not something that is that blatantly corrosive. Maybe it's greed. Maybe the thing that tempts you is just to chase after the next thing, is to get the next job to make a little bit more money so that you can have the next nice thing. So that when you get that nice thing, you can become instantly dissatisfied with that and then want the next nice thing. And if you think I'm making that up, all right, I know that that's something that we all face. A year and a half ago, Jen and I bought a house. We were so proud of it. We were thrilled with it. This is the nicest house we've ever owned. And then within like nine months, we were like, this place is small. We need more space. Lily's asking us constantly, and on the next house, can I paint my walls this color? And I'm like, we don't have any money to do that. So sure, in 10 years. Maybe we just get caught up in greed for the next thing that we want. Maybe for many of us, I was really trying to think this week about what might tempt us. And I think that there's some obvious things, like the things I've already addressed. But I think that many of us face a temptation that maybe we wouldn't address out loud or we wouldn't even conclude ourselves, but I think it very much is one, but it's the sin of complacency or being good enough. Maybe what tempts you is to simply say, I'm good. I'm good enough. Yeah, I mean, I could maybe come to church with more regularity. I know I could get up and I could read my Bible more. Nate's always talking about that. I could try it. I know I could be more prayerful. I know that I could have devotions with my kids. I know that I could pray with my spouse more. I know that I could volunteer more. I know that I could probably give more if I wanted to. Like, I know that there's more that I could do, sure. But I'm pretty good. I'm okay. My life's not going off the rails. I wasn't in the first group. I'm not tempted by affairs or by alcohol. Oh man, those people are terrible. I'm in the good group. We often get to this place of complacency and good enough by playing comparison games, right? I know that I could be better, but at least I wasn't in that first group. I know that I could do more, but at least I'm not as bad as blank. So-and-so hasn't done this in years, and they seem fine. I think I'm fine, too. And so we find favorable comparisons to ourselves to convince ourselves that, yeah, I could be more healthy spiritually, but I'm doing okay. And I would encourage you to do this if this sounds like you. How about don't compare yourself to other people? How about compare yourself to yourself five years ago? To yourself three years ago? If I'm striking a chord with you and sometimes you think to yourself, yeah, sometimes I just think I'm good enough. I know I could do more, but I don't really want to do it. How do you compare? If you're 50 years old, how do you compare to 45 year old you? Are you healthier? Are you more vibrant spiritually? Do you feel a closeness to Jesus that you didn't feel when you're 45? Are you telling more people about Jesus than you did five years ago? Are you talking with your kids about Jesus more than you did five years ago? Are you seeing more people come to faith in your orbit than you did five years ago? Are you more engaged with scripture? Are you more breathing in God's love and God's goodness and breathing that out to other people than you were five years ago? Or are you about the same? Is it just steady and maybe sometimes a little worse? The sin of good enough just convinces us to flatline for our whole lives and not see any growth. And I kept saying, well, at least I'm not in group one, but guess what? All those sins are just as damaging to us. I thought of one more too. Maybe the sin that you struggle with is letting other people tell you who you are instead of your creator tell you who you are. Maybe you have people in your life who tell you that you're not good enough. Maybe you have voices in your head that tell you that you don't matter. That tell you that no one's going to listen to you. That tell you that you can't really change or that you can't really do or that you're not really that important. I don't want to press too hard on this because that's a difficult place to be, but I would just tell you gently as your pastor, that's sinful too. Because God tells you that you're chosen. God tells you that you're fearfully and wonderfully made. God watched his son die on a cross for you. God is orchestrating this whole thing to come back and get you and bring you to his heaven. God loves you dearly. God made you on purpose. God watches you every day and he roots for you and Jesus sits at the right hand of the father and he intercedes for you. And so maybe your temptation is to listen to voices who aren't God's tell you that you're something or someone that you're not instead of listening to who God tells us that we are. Whatever your temptation is, whatever it is, however you identify with that, I'm not all of them, that'd be too difficult, but pick the one that's most pernicious in your life. That's most relevant in your life. And let's think about that one. What does it look like to run from that sin? Joseph ran. He ran away from that sin and he ran to Jesus. So what does it look like in your life to do that? I would simply like to make this point about running as we try to figure out what that means in our own life. That to run is to take the option off the table. When Joseph ran, he was burning a bridge, man. I was just never coming back. This is never going to happen. I'm getting out of here. I'm not leaving any possibility for it. He didn't go to a different room. He didn't try to talk her out of it. He ran. I'm taking this option that you're proposing off the table. That's not possible. We're not doing it. Not happening. So in your life and the temptations that you face, what does it look like to run from them? What does it look like to take those options off the table? That thing is tempting me and I'm going to make it in my life so that it's not even a possibility. What do you have to do to run from it? What accountability do you have to invite into your life about complacency? What do you have to do to burn the bridge about the affair that you're entertaining? And listen to me, if that's your temptation, run, man, run. Get out of there. Run and burn the bridge. If it's substances, what do you have to do to burn that bridge and take it off the table? If it's complacency, if it's believing the wrong voices, if it's greed, if it's whatever it is, what do we have to do to burn bridges and run, to take that option off the table? And now listen. These are not my favorite kinds of sermons. This is a pretty classic sermon. Hey, what is the sin in your life? You should stop it. That's what this sermon is in its most simple form. And I don't really like to harp on stuff like that because I really don't want this to be a house of guilt. I don't want to bring you in every week, make you feel bad about what you're doing, and then send you out here trying to do better. That's really not the point at all. But it's where we are in the text. It's what happens in the story. And it's a theme of the Bible that we are to pursue holiness and purity. So why does this matter so much to God? Why does God want us to run from our temptations? Why does he want us to take those options off the table? Why does that matter so deeply to him? Well, I had a couple thoughts for that. The first is that we're told in Scripture that we should be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, that we should pursue holiness. God values purity, and so we should too. Jesus died to make us pure. And so we should value that purity. We also talked about in the middle of the summer, we focused in on Psalm 1611, that you make known to me the paths of life in your presence. There is fullness of joy at your right hand. There are pleasures forevermore. And we talked about how this full life is found in God. And we talked about this idea of really God invites us on, this is from C.S. Lewis, God invites us on this incredible vacation, this incredible life to live, and we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies thinking this is the apex of all human experience. When we choose to run away from sin and to Jesus, we're leaving the mud pies and we're pursuing the life that he has laid out for us that's far greater than we could ever ask or imagine. John 10.10 says that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it to the full. We find fullness of joy there. We find pleasures forevermore. He makes known to us the paths of life. So when we sin, we forfeit that. But that's not really the reason that I want us to focus on this morning. To me, the most compelling thought about why does purity matter so much and why should we run from the temptations that exist in our life is simply this thought here. What kingdom work can the enemy short-circuit if you give in to your temptations? What kingdom work can the enemy short circuit if you simply give in to the temptations that you face? It's becoming more and more one of my more favorite used thought about verses in my life, Ephesians 2.10, where Paul writes that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. I know some of you might feel like, listen, man, I don't have any great kingdom work to do. Yes, you do. The Bible tells me so. That God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in him, that he has mapped out for you in your life based on your gifts and your abilities and your spiritual gifts and the way that God has uniquely created and crafted you, that he has laid out for you good works, things to do to build his kingdom for all eternity, to live out our purpose for being here, which our purpose for being alive, I don't know if you know this, is to know Jesus and to bring other people with you as you go to him. That's why we exist. That's why he doesn't snap us up to heaven as soon as we get saved. We were created in Christ Jesus for those good works that we might walk in them. So you might say, gosh, Nate, I'm a stay-at-home mom. My life is a two-year-old. I don't have good works. Bull, you're discipling that kid. You're loving on the families that you invite into your home. You're loving on the friends that that kid has. You're volunteering somewhere. You're loving on your neighborhood somewhere. You're coming to church and loving on kids here and loving on other folks here. You're influencing them, and they're seeing the ripples of God in your life. You cannot tell me that your life doesn't matter. God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. He's got a plan to use you if only we open our eyes to see it. And I wonder, what kingdom building do we short circuit when we allow temptations to take over our life? Here's what I mean. If I allow my temptations to take over my life, what does that do to the work that we're doing at Grace? To what God is doing here in this place? How does it short circuit God's kingdom work here? If you give in to the temptations that you have in your life, how does it short circuit your ability to reach your neighbors, your ability to share Christ's love with your coworkers? How does it short circuit your ability to disciple your children if you give in to the temptations that you're facing? How does it short circuit your ability to love on your family members who don't know Jesus yet but you desperately want them to? If you give in to your temptations, how does it short circuit your ability to be used in those ways? I think this is a huge reason that we pursue purity. So that God can do the work in us and through us that he's always wanted to do. And in being used for that work, we find the greatest joy imaginable. There's another point on your notes, but I'm not going to end it like that. I'm going to end it like this. I don't know what tempts you. I don't know how the enemy would seek to short circuit the work that God has for you to do. But I do know this. That the best choice, the wisest choice, the choice you need to make today is to run from it. Run. Take the option off the table and run to it. And your life may get harder for running. Joseph ran and it landed his butt in prison. Your life may get more difficult if you run, but run. Get away from it. Pursue purity. Know God. Experience his pleasures forevermore and know what it is to live a life of service to his kingdom and live in that peace and that contentment and that fulfillment. If you run, you won't regret it. If you stay, you will. Let's pray. Father, you are so good to us. You're so good to us in how you love us. Father, if there's anybody here who just can't hear your voice and they want so desperately to believe that they are who you say they are, would you just shout at them so they can hear you? God, for those tempted with the same temptation that faced Joseph, give us the strength and wherewithal to run. Whatever we're facing, whatever tempts us, however the enemy would seek to take us off course so that we can't know you like we should and we can't show others who you are. God, I just pray that you would give us the strength and the conviction and the determination to run, to run away from that sin and to run towards you and find the joy that you offer us there. God, let us not think for a second that this is somehow about behaving ourselves better. But let us know and understand that this is all about pursuing you and experiencing the life that you have for us. It's in your son's name who provides us that life that I pray. Amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. In part two, we encountered Joseph as a teenager and learned his arrogance earned him such resentment from his brothers that they eventually sold him into slavery. This event changed Joseph forever. Joseph believed, based on God-given dreams, that he would one day rule over his brothers. Now, facing the disillusion of those dreams, Joseph must make a choice. A choice that is eventually faced by all of us. Will he choose to resent God because he feels God let him down? Or will he still cling to the hope that even though he can't see it, he knows that God has a plan? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching online. If you are online and you saw that Hootenanny announcement or here, I know that you did. I would add one thing to it that I'm very excited about. There's actually, we have a guy who comes to the church who is a private chef that you can hire and bring into your home. And then we have some other folks who are a part of the church who have worked as professional chefs. And they are conspiring to come up with kind of an elevated grill menu that they're gonna make for us for the Hootenanny. So we're not just gonna have frozen pucks that we melt on the grill and then slap between buns and expect you to call them good. We're gonna have actual good stuff to eat at the Hootenanny. So come on, invite your friends. I think it's going to be a really fun, special time. I'm looking forward to getting to do that together as a church. Last week as a church, we did Grace Serves. And for those who weren't able to make it, we had a really great turnout. I was very much encouraged by it. We did some work at Fox Road. We packed lunches or meals with Rise Against Hunger. And I was told this week, where's Doug Funk? Are you in here? Are you out in the lobby? Okay. Yeah, you're here. Is it 300,000 meals in 20 years? Yes. 350,000. Sorry. Let's just call it 500. Let's just round up 500,000. But no, we were told by Rise Against Hunger that over the course of 20 years that Grace has helped to pack about 350,000 meals for people who need them a whole, whole lot. So I thought that was great. I don't know if it's appropriate to cheer for ourselves. Let's just know that we did that. No, don't cheer. That's great that we did that. And finally, it's kickoff Sunday. This is a good Sunday. If you're here, your team has a chance to be good this year. If you're watching from home, they're going to be terrible. All right? That's what you get. I wish the best of luck to all of you and your teams, unless your teams are the Panthers or the Patriots or whoever's playing the Falcons. Otherwise, best of luck to you. Let's go. This morning, we're focused on Joseph and moving through his life. As we said in the video, that we ended last week with Joseph facing this decision. He was an arrogant teenager that built resentment with his brothers that got him thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. And then we see, we leave Joseph on the back of presumably an ox cart chained, being carried down to Egypt into a life of slavery. Joseph had just received dreams from God that said that he was going to rule over his brothers and rule over even his mom and his dad. He had received these dreams from God, these promises from God, and then the exact opposite of those promises happened to him as he's riding down to Egypt as a slave? How can he possibly rule over his brothers? He will be irrevocably separated from his family and is now bound to live a life of slavery. And so in that moment, he faces a choice that every God follower faces at some point in their life. He's in a place where he feels disillusioned by God. He's in a place where he feels disappointed by God. And you've been in that place too. And if you haven't, you will be. I was taught this about God and yet it's not happening. I read this in God's word. It says, if I did this, then he would do this. And I did this and he's not doing that. To be a believer is to sit in a place at some point or another where you feel like God should do this thing and he's not doing it. And you're disillusioned and you're disappointed. And you feel that maybe God's not going to keep his word to you. And in those moments, we're faced with the same decision that Joseph was faced with as he's going down to Egypt in the ox cart. Do I resent God because he broke his word to me, because I think he's let me down, or do I choose to love God and trust him because I know that he loves me and I know that he has a plan. And even though I can't see how it's going to work out, I know that God is good and he has a plan. And so Joseph chooses, we see as we pick up the story, he chooses to continue to honor God. He chooses to continue to show God favor. And sometimes there are these times in life where we feel like we want to be resentful of God, but we have no other place to go but to run to him. There is this scene with Jesus and his disciples where Jesus offers this really hard teaching and a lot of people fall away from him because they don't expect that that's what Jesus, the Son of God, would teach. And he looks at the disciples and he says, are you going to leave too? And Peter profoundly and wonderfully responds, where else can I go? Where else can I find hope? And so maybe Joseph relates to that. God, I don't understand what you're doing here. I'm on an ox cart in chains to live a life of slavery. I'm supposed to be ruling over my family and be the head of the clan. This is the exact opposite of what you promised, but I don't know where else to go from here. And so we see that Joseph chooses to lean into God, to trust him, and to trust that God loves him. When he gets to Egypt, he's sold into slavery to a man named Potiphar. Many of you know this story, but in case you don't, Potiphar was the chief of Pharaoh's guard. We're told that he was the second most powerful person in Egypt, which makes him the second most powerful person on the planet at the time because Egypt is the superpower during Joseph's day. Potiphar had risen to prominence in the Egyptian empire and was in charge of Pharaoh's guard. He was tasked with keeping Pharaoh alive, which made him the second most powerful man in the nation. And he buys Joseph. And we don't know how many years for sure that he worked for Potiphar. And well, what we don't know is how many years it took to get to this place. But Joseph is bought by this powerful man in Egypt. He is a Hebrew slave. He's a foreign guy. He's about 17 years old and he sold to Potiphar. And remember he was faced with that choice. Do I honor God or do I run away from him? And Joseph chooses to honor God. And this is how we see that he does this. This is what happens to Joseph in Potiphar's house. We're going to be in Genesis chapter 39 and pick up the story in verse 2. If you read on, what you find is that Joseph ran the house so well and so efficiently and Potiphar trusted him with so much that it says that the only thing that Potiphar had to think about every day was what to eat. Joseph took care of Potiphar so well just saying, let's relate to the text a little bit. Wouldn't that be a pretty sweet gig? How would you like it if you had a personal life assistant that was so good at what they did that they ran your life better than you and all you had to do is decide what you wanted to eat. That's pretty good, especially on NFL Sunday. I wish that that was my life on NFL Sunday. That's how much Potiphar trusted Joseph, which I've got to believe. I don't know. Admittedly, I don't know a lot about the slave culture in ancient Egypt. But I'd be willing to bet that there's not many foreign slaves who rose to such a position of prominence as Joseph did. I bet Potiphar had Egyptian slaves that human nature tells us he would have preferred over the Hebrew slave. But for some reason, Joseph was so impressive that he rose to what I would argue is very likely an unprecedented position for someone who came from outside of Egypt. But Joseph chose to honor God. He chose to do the right thing, and God gave him favor. And God made all that he did prosper. You know those people? I've worked with people like that before. I've worked with people on church staff. I got a buddy named Heath. No matter where he got moved around at my old church, he got moved around to different positions every year and a half or two years. And everywhere he went, that ministry grew. He's just good at everything. I wish I had an ounce of what he has. He's good at everything. This is Joseph. Wherever God puts him, it thrives. And so he rises to prominence in Potiphar's house. At some point in his rise, which would have been over the course of years, this was not an overnight thing, Potiphar's wife comes to Joseph and says, would you lay with me? Now, we've covered this story before, and when we did, for this section, I walked over here and I said, this is going to be my reckless speculation box. This is not biblical truth. This is just me guessing. So with that in mind, I would just like to reiterate this point because I think it bears repeating, and many of you didn't hear it when I made it two or three years ago. And I don't want to be untoward with what I'm about to say, but I think that we can admit that this is objectively true in most cases. Potiphar is rich and powerful. Rich and powerful people tend to be good-looking and have good-looking spouses. Yes, you don't have to answer this out loud, but this is just a thing. It's a dynamic. People get money and they get better looking. That's why I look this way. I have an average amount of money. I look average. If I had a lot of money, I would look amazing. I bet Potiphar's wife was pretty. I bet she was. Joseph grew up in a nomadic tribe that wandered the fields and the hillsides and the deserts. You ever seen people who live a life exposed to the elements? They have a face of a catcher's mitt at like 35. They're not a good-looking people. Go to the coast of Maine and look around. You'd be like, that person's a grandpa. No, they're not. They just graduated college. That's what it was like to be a nomad. I'd be willing to bet. Again, this is conjecture. Joseph grew up in a rough and tumble nomadic tribe where all the girls were his cousins. All right, he didn't have a lot of options. And then this Hebrew nomad comes to the most powerful nation in the world, is elevated in the second most powerful home in the nation, and the wife of that home wants to sleep with him. That would be, for any human who's ever lived, a genuinely tempting situation. Right? Put yourself in his shoes and you tell me what you would do. I'm a big person. When we want to start judging people's sins and what they did and how far they fell and gosh, I can't believe that they would have done that or done that to their family or whatever it was. I always go to, okay, that's fine. Let's judge them. Put yourself in their shoes with their circumstances and the way that they grew up and you tell me that you would make different choices because I don't think you would. Put yourself in Joseph's shoes and ask yourself what choice you would make. Even if you didn't go through with it, would you flirt with it a little bit? Would you let it stroke your ego? Would you want to see if she was really serious? Would you just lean into it because it kind of made you feel good that someone like that would like someone like you? Human nature says that we probably would. Human nature suggests that many of us, including me, I'm saying us on purpose, would at least entertain it a little bit. Would at least want to search it out just a little bit. Would maybe want to see how close can I get to the fire without getting burned. But that wasn't Joseph's response. She came to him day after day. And she tried to entice him. And in that, in that day after day enticement, do you think that it was a formal across the room? Mr. Joseph, as you would be so obliged, I would love to engage in some activities with you. I bet she did what she could to make it more and more difficult for him to stand firm. But this is what he said. And this is the remarkable character of Joseph. Look at his response. When she would come to him day after day and try to entice him, look at what his response was. We see it in verse 8, and I'll read through 10. That is some remarkable integrity. She would try to entice him, and he would say to her, how could I possibly do that? Your husband has entrusted me with his very life. He has given me all his authority. He's not even more powerful in this house than I am. How could I betray him and do this to him? And more than that, and I love the way that Joseph phrases this, how could I sin against my God? My God who has been faithful to me, my God who, yes, let me get sold into slavery, but has shown me favor here and given me a position here that I did not think I could attain to and who has helped me to find favor in my master Potiphar's eyes. How could I sin against him, and sin against Potiphar, and sin against myself, and sin against you, and engage myself in this? How could I possibly do that? I wonder what it would look like to see temptations in our life through the lens of God's blessings. If when we are tempted to sin or to go down a path that we shouldn't go down, I wonder what it would look like to call to mind God's blessings in our life. How could I do that to God after all that he's given me and list off the things that we are grateful for? I wonder what kind of impact that would have on our ability to stand firm when we face the tests of temptation. And as we keep reading the story, we find that one day it comes to a critical point where words are no longer enough. One day Joseph goes into the house and he and Potiphar's wife are alone. It seems that normally there was all kinds of servants around, so even if Potiphar's wife was being suggestive, there really wasn't a time or a place where it would be expedient. But this time, there's nobody else around. This time, there's no accountability. It's just him and her. And she apparently grabs hold of him because she was trying to seize the moment. And you know the story. He, in that moment, sets an example for us that rings through the centuries. He, in that moment, does something that I think is incredibly profound. And I wonder what we would do in that moment. We're a slave. We've risen to prominence. We are subjected to Potiphar. This person who we may be very attracted to wants us to cross a line with them. How many of us in our heads in that moment would justify it? What choice do I have? If I don't, she's going to tell on me, I'm going to go to prison or be killed. I may as well just do it. I may as well just follow through because I'm in an impossible situation. But Joseph doesn't do any of that. Again, he sets an example in that moment that rings throughout history. And he runs. He just gets the heck out of there. He runs away. And as he runs, she holds on to his cloak, his tunic, whatever the outer layer of his garments were, and he flings them off and he goes and he gets out of there. And he runs from that temptation. And this didn't even occur to me in my sermon prep. This occurred to me as I was praying about to get up and do the sermon. But do you understand that when he's running from temptation, that he's running directly to Jesus? It may have felt to him like he was running out of the house and to a safe place, but no, no, no, that's not where he's running. He's running away from evil and towards his Savior. When you choose to run like Joseph, you're running away from evil, the things that would seek to tear you down, and you are running towards your Savior. And I think that's a pretty cool picture. But in that moment, Joseph chooses to run. And it's here in the story that I want to ask a couple questions of us as we reflect on and relate to this story. The first question would be this, what tempts me? If you have notes, you can write that down. I'm not asking you to guess what tempts Nate, okay? I'm asking you to make it personal in your life as you think about yourself. I didn't want to say what tempts you because then we're tempted to think about what tempts other people. No, no, no, no, no. What tempts me? Think about it that way. What tempts you? Don't write it down. People around you will see. They'll be weird. What tempts you? Is it the temptation that Joseph faced? Listen, in a church our size, and the number of marriages that are represented here, you're kidding yourself if you think that people aren't currently facing that temptation. You're kidding yourself if you think people aren't currently involved in that temptation. If you think that people aren't flirting with the idea in their mind. Or maybe it's not a temptation that you have now, but it's not because you don't want that temptation. It's because you don't have the option. But you would invite the option if it came. Maybe that's the temptation that you face. If it is, then you're likely sweaty right now. And that's good. That's the Holy Spirit. Don't worry about that. Maybe the temptation we face is some sort of addiction, a reliance on chemicals. Listen, I've heard a lot of jokes over the course of the pandemic, but has there ever been an easier time in our adult life to develop a habit that's not healthy in the privacy of our own home? We work from home, don't have to be anywhere the next day, just have a couple more. Has it ever been easier to push alcohol into an area where it just doesn't need to be, to take that too far? Maybe that's what's tempting us. Maybe, maybe it's not something that is that blatantly corrosive. Maybe it's greed. Maybe the thing that tempts you is just to chase after the next thing, is to get the next job to make a little bit more money so that you can have the next nice thing. So that when you get that nice thing, you can become instantly dissatisfied with that and then want the next nice thing. And if you think I'm making that up, all right, I know that that's something that we all face. A year and a half ago, Jen and I bought a house. We were so proud of it. We were thrilled with it. This is the nicest house we've ever owned. And then within like nine months, we were like, this place is small. We need more space. Lily's asking us constantly, and on the next house, can I paint my walls this color? And I'm like, we don't have any money to do that. So sure, in 10 years. Maybe we just get caught up in greed for the next thing that we want. Maybe for many of us, I was really trying to think this week about what might tempt us. And I think that there's some obvious things, like the things I've already addressed. But I think that many of us face a temptation that maybe we wouldn't address out loud or we wouldn't even conclude ourselves, but I think it very much is one, but it's the sin of complacency or being good enough. Maybe what tempts you is to simply say, I'm good. I'm good enough. Yeah, I mean, I could maybe come to church with more regularity. I know I could get up and I could read my Bible more. Nate's always talking about that. I could try it. I know I could be more prayerful. I know that I could have devotions with my kids. I know that I could pray with my spouse more. I know that I could volunteer more. I know that I could probably give more if I wanted to. Like, I know that there's more that I could do, sure. But I'm pretty good. I'm okay. My life's not going off the rails. I wasn't in the first group. I'm not tempted by affairs or by alcohol. Oh man, those people are terrible. I'm in the good group. We often get to this place of complacency and good enough by playing comparison games, right? I know that I could be better, but at least I wasn't in that first group. I know that I could do more, but at least I'm not as bad as blank. So-and-so hasn't done this in years, and they seem fine. I think I'm fine, too. And so we find favorable comparisons to ourselves to convince ourselves that, yeah, I could be more healthy spiritually, but I'm doing okay. And I would encourage you to do this if this sounds like you. How about don't compare yourself to other people? How about compare yourself to yourself five years ago? To yourself three years ago? If I'm striking a chord with you and sometimes you think to yourself, yeah, sometimes I just think I'm good enough. I know I could do more, but I don't really want to do it. How do you compare? If you're 50 years old, how do you compare to 45 year old you? Are you healthier? Are you more vibrant spiritually? Do you feel a closeness to Jesus that you didn't feel when you're 45? Are you telling more people about Jesus than you did five years ago? Are you talking with your kids about Jesus more than you did five years ago? Are you seeing more people come to faith in your orbit than you did five years ago? Are you more engaged with scripture? Are you more breathing in God's love and God's goodness and breathing that out to other people than you were five years ago? Or are you about the same? Is it just steady and maybe sometimes a little worse? The sin of good enough just convinces us to flatline for our whole lives and not see any growth. And I kept saying, well, at least I'm not in group one, but guess what? All those sins are just as damaging to us. I thought of one more too. Maybe the sin that you struggle with is letting other people tell you who you are instead of your creator tell you who you are. Maybe you have people in your life who tell you that you're not good enough. Maybe you have voices in your head that tell you that you don't matter. That tell you that no one's going to listen to you. That tell you that you can't really change or that you can't really do or that you're not really that important. I don't want to press too hard on this because that's a difficult place to be, but I would just tell you gently as your pastor, that's sinful too. Because God tells you that you're chosen. God tells you that you're fearfully and wonderfully made. God watched his son die on a cross for you. God is orchestrating this whole thing to come back and get you and bring you to his heaven. God loves you dearly. God made you on purpose. God watches you every day and he roots for you and Jesus sits at the right hand of the father and he intercedes for you. And so maybe your temptation is to listen to voices who aren't God's tell you that you're something or someone that you're not instead of listening to who God tells us that we are. Whatever your temptation is, whatever it is, however you identify with that, I'm not all of them, that'd be too difficult, but pick the one that's most pernicious in your life. That's most relevant in your life. And let's think about that one. What does it look like to run from that sin? Joseph ran. He ran away from that sin and he ran to Jesus. So what does it look like in your life to do that? I would simply like to make this point about running as we try to figure out what that means in our own life. That to run is to take the option off the table. When Joseph ran, he was burning a bridge, man. I was just never coming back. This is never going to happen. I'm getting out of here. I'm not leaving any possibility for it. He didn't go to a different room. He didn't try to talk her out of it. He ran. I'm taking this option that you're proposing off the table. That's not possible. We're not doing it. Not happening. So in your life and the temptations that you face, what does it look like to run from them? What does it look like to take those options off the table? That thing is tempting me and I'm going to make it in my life so that it's not even a possibility. What do you have to do to run from it? What accountability do you have to invite into your life about complacency? What do you have to do to burn the bridge about the affair that you're entertaining? And listen to me, if that's your temptation, run, man, run. Get out of there. Run and burn the bridge. If it's substances, what do you have to do to burn that bridge and take it off the table? If it's complacency, if it's believing the wrong voices, if it's greed, if it's whatever it is, what do we have to do to burn bridges and run, to take that option off the table? And now listen. These are not my favorite kinds of sermons. This is a pretty classic sermon. Hey, what is the sin in your life? You should stop it. That's what this sermon is in its most simple form. And I don't really like to harp on stuff like that because I really don't want this to be a house of guilt. I don't want to bring you in every week, make you feel bad about what you're doing, and then send you out here trying to do better. That's really not the point at all. But it's where we are in the text. It's what happens in the story. And it's a theme of the Bible that we are to pursue holiness and purity. So why does this matter so much to God? Why does God want us to run from our temptations? Why does he want us to take those options off the table? Why does that matter so deeply to him? Well, I had a couple thoughts for that. The first is that we're told in Scripture that we should be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, that we should pursue holiness. God values purity, and so we should too. Jesus died to make us pure. And so we should value that purity. We also talked about in the middle of the summer, we focused in on Psalm 1611, that you make known to me the paths of life in your presence. There is fullness of joy at your right hand. There are pleasures forevermore. And we talked about how this full life is found in God. And we talked about this idea of really God invites us on, this is from C.S. Lewis, God invites us on this incredible vacation, this incredible life to live, and we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies thinking this is the apex of all human experience. When we choose to run away from sin and to Jesus, we're leaving the mud pies and we're pursuing the life that he has laid out for us that's far greater than we could ever ask or imagine. John 10.10 says that Jesus came so that we might have life and have it to the full. We find fullness of joy there. We find pleasures forevermore. He makes known to us the paths of life. So when we sin, we forfeit that. But that's not really the reason that I want us to focus on this morning. To me, the most compelling thought about why does purity matter so much and why should we run from the temptations that exist in our life is simply this thought here. What kingdom work can the enemy short-circuit if you give in to your temptations? What kingdom work can the enemy short circuit if you simply give in to the temptations that you face? It's becoming more and more one of my more favorite used thought about verses in my life, Ephesians 2.10, where Paul writes that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. I know some of you might feel like, listen, man, I don't have any great kingdom work to do. Yes, you do. The Bible tells me so. That God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in him, that he has mapped out for you in your life based on your gifts and your abilities and your spiritual gifts and the way that God has uniquely created and crafted you, that he has laid out for you good works, things to do to build his kingdom for all eternity, to live out our purpose for being here, which our purpose for being alive, I don't know if you know this, is to know Jesus and to bring other people with you as you go to him. That's why we exist. That's why he doesn't snap us up to heaven as soon as we get saved. We were created in Christ Jesus for those good works that we might walk in them. So you might say, gosh, Nate, I'm a stay-at-home mom. My life is a two-year-old. I don't have good works. Bull, you're discipling that kid. You're loving on the families that you invite into your home. You're loving on the friends that that kid has. You're volunteering somewhere. You're loving on your neighborhood somewhere. You're coming to church and loving on kids here and loving on other folks here. You're influencing them, and they're seeing the ripples of God in your life. You cannot tell me that your life doesn't matter. God created you in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. He's got a plan to use you if only we open our eyes to see it. And I wonder, what kingdom building do we short circuit when we allow temptations to take over our life? Here's what I mean. If I allow my temptations to take over my life, what does that do to the work that we're doing at Grace? To what God is doing here in this place? How does it short circuit God's kingdom work here? If you give in to the temptations that you have in your life, how does it short circuit your ability to reach your neighbors, your ability to share Christ's love with your coworkers? How does it short circuit your ability to disciple your children if you give in to the temptations that you're facing? How does it short circuit your ability to love on your family members who don't know Jesus yet but you desperately want them to? If you give in to your temptations, how does it short circuit your ability to be used in those ways? I think this is a huge reason that we pursue purity. So that God can do the work in us and through us that he's always wanted to do. And in being used for that work, we find the greatest joy imaginable. There's another point on your notes, but I'm not going to end it like that. I'm going to end it like this. I don't know what tempts you. I don't know how the enemy would seek to short circuit the work that God has for you to do. But I do know this. That the best choice, the wisest choice, the choice you need to make today is to run from it. Run. Take the option off the table and run to it. And your life may get harder for running. Joseph ran and it landed his butt in prison. Your life may get more difficult if you run, but run. Get away from it. Pursue purity. Know God. Experience his pleasures forevermore and know what it is to live a life of service to his kingdom and live in that peace and that contentment and that fulfillment. If you run, you won't regret it. If you stay, you will. Let's pray. Father, you are so good to us. You're so good to us in how you love us. Father, if there's anybody here who just can't hear your voice and they want so desperately to believe that they are who you say they are, would you just shout at them so they can hear you? God, for those tempted with the same temptation that faced Joseph, give us the strength and wherewithal to run. Whatever we're facing, whatever tempts us, however the enemy would seek to take us off course so that we can't know you like we should and we can't show others who you are. God, I just pray that you would give us the strength and the conviction and the determination to run, to run away from that sin and to run towards you and find the joy that you offer us there. God, let us not think for a second that this is somehow about behaving ourselves better. But let us know and understand that this is all about pursuing you and experiencing the life that you have for us. It's in your son's name who provides us that life that I pray. Amen.