John 14

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace. Before I jump into the sermon this morning, I did just want to make note of the fact that this morning and today actually is July 4th. And so that's exciting and that's super awesome. Thank you to everyone who has decided to join us on July 4th. And for everyone who's online, we're thankful that you're watching us online on your holiday. But as we think about July 4th, and as we think about these patriotic holidays that we come to, and as we talk about them within the church, it is normally within the realm of just being incredibly thankful to live in a place where we are free to gather together like this and worship God how we want and however we are able to do so. And so this morning I just wanted to make note of that, but then this weekend as I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about that we celebrate that freedom, one, because it's a freedom, but because that is not a freedom everywhere. There are Christians around the world who live in places where they are not free to worship in this way. They are living out their faith. They are meeting with other Christians. They are taking the gospel to places that is illegal to do so. And so as we celebrate our thankfulness and our praise for this freedom that we have, let us be mindful of those people as well, that those people who live there are those people who have left the freedom of America as missionaries to go and take the gospel to places where those freedoms do not exist. And so will you real quick just bow with me as we pray for both of those things. God, thank you for allowing us to live in a place where we are able to freely worship you, freely just learn more about you and grow closer to you. God, we realize that on days like today, it's just the perfect time to celebrate the fact that we get to celebrate you. And God, we also realize that this isn't the case for everyone. And so we also pray for those Christians worldwide, whether they be people who are native to countries where it is illegal to have and to spread the gospel, where it's illegal to worship you, or whether it be our American missionaries who have left their cushy freedoms to be able to take the gospel to places where it's not free. And so God, today, allow our joys to be sweeter as we celebrate you, as we celebrate our ability to celebrate you, and allow us to continue to be mindful of those who don't have those freedoms. We love you so much. Amen. So when I was coming towards the end of my college days, I basically, my last semester of college, I knew for sure that I was going to start working at Greystone Church as the student pastor. Many of you know Greystone is where our pastor, Pastor Nate, where he used to work. And so that's how we got connected. I got to work underneath him there at Greystone. Well, also, I found out at my second semester of my senior year of college that I had torn my ACL and my meniscus in such a way that it was going to have to require a full repair for both. Basically, I had hurt my knee at one point, like two years prior to that. I had gotten an MRI. He said he didn't see anything conclusive. He didn't see anything that was conclusive. And so I took that to mean, all right, let's go tear it now. And so for the next two years, I just played sports until I went back, got an MRI, and the list of things wrong with my knee were longer than the list of things I have to tell you this morning. But with that being the case, not only did I have ACL and meniscus surgery, but with a repair of both of those things, not a shaving, but a repair, it takes like months and months up to like over a year to be able to do any of the fun, athletic, exciting things that I wanted to be able to do, right? Not only that, but with a full meniscus repair, I don't, I mean, like some of you might be like, that's not actually right. I'm just telling you what I think that I remember. But, like, it was like, I wasn't allowed to put weight on my left leg for an entire month, or at least a few weeks. I think it was a month. But like, think about how hard that is. I mean, like, for those of you who've never seen me before, you're already watching me. It's like, this is not a guy who sits. And so like, that was incredibly difficult for me. And then even after that month, I had lost all of the little muscle that I had to where any rehab and any weight was literally all I could do was put some weight onto my leg. And so for a guy who all I wanted to do was just play sports and play basketball and play Ultimate Frisbee and all that stuff, that was really difficult. And so I got that surgery right before I started at Greystone. And so through that time, I'm on crutches. And even when I'm getting off of crutches, I'm just like walking. And so I have all of, I have all of these students who play basketball and I wanted to play basketball with them. We have like Greystone. I know none of you guys have ever been there, but like there's this incredible outdoor basketball facility at our church, which is also like, I lived in the backyard of our church. I had 24 seven access to basketball that I couldn't play because of this knee injury. And so because of those facts, what I decided was when I came back, I was going to have the very best possible basketball shoes that were on the market. It's just the decision was made. I was like, I have to figure out something that I can control that has to do with basketball that actually doesn't get me hurt or injured again. And so I started to stream, and we've all been here. We've all been in this exact place where we just start really deep diving into basketball shoe performance review YouTube. We all know it. The performance, there's just, truly, I know I kid, but this is a very real thing that there are like this group of YouTubers that people that put videos online, basically as basketball shoes release, they get these shoes and they give you all of the specs. They give you all of the, this is the stack height and this is the fit and this is what the shoe is made of. And you know, all of those things that no one cares about, but that are true, I guess. They're saying like the specs of the shoe. But then what they also do is they tell you how they actually operate, what they're best for. Are they best for inside or outside? How do they cut? How do they feel? How do they measure up? All this stuff. All of these things that say, hey, not only is this what these shoes are on paper, but on feet, this is what they look like. And so I began to get a little overwhelmed because there's a lot of these people. They're all saying things. And a lot of them in their performance reviews are saying very different things. These people will be like, I love this shoe. It's great, whatever. And these other people are like, no, I do not love this shoe. It's terrible. It's an awful shoe. Never buy it. You should burn it if you did buy it, which not a good idea. But with that came me having to then do even more of a YouTube deep dive into this because it was no longer about the shoes anymore, and I had to figure out who to trust. Well, by doing that, what I had to figure out is who are these dudes? And so as I start going deeper and deeper into this, I start seeing some videos and some footage of some of these guys playing basketball. And so there's these guys who are awesome. They're super good at basketball. I'm like, these guys are great. You know, they're cutting, they're jumping, they're doing all the things that you want to do when you're testing out a shoe. I'm seeing other videos of dudes who look like they have never played basketball in their entire life, where they're just kind of like, you know, like doing this. And then if they catch the ball, they're shooting it, but they're not doing anything. And then even still, there are literally YouTubers who are giving performance reviews who do not play basketball, who do not wear the shoes, who did not do the performance aspect of the shoes. Instead, they are getting paid because they're YouTubers by these companies to say, hey, this is the shoe you need. This is how it performs. This is how it works. They might be saying things that are right. They might be saying like, hey, this is what the specs are, but they are doing so not because it's something that they've actually put the time and effort into, not because they're actually walking the walk. They're just talking the talk because it benefits them to get paid and to get to do it, even though they literally are not playing basketball. They are not ever using the shoes. And I know that this is a super random and specific example, but we all know the examples like this, right? Like we know and some of us know about the couple times that very famous people have tweeted about these new phones that they absolutely love and that everyone should buy. And then at the bottom of their tweet, it gives the little update that says tweeted from an iPhone, where it's like, oh yes, so you don't use this phone that you're telling us to buy in this ad now. But, you know, we have it. You know, you have the people who say like, hey, this five-minute workout, this five-minute-a-day workout absolutely changed my life. It is absolutely life-changing. Or this diet is life-changing. And I look the way that I look like a bodybuilder because I work out five minutes a day like this. You know, we hear those and we know those and we're like, okay, we know that maybe this is good, and maybe you're not necessarily lying, but you're telling us that something is good and great and life-changing when you're not doing it or when you're not using it in your own lives. Basically, they are people who are talking the talk without walking the walk. They come off as experts, but their life says something completely different than what they're saying in their mouths. This is what we enter into as we jump into Jude. This week we're going to be in Jude. As Nate has chosen a lot of different books of the Bible that are very hard to find in the Bible, I decided to be a good guy and to be your friend and to give you one that's very easy to find in your Bible. So if you want to open in your Bible, Jude is one chapter, so it's short, but is the second to last book in the Bible. So if you find Revelation, just go backwards until you find Jude. If you find Revelation 1, and it's the next page, over. But Jude is this guy who wrote a letter to these certain people. We're going to actually get into who he is, to what he wrote about in a second. But if you guys will go ahead and open, and we will actually jump in, and we will start reading, starting in Jude 1. It says, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Before we continue, that already kind of tells us who Jude is. He is somebody who is a Christian. This is post Jesus dying and being resurrected. This is during a time where people have given their selves to Christ, given their hearts to Christ. And so as Jude refers to himself, he is a servant of Jesus Christ. And not only that, but he is a brother of James. Now, what makes this interesting is I know that we're all like, oh yeah, we know James is in the Bible. But what makes this interesting is that James is a brother of Jesus. And so what this means intrinsically is that Jude or Judah is one of Jesus's brothers, which makes it a little bit weird and a little bit interesting that he calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. But we're going to get back to why that's interesting in just a second. So let's move on. We're going to keep going through one and then two. To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied in you. So who is he writing to? He is writing to these Christians. We don't have an exact area or exact place or an exact church that he is writing to, but what we know is these are people who love the Lord and who have given their hearts over to Jesus and given their hearts over to the gospel. And then we have a bit of a shift. As it goes, and if you're looking in scripture, you'll see that it's actually marked judgment on false teachers. And so we jump into for a second, he starts off by saying, Christians, you people who have given your hearts to Jesus, I wanted to write to you in celebration. I wanted to write to you to say what an amazing and incredible thing this gospel is. What an amazing thing that God has looked down on us and looked down on our imperfections and our failures and said, I want that person in my family. And so I will send my son so he can live a perfect life and die as a sacrifice so I can make them a part of my eternal family. What an unbelievable gospel that is. And I wanted to just be able to celebrate with you. I wanted to write a message of celebration and excitement. I wanted to just be able to love on Jesus. But it has come to my attention that there are these people within your community and there are these people within your church that are taking that gospel that we hold so dearly and they are perverting it and they are denying this Jesus who lived, who loved, and who served and then who died for us. How are they doing so? Not with their speech. They are people who are teaching, and as they talk, and as you hear them on a Sunday morning at church, or as you hear them and what they're saying, there's nothing necessarily wrong with it, but their lives are filled with ungodliness. Their lives are filled with them leaning in to unrepentant sin, leading into this selfish desire and ambition that they have. And by that, they are perverting the gospel. They are saying, Jesus, we understand that you made your sacrifice. And instead of allowing that to say, now I want to live a life that is marked by you and your spirit and your truth. Instead, I'm going to let that allow me to do whatever I want, whenever I want. And so as he writes this, he writes this to say, be wary of these people. Be wary of what they are able to do, of the strength that they can have and what they are able to do. And for that reason, contend for the faith. Contend for this faith that you have, that I have, that is in your heart, or else it is going to cause division, and it is going to cause strife. For the next 10 verses, he goes on to talk about different examples in biblical history where this has happened. He talks about the people being brought out of Egypt, the Israelites being brought out of Egypt, and they were barred from entering the promised land because as they were being cared for by God and as they were being led by Moses, these people had given themselves over to their personal passions and what they personally wanted and their personal convictions and seeking after their own ability to control their circumstances. They started turning to other things. They started turning to sin. They started turning to other gods because of fear, because of anxiety, because of worry, because of a lack of control that they had in their circumstances. They talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, and I think a lot of us have heard of them. They literally reached judgment and condemnation as nations because they were so enthralled, they were so invested into themselves and what personally drove them and anything that they wanted and anything made them feel good was okay and was right regardless of what the Lord said about it and they reached condemnation and death. He talks about that from as far back as Enoch, an eighth descendant of Adam, so a long time ago, all the way up to disciples of Jesus Christ, there had been people to say, look out for people. There will be people who rise up in this ungodliness and they will use, they might say the right things, but you can tell and they are marked by their ungodliness in their lives. They are marked by the fact that their lives look completely different than the gospel that they are speaking and the gospel that they are preaching. They're basically the shoe guys. They're the shoe guys who say, hey, I know all of these things. I know all the right things, but they're only talking the talk. When it comes to walking the walk, they were doing anything but. They liked the gospel and they wanted to use the gospel, but they wanted to use it for their own selfish gain and their own selfish ability to do whatever they wanted to do because they'd been saved by grace. And as I talk about these things, I think all of us in our minds probably have people in our minds and in our lives or that we know of whether like, you know, in our actual lives or that we know through social media or that we know through the news of these people like that, that they talk a big game, but their life is so far from anything that they're preaching and that they're speaking. We all know those people. We know what it means and we know what it looks like to have a false teacher in our faith. And so when I talk about this, I think most of us are probably like, yes, amen. We need to contend against those people. Yes, amen. These people bring strife, and we need to watch out, and we need to be wary of them. And all of those things are so true, and there certainly is a full sermon that can be preached on what to look for, and the ways to avoid, and the ways to contend for these things and for these people. But what really stood out to me is how he continues after he talks about these people. Because after he talks about these people, he turns back to talking directly to the Christians, to the people who are living their lives in faith and in the gospel. And he offers up and says, persevere in your faith. You need to continue to persevere in your faith, growing closer to God, growing closer to who he is. And I believe that not only is that so you can be wary and so you contend for your faith, but what I believe is that he realizes, what I realize as I read this scripture, is that these people that were marked by ungodliness, these people that he is writing against, have really fallen short in just some very small, unique ways that all of us are at danger of falling short. That these people's entire lives are marked by ungodliness. They are that way for reasons that they have fallen short that I believe that we fall short every day. And what I realized is as I was like, gosh, these people are the worst. We need to watch out for these people. I realized that it's a lot easier to point our fingers at the ungodliness in other people than it is for us to recognize the areas of our life and our faith where we fall short. It's a lot easier for me to roast these basketball guys than it is for me to, or than it was for me to admit back in middle school when I got really into skateboarding, but I was a huge wimp, and so I didn't actually want to skateboard, so I just got the clothes, and then people would call me poser, and I was like, and I was devastated by it, but then I had to realize, you know, I had to come, I had to realize, they're right, I'm a poser. I talked a good talk, I knew all the stuff, I wore the cool clothes, I had some sick brown etnies, but I wasn't walking the walk. And by walking the walk, I meant rolling the roll. But how often is that true, right? How often do we hear these things and hear these people who are marked by ungodliness and in our minds we immediately go to the people that we know that are marked by ungodliness instead of our minds going to the parts of our life that are marked with ungodliness, the parts of our life that are separating us and that are holding back to a full life marked by the gospel. See, I think that the root of these people's sins were simple. I think for one, they wanted to keep seeking after and striving after their own selfish ambitions. They knew that God was who God was, but they had these things that they liked in their life and they weren't willing to give them up. And even that is rooted even deeper in the fact that I think that they just wanted to have lives that were separate from their spiritual lives. They had their regular, they had their personal life, their weekday life, and then they had their spiritual life. That on Sunday, yes, let's celebrate the gospel. Let's celebrate God and let's worship because he's awesome. I get to spend Sunday celebrating my spiritual life in God so that for the rest of the week, I am able to live my life that is not my spiritual life, my regular or my normal life. And I think the third thing they did is they just misunderstood the gospel. When they heard that Jesus died for their sins, when they heard that there is grace offered because Jesus was a perfect sacrifice, that they just misunderstood what that meant. They felt like the people, like in Romans 6, Paul asks, does that mean that we sin so we can make much of grace? No. That means we lean into godliness, we lean into holiness, we pursue getting rid of the sin in our lives so that we can have the best possible relationship we can with Jesus. But they didn't understand that. They thought, if I'm saved and I'm redeemed, then why do I have to change anything about my life? They didn't get it. They'd forgotten what it says in John 14, what Jesus says when he says that if you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, you will obey my teachings. Don't we all have those things? Don't we all have those sins that are in our lives, those sins that are in our hearts that we just don't want to give up, that we just want to be separate from our faith, separate from our spiritual life? Don't we all have those times where we say, okay, like, that was a great time of church or that was a great time of Bible study, now time to get back to my real or my regular life? Don't we separate the two at times? Don't we have sins and time commitments and ambitions and worries and plans and comforts and the like that we just hesitate wanting to give up to God because they make us feel comfortable or because we like them? And so the question becomes, how do we make sure that we don't fall so far down like these ungodly people? How do we persevere in our faith? How can we grow in our faith to where we can do our best to grow closer to God, to where we can make our hearts more and more like him every day, giving up those personal ambitions for these godly ambitions and these godly calls. Well, he talks about it. He writes about it. In verses 20 through 23, he says, What do we do? We lean into God. What do we do? We lean into our relationship and into our faith with God, ever more trying to build it up however and wherever we can. We read scripture so that we can better understand his heart. We pray, we pray so that we can give up those things and ask for God to mold and mend and to shape our hearts into what he loves and what he believes and what his call for us is. It means leaning into each other and building up each other and ever more encouraging each other and asking for encouragement from the people that are around us. As he says, going back to verse 2, he says, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied in you. While I read that as a blessing, I also read that as a way to persevere in the faith is by leaning in to mercy and peace and love, the type of which we only know because of the gospel and because of who God and Jesus is. What is our ultimate goal? Our ultimate goal is that our identity is the same identity as Jude's. For that, we go back to Jude 1 where he says, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Why did he walk around here to tell us that he was the brother of Jesus? He mentioned Jesus. He talks about his relation to Jesus. Why doesn't he just say Jude, a brother of Jesus? Why instead does he say Jude, a servant of Christ, also a brother of James, which actually does connect me and I am a brother of Jesus. Well, the best way that I've heard it said is this way by William Barclay, who wrote a commentary on Jude. And he says, part of it's gonna be on the screen, but we'll get to it in a second. The only title of honor which Jude would allow himself was the servant of Jesus Christ. That is to say, Jude regarded himself as having only one purpose and one distinction in life, to be forever at the disposal of Jesus for service in his cause. And then this part's on the screen. The greatest glory which any Christian can attain is to be one of use to Jesus Christ. The ultimate goal of our life, the ultimate goal as we persevere in our faith is that we are simply and utterly used by Christ and loved and found in his love. We are marked by Jesus, not only in our teaching, not only in our theology, not only in what we believe, but by the fact that he governs our hearts, he governs our actions, and his call is what we do. And how does that grow? It grows through growing closer to him. It grows through knowing him, through spending time with him, through building up our love in him and who he is. What the teachers failed to understand, what these people that he writes about failed to understand is that when we give our hearts to Jesus, it means we are giving our lives to Jesus. That giving our lives to Jesus means that we are trying our best to pursue holiness, pursue blamelessness, to rid ourselves of these sins, to rid ourselves of the things that separate us between us and Jesus, not so we gain salvation, not so we can earn God's love, but because salvation has been freely given to us, we turn around and we love God. We turn around and we love Jesus. We seek his calling. We live out his calling. We get rid of what separates us and we lean into him with the ultimate mission that my identity, my marker is Kyle, servant of Jesus. Connor, servant of Jesus. Doug, a servant of Jesus. So when you look at your life, what are those things that are standing in your way? Whether it be sin or your time or your comfort, whatever it may be, what is standing in the way of you fully being able to call yourself and refer to yourself as a servant to Christ? What do you have that's making a disconnect between your regular life and your spiritual life? And this morning I say, why not lean into him today? Why not trust him today to say, I am willing to give this up to you, God, because I understand the promise that comes on the other side. Because here's this, God wants your all. And he wants your all not so he can just take away the things that you love, but so that he can give you fullness of joy and utter, like, just overwhelming joy and awe and love that comes literally and only through being found in him. So will you pray with me? Lord, thank you for your gospel. Thank you for sending your son to die for us in our place. God, that you offer us grace and you offer us salvation. God, I pray that we don't, that we never pervert that. God, I pray that we never spit in the face of Jesus by making his sacrifices less than what they are. Let us daily press on towards you. And through that, God, let us daily grow closer and closer to you. Let our hearts grow closer and closer to being like yours, growing in our sainthood, growing in our holiness, one step at a time. And God, we thank you that not only do you offer us an eternal home in your kingdom, but you offer us a seat in your kingdom that we get to experience today, right now, because of your salvation. We love you. Amen. So I know this feels a little bit different because I'm still up here after I prayed. One of the beautiful things that writers do sometimes in the Bible is they write doxologies. Doxologies are basically just words of worship. And one of the cool things about them is that they're often found at the end of theology. They write about, hey, these are these things that are true, or these are ways that God is awesome, or in this, contend for these things and persevere in your faith because it can get hard. But within that, let us stop. And in light of these things that I'm talking about, I have to stop now, and I have to finish this letter, not with a period, but saying, now it's time to worship. It's similar, and I don't know if you guys know this, but it's normally why we sing another song on Sunday morning after the message, because it is a response to truth in worship. And so, if you will, I would love for you to stand with me, and on your sheets or on the, you don't have to read out loud with me, but let's just read this, because I love his beautiful words. I love his beautiful doxology saying, hey, all of these things have happened, all of these things are true, but let us not forget the joy for which we fight for these things To the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace. Before I jump into the sermon this morning, I did just want to make note of the fact that this morning and today actually is July 4th. And so that's exciting and that's super awesome. Thank you to everyone who has decided to join us on July 4th. And for everyone who's online, we're thankful that you're watching us online on your holiday. But as we think about July 4th, and as we think about these patriotic holidays that we come to, and as we talk about them within the church, it is normally within the realm of just being incredibly thankful to live in a place where we are free to gather together like this and worship God how we want and however we are able to do so. And so this morning I just wanted to make note of that, but then this weekend as I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about that we celebrate that freedom, one, because it's a freedom, but because that is not a freedom everywhere. There are Christians around the world who live in places where they are not free to worship in this way. They are living out their faith. They are meeting with other Christians. They are taking the gospel to places that is illegal to do so. And so as we celebrate our thankfulness and our praise for this freedom that we have, let us be mindful of those people as well, that those people who live there are those people who have left the freedom of America as missionaries to go and take the gospel to places where those freedoms do not exist. And so will you real quick just bow with me as we pray for both of those things. God, thank you for allowing us to live in a place where we are able to freely worship you, freely just learn more about you and grow closer to you. God, we realize that on days like today, it's just the perfect time to celebrate the fact that we get to celebrate you. And God, we also realize that this isn't the case for everyone. And so we also pray for those Christians worldwide, whether they be people who are native to countries where it is illegal to have and to spread the gospel, where it's illegal to worship you, or whether it be our American missionaries who have left their cushy freedoms to be able to take the gospel to places where it's not free. And so God, today, allow our joys to be sweeter as we celebrate you, as we celebrate our ability to celebrate you, and allow us to continue to be mindful of those who don't have those freedoms. We love you so much. Amen. So when I was coming towards the end of my college days, I basically, my last semester of college, I knew for sure that I was going to start working at Greystone Church as the student pastor. Many of you know Greystone is where our pastor, Pastor Nate, where he used to work. And so that's how we got connected. I got to work underneath him there at Greystone. Well, also, I found out at my second semester of my senior year of college that I had torn my ACL and my meniscus in such a way that it was going to have to require a full repair for both. Basically, I had hurt my knee at one point, like two years prior to that. I had gotten an MRI. He said he didn't see anything conclusive. He didn't see anything that was conclusive. And so I took that to mean, all right, let's go tear it now. And so for the next two years, I just played sports until I went back, got an MRI, and the list of things wrong with my knee were longer than the list of things I have to tell you this morning. But with that being the case, not only did I have ACL and meniscus surgery, but with a repair of both of those things, not a shaving, but a repair, it takes like months and months up to like over a year to be able to do any of the fun, athletic, exciting things that I wanted to be able to do, right? Not only that, but with a full meniscus repair, I don't, I mean, like some of you might be like, that's not actually right. I'm just telling you what I think that I remember. But, like, it was like, I wasn't allowed to put weight on my left leg for an entire month, or at least a few weeks. I think it was a month. But like, think about how hard that is. I mean, like, for those of you who've never seen me before, you're already watching me. It's like, this is not a guy who sits. And so like, that was incredibly difficult for me. And then even after that month, I had lost all of the little muscle that I had to where any rehab and any weight was literally all I could do was put some weight onto my leg. And so for a guy who all I wanted to do was just play sports and play basketball and play Ultimate Frisbee and all that stuff, that was really difficult. And so I got that surgery right before I started at Greystone. And so through that time, I'm on crutches. And even when I'm getting off of crutches, I'm just like walking. And so I have all of, I have all of these students who play basketball and I wanted to play basketball with them. We have like Greystone. I know none of you guys have ever been there, but like there's this incredible outdoor basketball facility at our church, which is also like, I lived in the backyard of our church. I had 24 seven access to basketball that I couldn't play because of this knee injury. And so because of those facts, what I decided was when I came back, I was going to have the very best possible basketball shoes that were on the market. It's just the decision was made. I was like, I have to figure out something that I can control that has to do with basketball that actually doesn't get me hurt or injured again. And so I started to stream, and we've all been here. We've all been in this exact place where we just start really deep diving into basketball shoe performance review YouTube. We all know it. The performance, there's just, truly, I know I kid, but this is a very real thing that there are like this group of YouTubers that people that put videos online, basically as basketball shoes release, they get these shoes and they give you all of the specs. They give you all of the, this is the stack height and this is the fit and this is what the shoe is made of. And you know, all of those things that no one cares about, but that are true, I guess. They're saying like the specs of the shoe. But then what they also do is they tell you how they actually operate, what they're best for. Are they best for inside or outside? How do they cut? How do they feel? How do they measure up? All this stuff. All of these things that say, hey, not only is this what these shoes are on paper, but on feet, this is what they look like. And so I began to get a little overwhelmed because there's a lot of these people. They're all saying things. And a lot of them in their performance reviews are saying very different things. These people will be like, I love this shoe. It's great, whatever. And these other people are like, no, I do not love this shoe. It's terrible. It's an awful shoe. Never buy it. You should burn it if you did buy it, which not a good idea. But with that came me having to then do even more of a YouTube deep dive into this because it was no longer about the shoes anymore, and I had to figure out who to trust. Well, by doing that, what I had to figure out is who are these dudes? And so as I start going deeper and deeper into this, I start seeing some videos and some footage of some of these guys playing basketball. And so there's these guys who are awesome. They're super good at basketball. I'm like, these guys are great. You know, they're cutting, they're jumping, they're doing all the things that you want to do when you're testing out a shoe. I'm seeing other videos of dudes who look like they have never played basketball in their entire life, where they're just kind of like, you know, like doing this. And then if they catch the ball, they're shooting it, but they're not doing anything. And then even still, there are literally YouTubers who are giving performance reviews who do not play basketball, who do not wear the shoes, who did not do the performance aspect of the shoes. Instead, they are getting paid because they're YouTubers by these companies to say, hey, this is the shoe you need. This is how it performs. This is how it works. They might be saying things that are right. They might be saying like, hey, this is what the specs are, but they are doing so not because it's something that they've actually put the time and effort into, not because they're actually walking the walk. They're just talking the talk because it benefits them to get paid and to get to do it, even though they literally are not playing basketball. They are not ever using the shoes. And I know that this is a super random and specific example, but we all know the examples like this, right? Like we know and some of us know about the couple times that very famous people have tweeted about these new phones that they absolutely love and that everyone should buy. And then at the bottom of their tweet, it gives the little update that says tweeted from an iPhone, where it's like, oh yes, so you don't use this phone that you're telling us to buy in this ad now. But, you know, we have it. You know, you have the people who say like, hey, this five-minute workout, this five-minute-a-day workout absolutely changed my life. It is absolutely life-changing. Or this diet is life-changing. And I look the way that I look like a bodybuilder because I work out five minutes a day like this. You know, we hear those and we know those and we're like, okay, we know that maybe this is good, and maybe you're not necessarily lying, but you're telling us that something is good and great and life-changing when you're not doing it or when you're not using it in your own lives. Basically, they are people who are talking the talk without walking the walk. They come off as experts, but their life says something completely different than what they're saying in their mouths. This is what we enter into as we jump into Jude. This week we're going to be in Jude. As Nate has chosen a lot of different books of the Bible that are very hard to find in the Bible, I decided to be a good guy and to be your friend and to give you one that's very easy to find in your Bible. So if you want to open in your Bible, Jude is one chapter, so it's short, but is the second to last book in the Bible. So if you find Revelation, just go backwards until you find Jude. If you find Revelation 1, and it's the next page, over. But Jude is this guy who wrote a letter to these certain people. We're going to actually get into who he is, to what he wrote about in a second. But if you guys will go ahead and open, and we will actually jump in, and we will start reading, starting in Jude 1. It says, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Before we continue, that already kind of tells us who Jude is. He is somebody who is a Christian. This is post Jesus dying and being resurrected. This is during a time where people have given their selves to Christ, given their hearts to Christ. And so as Jude refers to himself, he is a servant of Jesus Christ. And not only that, but he is a brother of James. Now, what makes this interesting is I know that we're all like, oh yeah, we know James is in the Bible. But what makes this interesting is that James is a brother of Jesus. And so what this means intrinsically is that Jude or Judah is one of Jesus's brothers, which makes it a little bit weird and a little bit interesting that he calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. But we're going to get back to why that's interesting in just a second. So let's move on. We're going to keep going through one and then two. To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied in you. So who is he writing to? He is writing to these Christians. We don't have an exact area or exact place or an exact church that he is writing to, but what we know is these are people who love the Lord and who have given their hearts over to Jesus and given their hearts over to the gospel. And then we have a bit of a shift. As it goes, and if you're looking in scripture, you'll see that it's actually marked judgment on false teachers. And so we jump into for a second, he starts off by saying, Christians, you people who have given your hearts to Jesus, I wanted to write to you in celebration. I wanted to write to you to say what an amazing and incredible thing this gospel is. What an amazing thing that God has looked down on us and looked down on our imperfections and our failures and said, I want that person in my family. And so I will send my son so he can live a perfect life and die as a sacrifice so I can make them a part of my eternal family. What an unbelievable gospel that is. And I wanted to just be able to celebrate with you. I wanted to write a message of celebration and excitement. I wanted to just be able to love on Jesus. But it has come to my attention that there are these people within your community and there are these people within your church that are taking that gospel that we hold so dearly and they are perverting it and they are denying this Jesus who lived, who loved, and who served and then who died for us. How are they doing so? Not with their speech. They are people who are teaching, and as they talk, and as you hear them on a Sunday morning at church, or as you hear them and what they're saying, there's nothing necessarily wrong with it, but their lives are filled with ungodliness. Their lives are filled with them leaning in to unrepentant sin, leading into this selfish desire and ambition that they have. And by that, they are perverting the gospel. They are saying, Jesus, we understand that you made your sacrifice. And instead of allowing that to say, now I want to live a life that is marked by you and your spirit and your truth. Instead, I'm going to let that allow me to do whatever I want, whenever I want. And so as he writes this, he writes this to say, be wary of these people. Be wary of what they are able to do, of the strength that they can have and what they are able to do. And for that reason, contend for the faith. Contend for this faith that you have, that I have, that is in your heart, or else it is going to cause division, and it is going to cause strife. For the next 10 verses, he goes on to talk about different examples in biblical history where this has happened. He talks about the people being brought out of Egypt, the Israelites being brought out of Egypt, and they were barred from entering the promised land because as they were being cared for by God and as they were being led by Moses, these people had given themselves over to their personal passions and what they personally wanted and their personal convictions and seeking after their own ability to control their circumstances. They started turning to other things. They started turning to sin. They started turning to other gods because of fear, because of anxiety, because of worry, because of a lack of control that they had in their circumstances. They talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, and I think a lot of us have heard of them. They literally reached judgment and condemnation as nations because they were so enthralled, they were so invested into themselves and what personally drove them and anything that they wanted and anything made them feel good was okay and was right regardless of what the Lord said about it and they reached condemnation and death. He talks about that from as far back as Enoch, an eighth descendant of Adam, so a long time ago, all the way up to disciples of Jesus Christ, there had been people to say, look out for people. There will be people who rise up in this ungodliness and they will use, they might say the right things, but you can tell and they are marked by their ungodliness in their lives. They are marked by the fact that their lives look completely different than the gospel that they are speaking and the gospel that they are preaching. They're basically the shoe guys. They're the shoe guys who say, hey, I know all of these things. I know all the right things, but they're only talking the talk. When it comes to walking the walk, they were doing anything but. They liked the gospel and they wanted to use the gospel, but they wanted to use it for their own selfish gain and their own selfish ability to do whatever they wanted to do because they'd been saved by grace. And as I talk about these things, I think all of us in our minds probably have people in our minds and in our lives or that we know of whether like, you know, in our actual lives or that we know through social media or that we know through the news of these people like that, that they talk a big game, but their life is so far from anything that they're preaching and that they're speaking. We all know those people. We know what it means and we know what it looks like to have a false teacher in our faith. And so when I talk about this, I think most of us are probably like, yes, amen. We need to contend against those people. Yes, amen. These people bring strife, and we need to watch out, and we need to be wary of them. And all of those things are so true, and there certainly is a full sermon that can be preached on what to look for, and the ways to avoid, and the ways to contend for these things and for these people. But what really stood out to me is how he continues after he talks about these people. Because after he talks about these people, he turns back to talking directly to the Christians, to the people who are living their lives in faith and in the gospel. And he offers up and says, persevere in your faith. You need to continue to persevere in your faith, growing closer to God, growing closer to who he is. And I believe that not only is that so you can be wary and so you contend for your faith, but what I believe is that he realizes, what I realize as I read this scripture, is that these people that were marked by ungodliness, these people that he is writing against, have really fallen short in just some very small, unique ways that all of us are at danger of falling short. That these people's entire lives are marked by ungodliness. They are that way for reasons that they have fallen short that I believe that we fall short every day. And what I realized is as I was like, gosh, these people are the worst. We need to watch out for these people. I realized that it's a lot easier to point our fingers at the ungodliness in other people than it is for us to recognize the areas of our life and our faith where we fall short. It's a lot easier for me to roast these basketball guys than it is for me to, or than it was for me to admit back in middle school when I got really into skateboarding, but I was a huge wimp, and so I didn't actually want to skateboard, so I just got the clothes, and then people would call me poser, and I was like, and I was devastated by it, but then I had to realize, you know, I had to come, I had to realize, they're right, I'm a poser. I talked a good talk, I knew all the stuff, I wore the cool clothes, I had some sick brown etnies, but I wasn't walking the walk. And by walking the walk, I meant rolling the roll. But how often is that true, right? How often do we hear these things and hear these people who are marked by ungodliness and in our minds we immediately go to the people that we know that are marked by ungodliness instead of our minds going to the parts of our life that are marked with ungodliness, the parts of our life that are separating us and that are holding back to a full life marked by the gospel. See, I think that the root of these people's sins were simple. I think for one, they wanted to keep seeking after and striving after their own selfish ambitions. They knew that God was who God was, but they had these things that they liked in their life and they weren't willing to give them up. And even that is rooted even deeper in the fact that I think that they just wanted to have lives that were separate from their spiritual lives. They had their regular, they had their personal life, their weekday life, and then they had their spiritual life. That on Sunday, yes, let's celebrate the gospel. Let's celebrate God and let's worship because he's awesome. I get to spend Sunday celebrating my spiritual life in God so that for the rest of the week, I am able to live my life that is not my spiritual life, my regular or my normal life. And I think the third thing they did is they just misunderstood the gospel. When they heard that Jesus died for their sins, when they heard that there is grace offered because Jesus was a perfect sacrifice, that they just misunderstood what that meant. They felt like the people, like in Romans 6, Paul asks, does that mean that we sin so we can make much of grace? No. That means we lean into godliness, we lean into holiness, we pursue getting rid of the sin in our lives so that we can have the best possible relationship we can with Jesus. But they didn't understand that. They thought, if I'm saved and I'm redeemed, then why do I have to change anything about my life? They didn't get it. They'd forgotten what it says in John 14, what Jesus says when he says that if you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, you will obey my teachings. Don't we all have those things? Don't we all have those sins that are in our lives, those sins that are in our hearts that we just don't want to give up, that we just want to be separate from our faith, separate from our spiritual life? Don't we all have those times where we say, okay, like, that was a great time of church or that was a great time of Bible study, now time to get back to my real or my regular life? Don't we separate the two at times? Don't we have sins and time commitments and ambitions and worries and plans and comforts and the like that we just hesitate wanting to give up to God because they make us feel comfortable or because we like them? And so the question becomes, how do we make sure that we don't fall so far down like these ungodly people? How do we persevere in our faith? How can we grow in our faith to where we can do our best to grow closer to God, to where we can make our hearts more and more like him every day, giving up those personal ambitions for these godly ambitions and these godly calls. Well, he talks about it. He writes about it. In verses 20 through 23, he says, What do we do? We lean into God. What do we do? We lean into our relationship and into our faith with God, ever more trying to build it up however and wherever we can. We read scripture so that we can better understand his heart. We pray, we pray so that we can give up those things and ask for God to mold and mend and to shape our hearts into what he loves and what he believes and what his call for us is. It means leaning into each other and building up each other and ever more encouraging each other and asking for encouragement from the people that are around us. As he says, going back to verse 2, he says, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied in you. While I read that as a blessing, I also read that as a way to persevere in the faith is by leaning in to mercy and peace and love, the type of which we only know because of the gospel and because of who God and Jesus is. What is our ultimate goal? Our ultimate goal is that our identity is the same identity as Jude's. For that, we go back to Jude 1 where he says, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Why did he walk around here to tell us that he was the brother of Jesus? He mentioned Jesus. He talks about his relation to Jesus. Why doesn't he just say Jude, a brother of Jesus? Why instead does he say Jude, a servant of Christ, also a brother of James, which actually does connect me and I am a brother of Jesus. Well, the best way that I've heard it said is this way by William Barclay, who wrote a commentary on Jude. And he says, part of it's gonna be on the screen, but we'll get to it in a second. The only title of honor which Jude would allow himself was the servant of Jesus Christ. That is to say, Jude regarded himself as having only one purpose and one distinction in life, to be forever at the disposal of Jesus for service in his cause. And then this part's on the screen. The greatest glory which any Christian can attain is to be one of use to Jesus Christ. The ultimate goal of our life, the ultimate goal as we persevere in our faith is that we are simply and utterly used by Christ and loved and found in his love. We are marked by Jesus, not only in our teaching, not only in our theology, not only in what we believe, but by the fact that he governs our hearts, he governs our actions, and his call is what we do. And how does that grow? It grows through growing closer to him. It grows through knowing him, through spending time with him, through building up our love in him and who he is. What the teachers failed to understand, what these people that he writes about failed to understand is that when we give our hearts to Jesus, it means we are giving our lives to Jesus. That giving our lives to Jesus means that we are trying our best to pursue holiness, pursue blamelessness, to rid ourselves of these sins, to rid ourselves of the things that separate us between us and Jesus, not so we gain salvation, not so we can earn God's love, but because salvation has been freely given to us, we turn around and we love God. We turn around and we love Jesus. We seek his calling. We live out his calling. We get rid of what separates us and we lean into him with the ultimate mission that my identity, my marker is Kyle, servant of Jesus. Connor, servant of Jesus. Doug, a servant of Jesus. So when you look at your life, what are those things that are standing in your way? Whether it be sin or your time or your comfort, whatever it may be, what is standing in the way of you fully being able to call yourself and refer to yourself as a servant to Christ? What do you have that's making a disconnect between your regular life and your spiritual life? And this morning I say, why not lean into him today? Why not trust him today to say, I am willing to give this up to you, God, because I understand the promise that comes on the other side. Because here's this, God wants your all. And he wants your all not so he can just take away the things that you love, but so that he can give you fullness of joy and utter, like, just overwhelming joy and awe and love that comes literally and only through being found in him. So will you pray with me? Lord, thank you for your gospel. Thank you for sending your son to die for us in our place. God, that you offer us grace and you offer us salvation. God, I pray that we don't, that we never pervert that. God, I pray that we never spit in the face of Jesus by making his sacrifices less than what they are. Let us daily press on towards you. And through that, God, let us daily grow closer and closer to you. Let our hearts grow closer and closer to being like yours, growing in our sainthood, growing in our holiness, one step at a time. And God, we thank you that not only do you offer us an eternal home in your kingdom, but you offer us a seat in your kingdom that we get to experience today, right now, because of your salvation. We love you. Amen. So I know this feels a little bit different because I'm still up here after I prayed. One of the beautiful things that writers do sometimes in the Bible is they write doxologies. Doxologies are basically just words of worship. And one of the cool things about them is that they're often found at the end of theology. They write about, hey, these are these things that are true, or these are ways that God is awesome, or in this, contend for these things and persevere in your faith because it can get hard. But within that, let us stop. And in light of these things that I'm talking about, I have to stop now, and I have to finish this letter, not with a period, but saying, now it's time to worship. It's similar, and I don't know if you guys know this, but it's normally why we sing another song on Sunday morning after the message, because it is a response to truth in worship. And so, if you will, I would love for you to stand with me, and on your sheets or on the, you don't have to read out loud with me, but let's just read this, because I love his beautiful words. I love his beautiful doxology saying, hey, all of these things have happened, all of these things are true, but let us not forget the joy for which we fight for these things To the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace. Before I jump into the sermon this morning, I did just want to make note of the fact that this morning and today actually is July 4th. And so that's exciting and that's super awesome. Thank you to everyone who has decided to join us on July 4th. And for everyone who's online, we're thankful that you're watching us online on your holiday. But as we think about July 4th, and as we think about these patriotic holidays that we come to, and as we talk about them within the church, it is normally within the realm of just being incredibly thankful to live in a place where we are free to gather together like this and worship God how we want and however we are able to do so. And so this morning I just wanted to make note of that, but then this weekend as I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about that we celebrate that freedom, one, because it's a freedom, but because that is not a freedom everywhere. There are Christians around the world who live in places where they are not free to worship in this way. They are living out their faith. They are meeting with other Christians. They are taking the gospel to places that is illegal to do so. And so as we celebrate our thankfulness and our praise for this freedom that we have, let us be mindful of those people as well, that those people who live there are those people who have left the freedom of America as missionaries to go and take the gospel to places where those freedoms do not exist. And so will you real quick just bow with me as we pray for both of those things. God, thank you for allowing us to live in a place where we are able to freely worship you, freely just learn more about you and grow closer to you. God, we realize that on days like today, it's just the perfect time to celebrate the fact that we get to celebrate you. And God, we also realize that this isn't the case for everyone. And so we also pray for those Christians worldwide, whether they be people who are native to countries where it is illegal to have and to spread the gospel, where it's illegal to worship you, or whether it be our American missionaries who have left their cushy freedoms to be able to take the gospel to places where it's not free. And so God, today, allow our joys to be sweeter as we celebrate you, as we celebrate our ability to celebrate you, and allow us to continue to be mindful of those who don't have those freedoms. We love you so much. Amen. So when I was coming towards the end of my college days, I basically, my last semester of college, I knew for sure that I was going to start working at Greystone Church as the student pastor. Many of you know Greystone is where our pastor, Pastor Nate, where he used to work. And so that's how we got connected. I got to work underneath him there at Greystone. Well, also, I found out at my second semester of my senior year of college that I had torn my ACL and my meniscus in such a way that it was going to have to require a full repair for both. Basically, I had hurt my knee at one point, like two years prior to that. I had gotten an MRI. He said he didn't see anything conclusive. He didn't see anything that was conclusive. And so I took that to mean, all right, let's go tear it now. And so for the next two years, I just played sports until I went back, got an MRI, and the list of things wrong with my knee were longer than the list of things I have to tell you this morning. But with that being the case, not only did I have ACL and meniscus surgery, but with a repair of both of those things, not a shaving, but a repair, it takes like months and months up to like over a year to be able to do any of the fun, athletic, exciting things that I wanted to be able to do, right? Not only that, but with a full meniscus repair, I don't, I mean, like some of you might be like, that's not actually right. I'm just telling you what I think that I remember. But, like, it was like, I wasn't allowed to put weight on my left leg for an entire month, or at least a few weeks. I think it was a month. But like, think about how hard that is. I mean, like, for those of you who've never seen me before, you're already watching me. It's like, this is not a guy who sits. And so like, that was incredibly difficult for me. And then even after that month, I had lost all of the little muscle that I had to where any rehab and any weight was literally all I could do was put some weight onto my leg. And so for a guy who all I wanted to do was just play sports and play basketball and play Ultimate Frisbee and all that stuff, that was really difficult. And so I got that surgery right before I started at Greystone. And so through that time, I'm on crutches. And even when I'm getting off of crutches, I'm just like walking. And so I have all of, I have all of these students who play basketball and I wanted to play basketball with them. We have like Greystone. I know none of you guys have ever been there, but like there's this incredible outdoor basketball facility at our church, which is also like, I lived in the backyard of our church. I had 24 seven access to basketball that I couldn't play because of this knee injury. And so because of those facts, what I decided was when I came back, I was going to have the very best possible basketball shoes that were on the market. It's just the decision was made. I was like, I have to figure out something that I can control that has to do with basketball that actually doesn't get me hurt or injured again. And so I started to stream, and we've all been here. We've all been in this exact place where we just start really deep diving into basketball shoe performance review YouTube. We all know it. The performance, there's just, truly, I know I kid, but this is a very real thing that there are like this group of YouTubers that people that put videos online, basically as basketball shoes release, they get these shoes and they give you all of the specs. They give you all of the, this is the stack height and this is the fit and this is what the shoe is made of. And you know, all of those things that no one cares about, but that are true, I guess. They're saying like the specs of the shoe. But then what they also do is they tell you how they actually operate, what they're best for. Are they best for inside or outside? How do they cut? How do they feel? How do they measure up? All this stuff. All of these things that say, hey, not only is this what these shoes are on paper, but on feet, this is what they look like. And so I began to get a little overwhelmed because there's a lot of these people. They're all saying things. And a lot of them in their performance reviews are saying very different things. These people will be like, I love this shoe. It's great, whatever. And these other people are like, no, I do not love this shoe. It's terrible. It's an awful shoe. Never buy it. You should burn it if you did buy it, which not a good idea. But with that came me having to then do even more of a YouTube deep dive into this because it was no longer about the shoes anymore, and I had to figure out who to trust. Well, by doing that, what I had to figure out is who are these dudes? And so as I start going deeper and deeper into this, I start seeing some videos and some footage of some of these guys playing basketball. And so there's these guys who are awesome. They're super good at basketball. I'm like, these guys are great. You know, they're cutting, they're jumping, they're doing all the things that you want to do when you're testing out a shoe. I'm seeing other videos of dudes who look like they have never played basketball in their entire life, where they're just kind of like, you know, like doing this. And then if they catch the ball, they're shooting it, but they're not doing anything. And then even still, there are literally YouTubers who are giving performance reviews who do not play basketball, who do not wear the shoes, who did not do the performance aspect of the shoes. Instead, they are getting paid because they're YouTubers by these companies to say, hey, this is the shoe you need. This is how it performs. This is how it works. They might be saying things that are right. They might be saying like, hey, this is what the specs are, but they are doing so not because it's something that they've actually put the time and effort into, not because they're actually walking the walk. They're just talking the talk because it benefits them to get paid and to get to do it, even though they literally are not playing basketball. They are not ever using the shoes. And I know that this is a super random and specific example, but we all know the examples like this, right? Like we know and some of us know about the couple times that very famous people have tweeted about these new phones that they absolutely love and that everyone should buy. And then at the bottom of their tweet, it gives the little update that says tweeted from an iPhone, where it's like, oh yes, so you don't use this phone that you're telling us to buy in this ad now. But, you know, we have it. You know, you have the people who say like, hey, this five-minute workout, this five-minute-a-day workout absolutely changed my life. It is absolutely life-changing. Or this diet is life-changing. And I look the way that I look like a bodybuilder because I work out five minutes a day like this. You know, we hear those and we know those and we're like, okay, we know that maybe this is good, and maybe you're not necessarily lying, but you're telling us that something is good and great and life-changing when you're not doing it or when you're not using it in your own lives. Basically, they are people who are talking the talk without walking the walk. They come off as experts, but their life says something completely different than what they're saying in their mouths. This is what we enter into as we jump into Jude. This week we're going to be in Jude. As Nate has chosen a lot of different books of the Bible that are very hard to find in the Bible, I decided to be a good guy and to be your friend and to give you one that's very easy to find in your Bible. So if you want to open in your Bible, Jude is one chapter, so it's short, but is the second to last book in the Bible. So if you find Revelation, just go backwards until you find Jude. If you find Revelation 1, and it's the next page, over. But Jude is this guy who wrote a letter to these certain people. We're going to actually get into who he is, to what he wrote about in a second. But if you guys will go ahead and open, and we will actually jump in, and we will start reading, starting in Jude 1. It says, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Before we continue, that already kind of tells us who Jude is. He is somebody who is a Christian. This is post Jesus dying and being resurrected. This is during a time where people have given their selves to Christ, given their hearts to Christ. And so as Jude refers to himself, he is a servant of Jesus Christ. And not only that, but he is a brother of James. Now, what makes this interesting is I know that we're all like, oh yeah, we know James is in the Bible. But what makes this interesting is that James is a brother of Jesus. And so what this means intrinsically is that Jude or Judah is one of Jesus's brothers, which makes it a little bit weird and a little bit interesting that he calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. But we're going to get back to why that's interesting in just a second. So let's move on. We're going to keep going through one and then two. To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied in you. So who is he writing to? He is writing to these Christians. We don't have an exact area or exact place or an exact church that he is writing to, but what we know is these are people who love the Lord and who have given their hearts over to Jesus and given their hearts over to the gospel. And then we have a bit of a shift. As it goes, and if you're looking in scripture, you'll see that it's actually marked judgment on false teachers. And so we jump into for a second, he starts off by saying, Christians, you people who have given your hearts to Jesus, I wanted to write to you in celebration. I wanted to write to you to say what an amazing and incredible thing this gospel is. What an amazing thing that God has looked down on us and looked down on our imperfections and our failures and said, I want that person in my family. And so I will send my son so he can live a perfect life and die as a sacrifice so I can make them a part of my eternal family. What an unbelievable gospel that is. And I wanted to just be able to celebrate with you. I wanted to write a message of celebration and excitement. I wanted to just be able to love on Jesus. But it has come to my attention that there are these people within your community and there are these people within your church that are taking that gospel that we hold so dearly and they are perverting it and they are denying this Jesus who lived, who loved, and who served and then who died for us. How are they doing so? Not with their speech. They are people who are teaching, and as they talk, and as you hear them on a Sunday morning at church, or as you hear them and what they're saying, there's nothing necessarily wrong with it, but their lives are filled with ungodliness. Their lives are filled with them leaning in to unrepentant sin, leading into this selfish desire and ambition that they have. And by that, they are perverting the gospel. They are saying, Jesus, we understand that you made your sacrifice. And instead of allowing that to say, now I want to live a life that is marked by you and your spirit and your truth. Instead, I'm going to let that allow me to do whatever I want, whenever I want. And so as he writes this, he writes this to say, be wary of these people. Be wary of what they are able to do, of the strength that they can have and what they are able to do. And for that reason, contend for the faith. Contend for this faith that you have, that I have, that is in your heart, or else it is going to cause division, and it is going to cause strife. For the next 10 verses, he goes on to talk about different examples in biblical history where this has happened. He talks about the people being brought out of Egypt, the Israelites being brought out of Egypt, and they were barred from entering the promised land because as they were being cared for by God and as they were being led by Moses, these people had given themselves over to their personal passions and what they personally wanted and their personal convictions and seeking after their own ability to control their circumstances. They started turning to other things. They started turning to sin. They started turning to other gods because of fear, because of anxiety, because of worry, because of a lack of control that they had in their circumstances. They talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, and I think a lot of us have heard of them. They literally reached judgment and condemnation as nations because they were so enthralled, they were so invested into themselves and what personally drove them and anything that they wanted and anything made them feel good was okay and was right regardless of what the Lord said about it and they reached condemnation and death. He talks about that from as far back as Enoch, an eighth descendant of Adam, so a long time ago, all the way up to disciples of Jesus Christ, there had been people to say, look out for people. There will be people who rise up in this ungodliness and they will use, they might say the right things, but you can tell and they are marked by their ungodliness in their lives. They are marked by the fact that their lives look completely different than the gospel that they are speaking and the gospel that they are preaching. They're basically the shoe guys. They're the shoe guys who say, hey, I know all of these things. I know all the right things, but they're only talking the talk. When it comes to walking the walk, they were doing anything but. They liked the gospel and they wanted to use the gospel, but they wanted to use it for their own selfish gain and their own selfish ability to do whatever they wanted to do because they'd been saved by grace. And as I talk about these things, I think all of us in our minds probably have people in our minds and in our lives or that we know of whether like, you know, in our actual lives or that we know through social media or that we know through the news of these people like that, that they talk a big game, but their life is so far from anything that they're preaching and that they're speaking. We all know those people. We know what it means and we know what it looks like to have a false teacher in our faith. And so when I talk about this, I think most of us are probably like, yes, amen. We need to contend against those people. Yes, amen. These people bring strife, and we need to watch out, and we need to be wary of them. And all of those things are so true, and there certainly is a full sermon that can be preached on what to look for, and the ways to avoid, and the ways to contend for these things and for these people. But what really stood out to me is how he continues after he talks about these people. Because after he talks about these people, he turns back to talking directly to the Christians, to the people who are living their lives in faith and in the gospel. And he offers up and says, persevere in your faith. You need to continue to persevere in your faith, growing closer to God, growing closer to who he is. And I believe that not only is that so you can be wary and so you contend for your faith, but what I believe is that he realizes, what I realize as I read this scripture, is that these people that were marked by ungodliness, these people that he is writing against, have really fallen short in just some very small, unique ways that all of us are at danger of falling short. That these people's entire lives are marked by ungodliness. They are that way for reasons that they have fallen short that I believe that we fall short every day. And what I realized is as I was like, gosh, these people are the worst. We need to watch out for these people. I realized that it's a lot easier to point our fingers at the ungodliness in other people than it is for us to recognize the areas of our life and our faith where we fall short. It's a lot easier for me to roast these basketball guys than it is for me to, or than it was for me to admit back in middle school when I got really into skateboarding, but I was a huge wimp, and so I didn't actually want to skateboard, so I just got the clothes, and then people would call me poser, and I was like, and I was devastated by it, but then I had to realize, you know, I had to come, I had to realize, they're right, I'm a poser. I talked a good talk, I knew all the stuff, I wore the cool clothes, I had some sick brown etnies, but I wasn't walking the walk. And by walking the walk, I meant rolling the roll. But how often is that true, right? How often do we hear these things and hear these people who are marked by ungodliness and in our minds we immediately go to the people that we know that are marked by ungodliness instead of our minds going to the parts of our life that are marked with ungodliness, the parts of our life that are separating us and that are holding back to a full life marked by the gospel. See, I think that the root of these people's sins were simple. I think for one, they wanted to keep seeking after and striving after their own selfish ambitions. They knew that God was who God was, but they had these things that they liked in their life and they weren't willing to give them up. And even that is rooted even deeper in the fact that I think that they just wanted to have lives that were separate from their spiritual lives. They had their regular, they had their personal life, their weekday life, and then they had their spiritual life. That on Sunday, yes, let's celebrate the gospel. Let's celebrate God and let's worship because he's awesome. I get to spend Sunday celebrating my spiritual life in God so that for the rest of the week, I am able to live my life that is not my spiritual life, my regular or my normal life. And I think the third thing they did is they just misunderstood the gospel. When they heard that Jesus died for their sins, when they heard that there is grace offered because Jesus was a perfect sacrifice, that they just misunderstood what that meant. They felt like the people, like in Romans 6, Paul asks, does that mean that we sin so we can make much of grace? No. That means we lean into godliness, we lean into holiness, we pursue getting rid of the sin in our lives so that we can have the best possible relationship we can with Jesus. But they didn't understand that. They thought, if I'm saved and I'm redeemed, then why do I have to change anything about my life? They didn't get it. They'd forgotten what it says in John 14, what Jesus says when he says that if you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, you will obey my teachings. Don't we all have those things? Don't we all have those sins that are in our lives, those sins that are in our hearts that we just don't want to give up, that we just want to be separate from our faith, separate from our spiritual life? Don't we all have those times where we say, okay, like, that was a great time of church or that was a great time of Bible study, now time to get back to my real or my regular life? Don't we separate the two at times? Don't we have sins and time commitments and ambitions and worries and plans and comforts and the like that we just hesitate wanting to give up to God because they make us feel comfortable or because we like them? And so the question becomes, how do we make sure that we don't fall so far down like these ungodly people? How do we persevere in our faith? How can we grow in our faith to where we can do our best to grow closer to God, to where we can make our hearts more and more like him every day, giving up those personal ambitions for these godly ambitions and these godly calls. Well, he talks about it. He writes about it. In verses 20 through 23, he says, What do we do? We lean into God. What do we do? We lean into our relationship and into our faith with God, ever more trying to build it up however and wherever we can. We read scripture so that we can better understand his heart. We pray, we pray so that we can give up those things and ask for God to mold and mend and to shape our hearts into what he loves and what he believes and what his call for us is. It means leaning into each other and building up each other and ever more encouraging each other and asking for encouragement from the people that are around us. As he says, going back to verse 2, he says, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied in you. While I read that as a blessing, I also read that as a way to persevere in the faith is by leaning in to mercy and peace and love, the type of which we only know because of the gospel and because of who God and Jesus is. What is our ultimate goal? Our ultimate goal is that our identity is the same identity as Jude's. For that, we go back to Jude 1 where he says, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Why did he walk around here to tell us that he was the brother of Jesus? He mentioned Jesus. He talks about his relation to Jesus. Why doesn't he just say Jude, a brother of Jesus? Why instead does he say Jude, a servant of Christ, also a brother of James, which actually does connect me and I am a brother of Jesus. Well, the best way that I've heard it said is this way by William Barclay, who wrote a commentary on Jude. And he says, part of it's gonna be on the screen, but we'll get to it in a second. The only title of honor which Jude would allow himself was the servant of Jesus Christ. That is to say, Jude regarded himself as having only one purpose and one distinction in life, to be forever at the disposal of Jesus for service in his cause. And then this part's on the screen. The greatest glory which any Christian can attain is to be one of use to Jesus Christ. The ultimate goal of our life, the ultimate goal as we persevere in our faith is that we are simply and utterly used by Christ and loved and found in his love. We are marked by Jesus, not only in our teaching, not only in our theology, not only in what we believe, but by the fact that he governs our hearts, he governs our actions, and his call is what we do. And how does that grow? It grows through growing closer to him. It grows through knowing him, through spending time with him, through building up our love in him and who he is. What the teachers failed to understand, what these people that he writes about failed to understand is that when we give our hearts to Jesus, it means we are giving our lives to Jesus. That giving our lives to Jesus means that we are trying our best to pursue holiness, pursue blamelessness, to rid ourselves of these sins, to rid ourselves of the things that separate us between us and Jesus, not so we gain salvation, not so we can earn God's love, but because salvation has been freely given to us, we turn around and we love God. We turn around and we love Jesus. We seek his calling. We live out his calling. We get rid of what separates us and we lean into him with the ultimate mission that my identity, my marker is Kyle, servant of Jesus. Connor, servant of Jesus. Doug, a servant of Jesus. So when you look at your life, what are those things that are standing in your way? Whether it be sin or your time or your comfort, whatever it may be, what is standing in the way of you fully being able to call yourself and refer to yourself as a servant to Christ? What do you have that's making a disconnect between your regular life and your spiritual life? And this morning I say, why not lean into him today? Why not trust him today to say, I am willing to give this up to you, God, because I understand the promise that comes on the other side. Because here's this, God wants your all. And he wants your all not so he can just take away the things that you love, but so that he can give you fullness of joy and utter, like, just overwhelming joy and awe and love that comes literally and only through being found in him. So will you pray with me? Lord, thank you for your gospel. Thank you for sending your son to die for us in our place. God, that you offer us grace and you offer us salvation. God, I pray that we don't, that we never pervert that. God, I pray that we never spit in the face of Jesus by making his sacrifices less than what they are. Let us daily press on towards you. And through that, God, let us daily grow closer and closer to you. Let our hearts grow closer and closer to being like yours, growing in our sainthood, growing in our holiness, one step at a time. And God, we thank you that not only do you offer us an eternal home in your kingdom, but you offer us a seat in your kingdom that we get to experience today, right now, because of your salvation. We love you. Amen. So I know this feels a little bit different because I'm still up here after I prayed. One of the beautiful things that writers do sometimes in the Bible is they write doxologies. Doxologies are basically just words of worship. And one of the cool things about them is that they're often found at the end of theology. They write about, hey, these are these things that are true, or these are ways that God is awesome, or in this, contend for these things and persevere in your faith because it can get hard. But within that, let us stop. And in light of these things that I'm talking about, I have to stop now, and I have to finish this letter, not with a period, but saying, now it's time to worship. It's similar, and I don't know if you guys know this, but it's normally why we sing another song on Sunday morning after the message, because it is a response to truth in worship. And so, if you will, I would love for you to stand with me, and on your sheets or on the, you don't have to read out loud with me, but let's just read this, because I love his beautiful words. I love his beautiful doxology saying, hey, all of these things have happened, all of these things are true, but let us not forget the joy for which we fight for these things To the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You guys have not gotten the memo. Church attendance spikes in January and February and then begins to dip in March. There's too many of you here. I hope this is a problem we continue to have. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I've really enjoyed getting to spend the last four weeks in the Upper Room Discourse, the final statements of Jesus to his disciples the night that he was arrested and crucified. And so we are calling this series His Final Thoughts because these are the last things he shares with just the intimate group of disciples. And we find this discourse in John, the back half of chapter 13, all the way through chapter 17, where we get this beautiful prayer of Christ called the High Priestly Prayer. I'm excited to be focused on that for two weeks here in another few weeks. But like Mike, our double-duty coffee guy and announcer guy this morning told us, we spent last week in the concept of abiding in Christ and why it's so important. And last week I said that the invitation to abide in Christ is a gift of simplicity amidst a world of confusion and chaos. That we're all asking ourselves these major questions. Am I making the right decision? And am I being a good fill in the blank, whatever you are. And that when we abide in Christ, the promise there is that Jesus will say yes, that we will do what we are supposed to do and that we will be what we are supposed to be when we simply focus on abiding in Christ. And we left off with this question of that's great, but life is still confusing and chaotic. Life is still very busy. I still have to do carpool. I still have to make the meetings. I still have to make the calls. I still have to do the things. I still have to live a life. So how do I abide in Christ, short of going to a monastery, in my life now? How do I abide? And so that's what we're tackling this week. So this week's sermon, really, if I'm being honest, is more of a seminar. This is intended to be practical and to be applicable to your life. So I would tell you up front that I do not expect everybody in the room to do all the things that I'm saying. Some of us aren't ready for them yet. Some of us have already started doing those things. Some of them it's not new. So I don't expect everything I say and suggest this morning to go, oh my gosh, that's so great. I've never thought about that. But my hope and my prayer is that there can be two or three things that you hear that will change your life because you begin to instill them into your life and it changes the course of your life. So that's my goal for you, that you'd pick up just a handful of things this morning that you can begin to apply in your life right away. As we answer this question together, how do I abide in Christ just day in and day out? How do I walk with the Lord? So to remind us of what we're talking about, I just wanted to start off by reading the passage. It's not going to be on the screen. And we're having some gremlins on the screen this morning. So if all of a sudden it just goes out, don't worry about it. Just keep following along. The only song we have left is How Great Thou Art. Most of you know it. So we'll be all right. If you have a Bible, open to John chapter 15. Read with me verses 4 and 5. This is where we are last week and this week. Jesus is speaking. Remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. And we talked last week about how some translators choose the word remain and some choose the word abide. I memorized this passage or got acquainted with this passage with an abide translation, so that's why I say abide. But the concept is the exact same. So here's what I want to do. As we ask the question, how do we day-to-day abide in Christ? What I want to do is I want to give you three guiding principles for abiding in Christ, and then we want to look at how we can apply those guiding principles to the different areas of our life, to our work or our school, to our home, to our friendships, and then to our alone time. So that's where we're going to go this morning. First of the three guiding principles to how can I daily abide in Christ is simply anchor your day in Christ. If you want to abide in Christ, anchor your day in Christ. If you have been here, if you have come to more than four services, you have heard me say at some point that the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. It's what I consider a keystone habit. There are some habits that are so fundamental that they begat other habits. This is one of those for us, especially for believers. We need to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer for myriad reasons. But if you're a parent, how are you going to teach your children the scriptures if you don't know them? If there's a verse in the Bible that says, I will hide God's word in my heart that I might not sin against you, how are we going to do that if we don't study the Bible on our own? How are we ever going to become acquainted with God's word in such a way that we can teach it and instruct it and know it and it nourishes us if the only bit of God's word are what we're getting from church every Sunday. It just won't work. This Sunday, I just read you two verses that I read you last Sunday. I'm going to read you one more verse in Philippians. That's the verse eight. Aaron read six, or where did you start? Four. Four through seven. And then I'm going to do eight. All right? So that's five verses or four verses, however the math works there. And then two more right now. That's it. That's all you're getting this week if you're not reading the Bible on your own. So we've got to read the Bible on our own. Similarly, we've got to pray on our own. We have to pursue the presence of God. We have to find a spot, get on our knees, and pray. I think posture is important in prayer. I'm not saying you have to do it. I'm just saying it helps me when I pray. And, you know, I know that some people say I'm not a morning person. I like to do my quiet time later in the day. That's fine. Do it whenever you want to do it. But for me, I anchor my day in it. I've got to start out that way. Find a place, find a habit that works for you and anchor your day in Christ by having a quiet time. If you don't know how to have a quiet time, if you're in a rut, if you need some suggestions, if you just like some more information, I've done a couple of things. I wrote a daily devotion guide. It's on the information table out there. We have two tables. We have a coffee table and an information table. You guys can piece it together where it is. This is just a guide on how much do I read, where do I read, when I pray, what do I pray about, how do I pray. And there's some resources in there. So if you're in a rut, there's some suggestions of some places that you can go and know how to have a quiet time. So I made that for you guys if you need it. And then there's also one of these, a Bible translation guide. There's a bunch of different translations of the Bible. A lot of times I get asked which one's right for me, which one should I be reading? And this is the answer, okay? This kind of tells you there's three major approaches to how translations are done, and I detail those, and that might help you as you decide which one you want to use in your daily study. But the first guiding principle is to anchor our day in Christ. We have to start with a quiet time if we're going to hope to be walking with Christ through the day. The second one is to practice the presence of Christ. If we want to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ. I'm stealing this phrasing from a 17th century French monk named Brother Lawrence. I don't know what his actual name was, but when he went to the monastery, he took on the name Brother Lawrence. It's called The Practice of the Presence of God. It is the single best book on prayer I've ever read. I believe for some of you, the thing you're supposed to get from the sermon this morning is to go read The Practice of the Presence of God. You can write that down on your bulletin or type it out on your phone, and then you don't have to listen anymore. As a matter of fact, if you want to leave to just make some space for other people, you can do that. Go get the book and read. It's a phenomenal book, Practice the Presence of God. But one of the things I pulled from that is this idea of being constantly with Christ, just knowing that wherever I go, I'm taking Him with me. And so it taught me this little phrase that sometimes I'm spiritual enough to remember, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, if you're a Christian, he tells us in the upper room discourse that he gives us the spirit. We have his spirit with us. Everywhere we go, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. As I go into a meeting at work, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. As I go into my office, as we go into traffic, as we go into the store, as we interact with the slow person behind the cash register, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, this should be our mantra. This should be what we repeat to ourselves. We take it into and out. We take him with us into and out of every situation. On the golf course, I am with Christ. At work, I am with Christ. At home, I am with Christ. Practicing the presence of Jesus. A story that kind of brings this home for me that I heard years ago. I heard it one time and I've never forgotten it. And I think I may have told it to you guys before, but indulge me. This is not a true story. This did not actually happen. If it did actually happen, it would be super weird. So it's a fable, all right, but it makes a good point. So there's this church, and there's this one guy in the church who's known just to be a phenomenal prayer. He has a remarkable prayer life. He's incredibly disciplined. He's the guy they always call on for the public prayers. Prayers are beautiful. And he's just this monkish spiritual figure in the church. Everyone respects him. Darn it. Chris Lott is a buddy of mine. He's sitting right here. He's looking at me, and I just edited about four jokes at his expense, and then I lost my train of thought because you had some sort of dumb grin on your face because you knew. Because you knew it. You knew I was thinking that, didn't you? Yeah, that's right. All right, well, let's get back on track, buddy. I don't even know what I was talking about. Oh, the story. The story. This godly guy, the story. Well, sorry. Then the lights were shining off your head. I got distracted again. So some guys from the church said, we want to hear his prayer life. We want to hear. He's such a great prayer. I bet his prayer at the end of the day is phenomenal. I want to hear his prayer at the end of the day. I want to know what his conversation is with God when he closes out his day and goes to bed. And so they decide what they're going to do, and this is how we know it's not true, is they hide in his closet. We're going to hide in his closet. We're going to wait for him to go to bed. So they're in there. They're doing whatever you do when you're hiding in somebody's closet. And then he comes in. It's nighttime. It's 930. It's time to tuck in. And so he does his routine. He brushes his teeth. He does whatever he does. And then they're expecting he's going to kneel next to the bed. He's going to pray. But he doesn't kneel. It's weird. He just gets in. And they're like, okay, I didn't think laying down prayer. But maybe he's trying to prostrate himself like Christ did in the garden. Maybe that's what he's doing. He's going to pray that way. And he gets in, and he pulls up the covers, and he rolls over, and all they do is hear him say, goodnight Jesus. And that was it. Which makes a phenomenal point about an active, everyday, constant prayer life, and obedience to Paul's instructions in Thessalonians, pray without ceasing. So if we are going to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ and bring him with us everywhere we go and talk to him constantly. Now, I know some people are actually pretty good at this. Some people are actually pretty good at doing what I just call like kind of sniper shot prayers throughout the day. Just kind of one-offs of God help me here, God help me here, God help me here. And that's great. And then other people are good at the basing foundational prayer where we pray about all the things in the morning. And some people are good at both, and that's really great. But if you are good at one and not the other, then maybe turn the dial on the other and let's see that prayer life start to escalate. But that's practicing the presence of Christ. The third guiding principle, and I think this one's so important, especially now, is consume what draws you to Christ. Consume what draws you to Christ. And I use that word consume very intentionally because I believe we have got to be, if we consider ourselves, if we consider whoever's alive one generation, we have got to be the most consumptive generation of humans that have ever walked the planet. We have to be. We are all day, every day. And the younger you get, the worse it is. All day, every day, taking things in, consuming things, conversation, media, TV, phone, all the time, radio, podcasts, all the time. It's just piped into it. The world has a funnel into our brain, just shoving information in there all the time. I mean, if you think about it, almost, I'm 42, I'll be 43 here in a little bit. So almost 30 years ago, I was sitting in the DMV getting my driver's license. And the DMV has made zero innovations in 30 years. And it's still just as satanic as it was then. It's terrible. It's the worst place on earth. And when you go there, because they have engineered it to make you hate it, it's slow. It takes forever. And when I was waiting two hours to go back a car up into some cones, I, you know what I did for those two hours of the DMV? Nothing. You just sat there and you stared at the wall and you counted bricks and you wondered why it was taking so long, and you thought about your life. You contemplated all the decisions that had led you there. If you wanted something to do at the DMV, you took a book. You took a Sudoku thing or something. I don't think they had invented Sudoku in 1997. But you know what you do now? When you have 30 seconds of dead time, you have 30 seconds of something not entertaining you, don't raise your hand. How many of you at traffic lights grab your phone? He's like, I don't know what to do anymore. And you just grab it because you need something to look at, something to inform you, something that you consume. We are the most consumptive generation of people who have ever existed. We have no dead space in our life. So just as an aside, we should seek silence and stillness sometimes so that the Lord can speak to us. But living in the reality of how consumptive we are, when you do consume things, we need a filter. Is this pushing me closer to Jesus or is it pulling me away from him? Is this inspiring me and increasing my desire for Christ or is it decreasing my desire for Christ? The things that we have that take up our attention every day, we ought to at least assess whether or not they are inflaming us and impassioning us towards Jesus or whether they are blunting and muting that passion so that it fades away. We should at least be aware of that. And I'm not advocating that I think it's possible to just pipe spiritual things into ourselves at all times. But I am certain that all of us have some room to grow there. This is the reason why last year I took social media off my phone. Because I just got tired of the time that I was wasting on it and what I was consuming. There's only so many falling videos you can watch in a row before you feel like this can't be edifying twitter just made me angry now i will admit i have tick tock and i need to take that off my phone because it's too often that i'm not doing anything and then now all of a sudden i'm watching dumb videos we need to at least know what we're consuming what are we filling our brains with when we get in the car, when we go on a run, when we sit down at our office, when we have some alone time, when we're doing yard work? What are we consuming? And is what I'm consuming pushing me towards Christ or pulling me away from Christ? So those are the three guiding principles. Anchor your day in Christ, practice the presence of Christ, and then consume what draws you to Christ. If you apply those three things in your life, you will be abiding in Christ. Now, how do we practically do this? I want to look at work, I want to look at home, I want to look at fun, and I want to look at alone. So, at work, how do we practice these principles? Well, one thing that I do, it's the easiest for me in my schedule, is the very first thing I do when I get into the office most days is I pull out my Bible and I read, and then I kneel and I pray. I'm actually lately been thinking I need to switch up that habit, and I'm just saying this for the parents in the room. I have vivid memories in middle school and high school of coming downstairs every morning, and my mom's Bible would be open on the table next to her chair, and there'd be a coffee mug, usually with some lipstick on it. And there was evidence there that she had been spending time in the Word. And that gave me respect for her when she started instructing me on spiritual things. And I don't know what you think it would be like to be my parent, but it wasn't easy. I'll tell you that. But seeing the evidence. Of her dedication to Christ. Gave me respect. And I listened. And so now I've got a daughter. Who's starting to notice things. And I'm going to try to shift. My quiet times back to my office. At home. So that when she gets up. She can see it too. because I have that memory. So parents, if you've got kids growing up in the house, what do you want them to see? Can they see your devotional habits? But for some of us, maybe it makes more sense to have it at work. A very easy way to anchor our day in Christ at work and to practice the presence of Christ at work is to pray before everything. We park. Pray before you get out of the car. Father, remind me that you're with me. Remind me that I'm representing you. Be with me as I go. If you're working from home, when you do whatever you do to tell yourself, now I'm locked in and I'm working, before you do that, pray, Father, be with me today. Carry Christ with you into meetings. Before you go into meetings, pray over the meeting. Before you do the call, pray over the call. Before you write the report, pray over the report. Before you do anything in your work, pray over it. Give it to God. Acknowledge that he is with me and I am with him. And let me just speak especially to the people in the room who lead other people, to the people in the room with direct reports, bosses. It is, I realized it this week, I had not articulated it before, but it's a big goal of mine because we do have, I think, an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. If you're a leader and you call grace home, it is my fervent prayer that the people who work for you would say that their life is better because you're in it, because you care about them and you lead them well. So if you're a leader and you're about to have a conversation with a team member, especially if that conversation is hard or potentially negative or has some conflict or it's critical, please pray before that meeting. Pray before they come into your office. Pray before you pick up the phone. Pray and ask for the Spirit to be with you in that conversation. Practice the presence of Christ in your workplace. How do we practice the presence of Christ in our home? Well, I think it's very similar. One thing, right off the bat, is mom, dad, when you're out and you're working and you're coming home, right? And you know, you know what it is. You're going to open that door. There's going to be a whirlwind of noise. Everything is going to need, everybody is going to need everything from you all at once, right away. You know that routine. Stop and pray. I have a friend who says he, when his daughters were young, he used to pull off the side of the road about a mile short of the house. And he would stop and decompress and take off career hat and put on dad hat and pray that God would be with him before he walked in. And once he felt like he was in the right space, he pulled in the driveway. He was present for his children. He was present for his wife. Stop and bring Jesus with you and that peace into the house. Wake up every day. Spend time in God's word and time in prayer there at your home. Ask yourself, and I think this is a conversation that everybody in the church should have. If you live alone, then you consider it on your own. If you live with other people, talk with them, talk with your spouse. And really ask the question, do we have a Christ-centered home? How often is the name Jesus mentioned here? If we have children still living with us, how often do we talk about faith with them? Did they hear us as adults talking about Jesus? One of my favorite things that I see in my house and that I can brag on because she's not here right now is every morning before Lily and I walk out the door to go to school, I take her to school. I don't still attend. Before we go, Jen grabs Lily and she says, let me pray for you, baby. And she prays. And do you know how non-spiritual I am? Sometimes we're running late. And I'm looking at her going like, yo, the Holy Spirit needs to move you to pray faster. I'm wearing sweatpants. I don't want to walk in that school if they're late. I'm so bad. Every morning, she grabs that little girl, she hugs her, and she prays for her. What a gift to kids to do that. Every night, we do a little devotional with the kids before they, in their beds before they go to bed. We sing them songs. I sing them hym truly the center of your home? And if he's not, how can we make it that way? So that when I'm at home, I'm abiding in Christ. How do we abide in Christ with our friends? Listen, I love friends. Friends are super important to me. I love having a good time with friends. I love messing around with friends. It's great. I think friendships are a gift from God. But how do we abide in Christ in those friendships? And listen, this can be tricky because not all of us, not all of our friends are Christian friends. And that's a good thing because I believe that the most effective form of evangelism is friendship. So we should all have friends in our life who don't know Jesus. We should. But we should also have friends in our life that push us towards Jesus. I learned very young, my dad used to say all the time, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. It's so true. Proverbs says that. It says if you spend your time in the counsel of the wise, you will become wise. If you spend your time in the council of morons, you will become a moron. It's a loose paraphrase. I explain that in the translation guide out there. And we know that research shows that you become the five people you spend the most time around. We know that. So if we are going to abide in Christ, then we're going to need our friends' help. And if we're going to need our friend's help, then we need friends who are abiding in Christ and who push us in our walk with Christ. And here's what can happen sometimes with friends, even Christian friends, is they'll become, and this is what I call them, they'll become yuck-yuck clubs where you just get together and you don't talk about anything that matters. We're just laughing and swapping stories and making fun of people and telling jokes. And everyone's just laughing and giggling the whole time. And listen, I love yuck yuck clubs. I'm the charter member of several of them. They're fantastic. Or other times people get together and all it is is one big juicy gossesh. And if you don't know what that is because you're not as cool as me, they just gossip a lot about other people. They just get together and eventually it's just going to degenerate into, did you hear what so-and-so did? I was disappointed in so-and-so for this. And we just start throwing names around and talking about other people and it's not productive and it's not good and it's not wise. So listen, what I would say to you is this, if your friends never talk about things that matter, change the conversation or get new friends. If the people you spend the most time with never talk about things that matter, have the courage to change the conversation, to introduce new topics, to actually ask them how their marriage and how their spiritual life is going. Have the courage to change the topic. Have the courage to ask a real question amidst the laughter. Have the courage to cut off the gossip and redirect to another place, or, I'm being honest, get new friends. If you look through your landscape of friends and you see that you don't really have anyone there who spiritually encourages you on a regular basis, then truly, maybe your thing this morning is to begin to pray that God would reveal to you some more friends, some new friends that you can grow with. And while we're here, don't forget what I talked about in January when I talked about the importance of community in the middle of the prayer where it says, along with all the saints, and we talked about this idea of sacred spaces. The one or two or three people we have in our life where we can be completely open and completely honest and completely vulnerable. If we want to abide in Christ, we're going to need those spaces. But I do want to encourage you this morning to consider your friendships. Do you carry Jesus into those as well? Do you find them spiritually encouraging? Are they neutral? Do they push you away? We need spaces where we can go for that. And then lastly, how do we abide in Christ when we're alone? This one's a tricky one. I've been told for a long time that your character is who you are when no one is around. And I think when we're alone, this idea of what we consume becomes incredibly important. When you're alone, and I don't know what alone is for you. For me, alone is the family can be upstairs and I can be in the kitchen with earbuds in. I may as well be alone. I'm listening to a book or a podcast or something or when I'm working in the yard. When you have time to yourself, no one else has any input into you, what are you doing? When you go on your runs or your rides or your hikes or your walks, if you're listening to something, what are you listening to? If you're thinking about something, what are you thinking about? When you're in the car, how do you use that time? You're by yourself, how do you use that time? What do you listen to? What do you think about? When do you pray? When it's the end of the day and the house is quiet and you have your own space, and we all need that, what do you consume? What do you watch? What do you play? What do you listen to? What do you read? In the morning, when you wake up, no one else is around. What does your mind go to? What is it that you want to consume? What is it that you should consume? This is where it's really, really important to know what pushes you towards Christ and what pulls you away from Christ. And this is why I'm careful to throw down standards. You should watch these kinds of shows. You should not watch these kinds of shows. These kinds of books. These kinds of books. Whatever it is. Because it's different for everybody. But what I want to encourage in you is this sense. This filter in your heart. That you allow to be triggered with, this isn't really edifying. I don't really think this is what I need to be consuming. And turn it off, or put it down, or go to sleep, or go on a walk. But we need to be thoughtful and not just consume things by default. So if we want to abide in Christ, remember, we anchor our day in Christ. We practice the presence of Christ. We consume what draws us to Christ. We think about how to apply those principles in our work life, in our home life, in our private life, and in our friend life. And then I would simply say this as we wrap up. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. I've had seasons where I've been radical about this, where I just kind of look at my life and I realize I'm watching junk shows that I don't need to be watching. I'm reading books that aren't bad, but they don't really help me in any way. They don't help me get better. They're not pushing me towards Jesus. Maybe I haven't been having my quiet times like I should. I've stopped. My podcasts are all news. There's nothing spiritually encouraging there. I'm just not consuming anything that's helping me. And I go, oh my gosh. And I do a whole reset. And I just, and I'm just, I'm reading, I'm reading a book, I'm listening to a book, both are spiritually edifying, I'm having good conversations with my friends, I'm reading the Bible every day, I'm praying like I'm supposed to, and all the dead spaces is just spiritual, spiritual, spiritual. And maybe it's just me, I can't go that long doing that. Eventually, I want to know what Dan Levitard thought of the Super Bowl. Like eventually, I just get curious about other stuff. And there absolutely, there absolutely needs to be space for dead time. To just exist. To just rest. And that's fine. We all need that space. But use that space to rejuvenate you so that you're ready to begin pursuing Jesus again when you wake up, again when you get done with work, again when you get done with this. No one can be 100% on with this 100% of the time, but we all have big steps to take. So I hope this morning you've identified at least one or two that you can begin to apply in your life right now and that your day tomorrow will change. And I hope that you will ask, particularly if you have a spouse, is Christ the center of our home? How do we turn that dial a little bit more? How do we make him the center of our home? So I hope that you'll start doing a couple things this week. I'd love to hear stories about what you guys started and how that's worked for you. But I'm going to pray, and then're going to come up and we're going to do one more song together. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this great congregation of folks that love each other so well that I love so much. God, I just pray that if we heard things today that made us go, oh gosh, yeah, I need to do that. God, would you help us do it? Would you help us install some of these practices? It's fine that we know about them, God. But help us not be like the person who looks at himself in the mirror and then forgets what he looks like, hears your word and doesn't obey it. But help us to be the people who obey and to do. And God, would you help us to abide in you? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You guys have not gotten the memo. Church attendance spikes in January and February and then begins to dip in March. There's too many of you here. I hope this is a problem we continue to have. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I've really enjoyed getting to spend the last four weeks in the Upper Room Discourse, the final statements of Jesus to his disciples the night that he was arrested and crucified. And so we are calling this series His Final Thoughts because these are the last things he shares with just the intimate group of disciples. And we find this discourse in John, the back half of chapter 13, all the way through chapter 17, where we get this beautiful prayer of Christ called the High Priestly Prayer. I'm excited to be focused on that for two weeks here in another few weeks. But like Mike, our double-duty coffee guy and announcer guy this morning told us, we spent last week in the concept of abiding in Christ and why it's so important. And last week I said that the invitation to abide in Christ is a gift of simplicity amidst a world of confusion and chaos. That we're all asking ourselves these major questions. Am I making the right decision? And am I being a good fill in the blank, whatever you are. And that when we abide in Christ, the promise there is that Jesus will say yes, that we will do what we are supposed to do and that we will be what we are supposed to be when we simply focus on abiding in Christ. And we left off with this question of that's great, but life is still confusing and chaotic. Life is still very busy. I still have to do carpool. I still have to make the meetings. I still have to make the calls. I still have to do the things. I still have to live a life. So how do I abide in Christ, short of going to a monastery, in my life now? How do I abide? And so that's what we're tackling this week. So this week's sermon, really, if I'm being honest, is more of a seminar. This is intended to be practical and to be applicable to your life. So I would tell you up front that I do not expect everybody in the room to do all the things that I'm saying. Some of us aren't ready for them yet. Some of us have already started doing those things. Some of them it's not new. So I don't expect everything I say and suggest this morning to go, oh my gosh, that's so great. I've never thought about that. But my hope and my prayer is that there can be two or three things that you hear that will change your life because you begin to instill them into your life and it changes the course of your life. So that's my goal for you, that you'd pick up just a handful of things this morning that you can begin to apply in your life right away. As we answer this question together, how do I abide in Christ just day in and day out? How do I walk with the Lord? So to remind us of what we're talking about, I just wanted to start off by reading the passage. It's not going to be on the screen. And we're having some gremlins on the screen this morning. So if all of a sudden it just goes out, don't worry about it. Just keep following along. The only song we have left is How Great Thou Art. Most of you know it. So we'll be all right. If you have a Bible, open to John chapter 15. Read with me verses 4 and 5. This is where we are last week and this week. Jesus is speaking. Remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. And we talked last week about how some translators choose the word remain and some choose the word abide. I memorized this passage or got acquainted with this passage with an abide translation, so that's why I say abide. But the concept is the exact same. So here's what I want to do. As we ask the question, how do we day-to-day abide in Christ? What I want to do is I want to give you three guiding principles for abiding in Christ, and then we want to look at how we can apply those guiding principles to the different areas of our life, to our work or our school, to our home, to our friendships, and then to our alone time. So that's where we're going to go this morning. First of the three guiding principles to how can I daily abide in Christ is simply anchor your day in Christ. If you want to abide in Christ, anchor your day in Christ. If you have been here, if you have come to more than four services, you have heard me say at some point that the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. It's what I consider a keystone habit. There are some habits that are so fundamental that they begat other habits. This is one of those for us, especially for believers. We need to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer for myriad reasons. But if you're a parent, how are you going to teach your children the scriptures if you don't know them? If there's a verse in the Bible that says, I will hide God's word in my heart that I might not sin against you, how are we going to do that if we don't study the Bible on our own? How are we ever going to become acquainted with God's word in such a way that we can teach it and instruct it and know it and it nourishes us if the only bit of God's word are what we're getting from church every Sunday. It just won't work. This Sunday, I just read you two verses that I read you last Sunday. I'm going to read you one more verse in Philippians. That's the verse eight. Aaron read six, or where did you start? Four. Four through seven. And then I'm going to do eight. All right? So that's five verses or four verses, however the math works there. And then two more right now. That's it. That's all you're getting this week if you're not reading the Bible on your own. So we've got to read the Bible on our own. Similarly, we've got to pray on our own. We have to pursue the presence of God. We have to find a spot, get on our knees, and pray. I think posture is important in prayer. I'm not saying you have to do it. I'm just saying it helps me when I pray. And, you know, I know that some people say I'm not a morning person. I like to do my quiet time later in the day. That's fine. Do it whenever you want to do it. But for me, I anchor my day in it. I've got to start out that way. Find a place, find a habit that works for you and anchor your day in Christ by having a quiet time. If you don't know how to have a quiet time, if you're in a rut, if you need some suggestions, if you just like some more information, I've done a couple of things. I wrote a daily devotion guide. It's on the information table out there. We have two tables. We have a coffee table and an information table. You guys can piece it together where it is. This is just a guide on how much do I read, where do I read, when I pray, what do I pray about, how do I pray. And there's some resources in there. So if you're in a rut, there's some suggestions of some places that you can go and know how to have a quiet time. So I made that for you guys if you need it. And then there's also one of these, a Bible translation guide. There's a bunch of different translations of the Bible. A lot of times I get asked which one's right for me, which one should I be reading? And this is the answer, okay? This kind of tells you there's three major approaches to how translations are done, and I detail those, and that might help you as you decide which one you want to use in your daily study. But the first guiding principle is to anchor our day in Christ. We have to start with a quiet time if we're going to hope to be walking with Christ through the day. The second one is to practice the presence of Christ. If we want to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ. I'm stealing this phrasing from a 17th century French monk named Brother Lawrence. I don't know what his actual name was, but when he went to the monastery, he took on the name Brother Lawrence. It's called The Practice of the Presence of God. It is the single best book on prayer I've ever read. I believe for some of you, the thing you're supposed to get from the sermon this morning is to go read The Practice of the Presence of God. You can write that down on your bulletin or type it out on your phone, and then you don't have to listen anymore. As a matter of fact, if you want to leave to just make some space for other people, you can do that. Go get the book and read. It's a phenomenal book, Practice the Presence of God. But one of the things I pulled from that is this idea of being constantly with Christ, just knowing that wherever I go, I'm taking Him with me. And so it taught me this little phrase that sometimes I'm spiritual enough to remember, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, if you're a Christian, he tells us in the upper room discourse that he gives us the spirit. We have his spirit with us. Everywhere we go, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. As I go into a meeting at work, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. As I go into my office, as we go into traffic, as we go into the store, as we interact with the slow person behind the cash register, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, this should be our mantra. This should be what we repeat to ourselves. We take it into and out. We take him with us into and out of every situation. On the golf course, I am with Christ. At work, I am with Christ. At home, I am with Christ. Practicing the presence of Jesus. A story that kind of brings this home for me that I heard years ago. I heard it one time and I've never forgotten it. And I think I may have told it to you guys before, but indulge me. This is not a true story. This did not actually happen. If it did actually happen, it would be super weird. So it's a fable, all right, but it makes a good point. So there's this church, and there's this one guy in the church who's known just to be a phenomenal prayer. He has a remarkable prayer life. He's incredibly disciplined. He's the guy they always call on for the public prayers. Prayers are beautiful. And he's just this monkish spiritual figure in the church. Everyone respects him. Darn it. Chris Lott is a buddy of mine. He's sitting right here. He's looking at me, and I just edited about four jokes at his expense, and then I lost my train of thought because you had some sort of dumb grin on your face because you knew. Because you knew it. You knew I was thinking that, didn't you? Yeah, that's right. All right, well, let's get back on track, buddy. I don't even know what I was talking about. Oh, the story. The story. This godly guy, the story. Well, sorry. Then the lights were shining off your head. I got distracted again. So some guys from the church said, we want to hear his prayer life. We want to hear. He's such a great prayer. I bet his prayer at the end of the day is phenomenal. I want to hear his prayer at the end of the day. I want to know what his conversation is with God when he closes out his day and goes to bed. And so they decide what they're going to do, and this is how we know it's not true, is they hide in his closet. We're going to hide in his closet. We're going to wait for him to go to bed. So they're in there. They're doing whatever you do when you're hiding in somebody's closet. And then he comes in. It's nighttime. It's 930. It's time to tuck in. And so he does his routine. He brushes his teeth. He does whatever he does. And then they're expecting he's going to kneel next to the bed. He's going to pray. But he doesn't kneel. It's weird. He just gets in. And they're like, okay, I didn't think laying down prayer. But maybe he's trying to prostrate himself like Christ did in the garden. Maybe that's what he's doing. He's going to pray that way. And he gets in, and he pulls up the covers, and he rolls over, and all they do is hear him say, goodnight Jesus. And that was it. Which makes a phenomenal point about an active, everyday, constant prayer life, and obedience to Paul's instructions in Thessalonians, pray without ceasing. So if we are going to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ and bring him with us everywhere we go and talk to him constantly. Now, I know some people are actually pretty good at this. Some people are actually pretty good at doing what I just call like kind of sniper shot prayers throughout the day. Just kind of one-offs of God help me here, God help me here, God help me here. And that's great. And then other people are good at the basing foundational prayer where we pray about all the things in the morning. And some people are good at both, and that's really great. But if you are good at one and not the other, then maybe turn the dial on the other and let's see that prayer life start to escalate. But that's practicing the presence of Christ. The third guiding principle, and I think this one's so important, especially now, is consume what draws you to Christ. Consume what draws you to Christ. And I use that word consume very intentionally because I believe we have got to be, if we consider ourselves, if we consider whoever's alive one generation, we have got to be the most consumptive generation of humans that have ever walked the planet. We have to be. We are all day, every day. And the younger you get, the worse it is. All day, every day, taking things in, consuming things, conversation, media, TV, phone, all the time, radio, podcasts, all the time. It's just piped into it. The world has a funnel into our brain, just shoving information in there all the time. I mean, if you think about it, almost, I'm 42, I'll be 43 here in a little bit. So almost 30 years ago, I was sitting in the DMV getting my driver's license. And the DMV has made zero innovations in 30 years. And it's still just as satanic as it was then. It's terrible. It's the worst place on earth. And when you go there, because they have engineered it to make you hate it, it's slow. It takes forever. And when I was waiting two hours to go back a car up into some cones, I, you know what I did for those two hours of the DMV? Nothing. You just sat there and you stared at the wall and you counted bricks and you wondered why it was taking so long, and you thought about your life. You contemplated all the decisions that had led you there. If you wanted something to do at the DMV, you took a book. You took a Sudoku thing or something. I don't think they had invented Sudoku in 1997. But you know what you do now? When you have 30 seconds of dead time, you have 30 seconds of something not entertaining you, don't raise your hand. How many of you at traffic lights grab your phone? He's like, I don't know what to do anymore. And you just grab it because you need something to look at, something to inform you, something that you consume. We are the most consumptive generation of people who have ever existed. We have no dead space in our life. So just as an aside, we should seek silence and stillness sometimes so that the Lord can speak to us. But living in the reality of how consumptive we are, when you do consume things, we need a filter. Is this pushing me closer to Jesus or is it pulling me away from him? Is this inspiring me and increasing my desire for Christ or is it decreasing my desire for Christ? The things that we have that take up our attention every day, we ought to at least assess whether or not they are inflaming us and impassioning us towards Jesus or whether they are blunting and muting that passion so that it fades away. We should at least be aware of that. And I'm not advocating that I think it's possible to just pipe spiritual things into ourselves at all times. But I am certain that all of us have some room to grow there. This is the reason why last year I took social media off my phone. Because I just got tired of the time that I was wasting on it and what I was consuming. There's only so many falling videos you can watch in a row before you feel like this can't be edifying twitter just made me angry now i will admit i have tick tock and i need to take that off my phone because it's too often that i'm not doing anything and then now all of a sudden i'm watching dumb videos we need to at least know what we're consuming what are we filling our brains with when we get in the car, when we go on a run, when we sit down at our office, when we have some alone time, when we're doing yard work? What are we consuming? And is what I'm consuming pushing me towards Christ or pulling me away from Christ? So those are the three guiding principles. Anchor your day in Christ, practice the presence of Christ, and then consume what draws you to Christ. If you apply those three things in your life, you will be abiding in Christ. Now, how do we practically do this? I want to look at work, I want to look at home, I want to look at fun, and I want to look at alone. So, at work, how do we practice these principles? Well, one thing that I do, it's the easiest for me in my schedule, is the very first thing I do when I get into the office most days is I pull out my Bible and I read, and then I kneel and I pray. I'm actually lately been thinking I need to switch up that habit, and I'm just saying this for the parents in the room. I have vivid memories in middle school and high school of coming downstairs every morning, and my mom's Bible would be open on the table next to her chair, and there'd be a coffee mug, usually with some lipstick on it. And there was evidence there that she had been spending time in the Word. And that gave me respect for her when she started instructing me on spiritual things. And I don't know what you think it would be like to be my parent, but it wasn't easy. I'll tell you that. But seeing the evidence. Of her dedication to Christ. Gave me respect. And I listened. And so now I've got a daughter. Who's starting to notice things. And I'm going to try to shift. My quiet times back to my office. At home. So that when she gets up. She can see it too. because I have that memory. So parents, if you've got kids growing up in the house, what do you want them to see? Can they see your devotional habits? But for some of us, maybe it makes more sense to have it at work. A very easy way to anchor our day in Christ at work and to practice the presence of Christ at work is to pray before everything. We park. Pray before you get out of the car. Father, remind me that you're with me. Remind me that I'm representing you. Be with me as I go. If you're working from home, when you do whatever you do to tell yourself, now I'm locked in and I'm working, before you do that, pray, Father, be with me today. Carry Christ with you into meetings. Before you go into meetings, pray over the meeting. Before you do the call, pray over the call. Before you write the report, pray over the report. Before you do anything in your work, pray over it. Give it to God. Acknowledge that he is with me and I am with him. And let me just speak especially to the people in the room who lead other people, to the people in the room with direct reports, bosses. It is, I realized it this week, I had not articulated it before, but it's a big goal of mine because we do have, I think, an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. If you're a leader and you call grace home, it is my fervent prayer that the people who work for you would say that their life is better because you're in it, because you care about them and you lead them well. So if you're a leader and you're about to have a conversation with a team member, especially if that conversation is hard or potentially negative or has some conflict or it's critical, please pray before that meeting. Pray before they come into your office. Pray before you pick up the phone. Pray and ask for the Spirit to be with you in that conversation. Practice the presence of Christ in your workplace. How do we practice the presence of Christ in our home? Well, I think it's very similar. One thing, right off the bat, is mom, dad, when you're out and you're working and you're coming home, right? And you know, you know what it is. You're going to open that door. There's going to be a whirlwind of noise. Everything is going to need, everybody is going to need everything from you all at once, right away. You know that routine. Stop and pray. I have a friend who says he, when his daughters were young, he used to pull off the side of the road about a mile short of the house. And he would stop and decompress and take off career hat and put on dad hat and pray that God would be with him before he walked in. And once he felt like he was in the right space, he pulled in the driveway. He was present for his children. He was present for his wife. Stop and bring Jesus with you and that peace into the house. Wake up every day. Spend time in God's word and time in prayer there at your home. Ask yourself, and I think this is a conversation that everybody in the church should have. If you live alone, then you consider it on your own. If you live with other people, talk with them, talk with your spouse. And really ask the question, do we have a Christ-centered home? How often is the name Jesus mentioned here? If we have children still living with us, how often do we talk about faith with them? Did they hear us as adults talking about Jesus? One of my favorite things that I see in my house and that I can brag on because she's not here right now is every morning before Lily and I walk out the door to go to school, I take her to school. I don't still attend. Before we go, Jen grabs Lily and she says, let me pray for you, baby. And she prays. And do you know how non-spiritual I am? Sometimes we're running late. And I'm looking at her going like, yo, the Holy Spirit needs to move you to pray faster. I'm wearing sweatpants. I don't want to walk in that school if they're late. I'm so bad. Every morning, she grabs that little girl, she hugs her, and she prays for her. What a gift to kids to do that. Every night, we do a little devotional with the kids before they, in their beds before they go to bed. We sing them songs. I sing them hym truly the center of your home? And if he's not, how can we make it that way? So that when I'm at home, I'm abiding in Christ. How do we abide in Christ with our friends? Listen, I love friends. Friends are super important to me. I love having a good time with friends. I love messing around with friends. It's great. I think friendships are a gift from God. But how do we abide in Christ in those friendships? And listen, this can be tricky because not all of us, not all of our friends are Christian friends. And that's a good thing because I believe that the most effective form of evangelism is friendship. So we should all have friends in our life who don't know Jesus. We should. But we should also have friends in our life that push us towards Jesus. I learned very young, my dad used to say all the time, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. It's so true. Proverbs says that. It says if you spend your time in the counsel of the wise, you will become wise. If you spend your time in the council of morons, you will become a moron. It's a loose paraphrase. I explain that in the translation guide out there. And we know that research shows that you become the five people you spend the most time around. We know that. So if we are going to abide in Christ, then we're going to need our friends' help. And if we're going to need our friend's help, then we need friends who are abiding in Christ and who push us in our walk with Christ. And here's what can happen sometimes with friends, even Christian friends, is they'll become, and this is what I call them, they'll become yuck-yuck clubs where you just get together and you don't talk about anything that matters. We're just laughing and swapping stories and making fun of people and telling jokes. And everyone's just laughing and giggling the whole time. And listen, I love yuck yuck clubs. I'm the charter member of several of them. They're fantastic. Or other times people get together and all it is is one big juicy gossesh. And if you don't know what that is because you're not as cool as me, they just gossip a lot about other people. They just get together and eventually it's just going to degenerate into, did you hear what so-and-so did? I was disappointed in so-and-so for this. And we just start throwing names around and talking about other people and it's not productive and it's not good and it's not wise. So listen, what I would say to you is this, if your friends never talk about things that matter, change the conversation or get new friends. If the people you spend the most time with never talk about things that matter, have the courage to change the conversation, to introduce new topics, to actually ask them how their marriage and how their spiritual life is going. Have the courage to change the topic. Have the courage to ask a real question amidst the laughter. Have the courage to cut off the gossip and redirect to another place, or, I'm being honest, get new friends. If you look through your landscape of friends and you see that you don't really have anyone there who spiritually encourages you on a regular basis, then truly, maybe your thing this morning is to begin to pray that God would reveal to you some more friends, some new friends that you can grow with. And while we're here, don't forget what I talked about in January when I talked about the importance of community in the middle of the prayer where it says, along with all the saints, and we talked about this idea of sacred spaces. The one or two or three people we have in our life where we can be completely open and completely honest and completely vulnerable. If we want to abide in Christ, we're going to need those spaces. But I do want to encourage you this morning to consider your friendships. Do you carry Jesus into those as well? Do you find them spiritually encouraging? Are they neutral? Do they push you away? We need spaces where we can go for that. And then lastly, how do we abide in Christ when we're alone? This one's a tricky one. I've been told for a long time that your character is who you are when no one is around. And I think when we're alone, this idea of what we consume becomes incredibly important. When you're alone, and I don't know what alone is for you. For me, alone is the family can be upstairs and I can be in the kitchen with earbuds in. I may as well be alone. I'm listening to a book or a podcast or something or when I'm working in the yard. When you have time to yourself, no one else has any input into you, what are you doing? When you go on your runs or your rides or your hikes or your walks, if you're listening to something, what are you listening to? If you're thinking about something, what are you thinking about? When you're in the car, how do you use that time? You're by yourself, how do you use that time? What do you listen to? What do you think about? When do you pray? When it's the end of the day and the house is quiet and you have your own space, and we all need that, what do you consume? What do you watch? What do you play? What do you listen to? What do you read? In the morning, when you wake up, no one else is around. What does your mind go to? What is it that you want to consume? What is it that you should consume? This is where it's really, really important to know what pushes you towards Christ and what pulls you away from Christ. And this is why I'm careful to throw down standards. You should watch these kinds of shows. You should not watch these kinds of shows. These kinds of books. These kinds of books. Whatever it is. Because it's different for everybody. But what I want to encourage in you is this sense. This filter in your heart. That you allow to be triggered with, this isn't really edifying. I don't really think this is what I need to be consuming. And turn it off, or put it down, or go to sleep, or go on a walk. But we need to be thoughtful and not just consume things by default. So if we want to abide in Christ, remember, we anchor our day in Christ. We practice the presence of Christ. We consume what draws us to Christ. We think about how to apply those principles in our work life, in our home life, in our private life, and in our friend life. And then I would simply say this as we wrap up. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. I've had seasons where I've been radical about this, where I just kind of look at my life and I realize I'm watching junk shows that I don't need to be watching. I'm reading books that aren't bad, but they don't really help me in any way. They don't help me get better. They're not pushing me towards Jesus. Maybe I haven't been having my quiet times like I should. I've stopped. My podcasts are all news. There's nothing spiritually encouraging there. I'm just not consuming anything that's helping me. And I go, oh my gosh. And I do a whole reset. And I just, and I'm just, I'm reading, I'm reading a book, I'm listening to a book, both are spiritually edifying, I'm having good conversations with my friends, I'm reading the Bible every day, I'm praying like I'm supposed to, and all the dead spaces is just spiritual, spiritual, spiritual. And maybe it's just me, I can't go that long doing that. Eventually, I want to know what Dan Levitard thought of the Super Bowl. Like eventually, I just get curious about other stuff. And there absolutely, there absolutely needs to be space for dead time. To just exist. To just rest. And that's fine. We all need that space. But use that space to rejuvenate you so that you're ready to begin pursuing Jesus again when you wake up, again when you get done with work, again when you get done with this. No one can be 100% on with this 100% of the time, but we all have big steps to take. So I hope this morning you've identified at least one or two that you can begin to apply in your life right now and that your day tomorrow will change. And I hope that you will ask, particularly if you have a spouse, is Christ the center of our home? How do we turn that dial a little bit more? How do we make him the center of our home? So I hope that you'll start doing a couple things this week. I'd love to hear stories about what you guys started and how that's worked for you. But I'm going to pray, and then're going to come up and we're going to do one more song together. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this great congregation of folks that love each other so well that I love so much. God, I just pray that if we heard things today that made us go, oh gosh, yeah, I need to do that. God, would you help us do it? Would you help us install some of these practices? It's fine that we know about them, God. But help us not be like the person who looks at himself in the mirror and then forgets what he looks like, hears your word and doesn't obey it. But help us to be the people who obey and to do. And God, would you help us to abide in you? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You guys have not gotten the memo. Church attendance spikes in January and February and then begins to dip in March. There's too many of you here. I hope this is a problem we continue to have. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I've really enjoyed getting to spend the last four weeks in the Upper Room Discourse, the final statements of Jesus to his disciples the night that he was arrested and crucified. And so we are calling this series His Final Thoughts because these are the last things he shares with just the intimate group of disciples. And we find this discourse in John, the back half of chapter 13, all the way through chapter 17, where we get this beautiful prayer of Christ called the High Priestly Prayer. I'm excited to be focused on that for two weeks here in another few weeks. But like Mike, our double-duty coffee guy and announcer guy this morning told us, we spent last week in the concept of abiding in Christ and why it's so important. And last week I said that the invitation to abide in Christ is a gift of simplicity amidst a world of confusion and chaos. That we're all asking ourselves these major questions. Am I making the right decision? And am I being a good fill in the blank, whatever you are. And that when we abide in Christ, the promise there is that Jesus will say yes, that we will do what we are supposed to do and that we will be what we are supposed to be when we simply focus on abiding in Christ. And we left off with this question of that's great, but life is still confusing and chaotic. Life is still very busy. I still have to do carpool. I still have to make the meetings. I still have to make the calls. I still have to do the things. I still have to live a life. So how do I abide in Christ, short of going to a monastery, in my life now? How do I abide? And so that's what we're tackling this week. So this week's sermon, really, if I'm being honest, is more of a seminar. This is intended to be practical and to be applicable to your life. So I would tell you up front that I do not expect everybody in the room to do all the things that I'm saying. Some of us aren't ready for them yet. Some of us have already started doing those things. Some of them it's not new. So I don't expect everything I say and suggest this morning to go, oh my gosh, that's so great. I've never thought about that. But my hope and my prayer is that there can be two or three things that you hear that will change your life because you begin to instill them into your life and it changes the course of your life. So that's my goal for you, that you'd pick up just a handful of things this morning that you can begin to apply in your life right away. As we answer this question together, how do I abide in Christ just day in and day out? How do I walk with the Lord? So to remind us of what we're talking about, I just wanted to start off by reading the passage. It's not going to be on the screen. And we're having some gremlins on the screen this morning. So if all of a sudden it just goes out, don't worry about it. Just keep following along. The only song we have left is How Great Thou Art. Most of you know it. So we'll be all right. If you have a Bible, open to John chapter 15. Read with me verses 4 and 5. This is where we are last week and this week. Jesus is speaking. Remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. And we talked last week about how some translators choose the word remain and some choose the word abide. I memorized this passage or got acquainted with this passage with an abide translation, so that's why I say abide. But the concept is the exact same. So here's what I want to do. As we ask the question, how do we day-to-day abide in Christ? What I want to do is I want to give you three guiding principles for abiding in Christ, and then we want to look at how we can apply those guiding principles to the different areas of our life, to our work or our school, to our home, to our friendships, and then to our alone time. So that's where we're going to go this morning. First of the three guiding principles to how can I daily abide in Christ is simply anchor your day in Christ. If you want to abide in Christ, anchor your day in Christ. If you have been here, if you have come to more than four services, you have heard me say at some point that the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. It's what I consider a keystone habit. There are some habits that are so fundamental that they begat other habits. This is one of those for us, especially for believers. We need to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer for myriad reasons. But if you're a parent, how are you going to teach your children the scriptures if you don't know them? If there's a verse in the Bible that says, I will hide God's word in my heart that I might not sin against you, how are we going to do that if we don't study the Bible on our own? How are we ever going to become acquainted with God's word in such a way that we can teach it and instruct it and know it and it nourishes us if the only bit of God's word are what we're getting from church every Sunday. It just won't work. This Sunday, I just read you two verses that I read you last Sunday. I'm going to read you one more verse in Philippians. That's the verse eight. Aaron read six, or where did you start? Four. Four through seven. And then I'm going to do eight. All right? So that's five verses or four verses, however the math works there. And then two more right now. That's it. That's all you're getting this week if you're not reading the Bible on your own. So we've got to read the Bible on our own. Similarly, we've got to pray on our own. We have to pursue the presence of God. We have to find a spot, get on our knees, and pray. I think posture is important in prayer. I'm not saying you have to do it. I'm just saying it helps me when I pray. And, you know, I know that some people say I'm not a morning person. I like to do my quiet time later in the day. That's fine. Do it whenever you want to do it. But for me, I anchor my day in it. I've got to start out that way. Find a place, find a habit that works for you and anchor your day in Christ by having a quiet time. If you don't know how to have a quiet time, if you're in a rut, if you need some suggestions, if you just like some more information, I've done a couple of things. I wrote a daily devotion guide. It's on the information table out there. We have two tables. We have a coffee table and an information table. You guys can piece it together where it is. This is just a guide on how much do I read, where do I read, when I pray, what do I pray about, how do I pray. And there's some resources in there. So if you're in a rut, there's some suggestions of some places that you can go and know how to have a quiet time. So I made that for you guys if you need it. And then there's also one of these, a Bible translation guide. There's a bunch of different translations of the Bible. A lot of times I get asked which one's right for me, which one should I be reading? And this is the answer, okay? This kind of tells you there's three major approaches to how translations are done, and I detail those, and that might help you as you decide which one you want to use in your daily study. But the first guiding principle is to anchor our day in Christ. We have to start with a quiet time if we're going to hope to be walking with Christ through the day. The second one is to practice the presence of Christ. If we want to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ. I'm stealing this phrasing from a 17th century French monk named Brother Lawrence. I don't know what his actual name was, but when he went to the monastery, he took on the name Brother Lawrence. It's called The Practice of the Presence of God. It is the single best book on prayer I've ever read. I believe for some of you, the thing you're supposed to get from the sermon this morning is to go read The Practice of the Presence of God. You can write that down on your bulletin or type it out on your phone, and then you don't have to listen anymore. As a matter of fact, if you want to leave to just make some space for other people, you can do that. Go get the book and read. It's a phenomenal book, Practice the Presence of God. But one of the things I pulled from that is this idea of being constantly with Christ, just knowing that wherever I go, I'm taking Him with me. And so it taught me this little phrase that sometimes I'm spiritual enough to remember, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, if you're a Christian, he tells us in the upper room discourse that he gives us the spirit. We have his spirit with us. Everywhere we go, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. As I go into a meeting at work, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. As I go into my office, as we go into traffic, as we go into the store, as we interact with the slow person behind the cash register, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, this should be our mantra. This should be what we repeat to ourselves. We take it into and out. We take him with us into and out of every situation. On the golf course, I am with Christ. At work, I am with Christ. At home, I am with Christ. Practicing the presence of Jesus. A story that kind of brings this home for me that I heard years ago. I heard it one time and I've never forgotten it. And I think I may have told it to you guys before, but indulge me. This is not a true story. This did not actually happen. If it did actually happen, it would be super weird. So it's a fable, all right, but it makes a good point. So there's this church, and there's this one guy in the church who's known just to be a phenomenal prayer. He has a remarkable prayer life. He's incredibly disciplined. He's the guy they always call on for the public prayers. Prayers are beautiful. And he's just this monkish spiritual figure in the church. Everyone respects him. Darn it. Chris Lott is a buddy of mine. He's sitting right here. He's looking at me, and I just edited about four jokes at his expense, and then I lost my train of thought because you had some sort of dumb grin on your face because you knew. Because you knew it. You knew I was thinking that, didn't you? Yeah, that's right. All right, well, let's get back on track, buddy. I don't even know what I was talking about. Oh, the story. The story. This godly guy, the story. Well, sorry. Then the lights were shining off your head. I got distracted again. So some guys from the church said, we want to hear his prayer life. We want to hear. He's such a great prayer. I bet his prayer at the end of the day is phenomenal. I want to hear his prayer at the end of the day. I want to know what his conversation is with God when he closes out his day and goes to bed. And so they decide what they're going to do, and this is how we know it's not true, is they hide in his closet. We're going to hide in his closet. We're going to wait for him to go to bed. So they're in there. They're doing whatever you do when you're hiding in somebody's closet. And then he comes in. It's nighttime. It's 930. It's time to tuck in. And so he does his routine. He brushes his teeth. He does whatever he does. And then they're expecting he's going to kneel next to the bed. He's going to pray. But he doesn't kneel. It's weird. He just gets in. And they're like, okay, I didn't think laying down prayer. But maybe he's trying to prostrate himself like Christ did in the garden. Maybe that's what he's doing. He's going to pray that way. And he gets in, and he pulls up the covers, and he rolls over, and all they do is hear him say, goodnight Jesus. And that was it. Which makes a phenomenal point about an active, everyday, constant prayer life, and obedience to Paul's instructions in Thessalonians, pray without ceasing. So if we are going to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ and bring him with us everywhere we go and talk to him constantly. Now, I know some people are actually pretty good at this. Some people are actually pretty good at doing what I just call like kind of sniper shot prayers throughout the day. Just kind of one-offs of God help me here, God help me here, God help me here. And that's great. And then other people are good at the basing foundational prayer where we pray about all the things in the morning. And some people are good at both, and that's really great. But if you are good at one and not the other, then maybe turn the dial on the other and let's see that prayer life start to escalate. But that's practicing the presence of Christ. The third guiding principle, and I think this one's so important, especially now, is consume what draws you to Christ. Consume what draws you to Christ. And I use that word consume very intentionally because I believe we have got to be, if we consider ourselves, if we consider whoever's alive one generation, we have got to be the most consumptive generation of humans that have ever walked the planet. We have to be. We are all day, every day. And the younger you get, the worse it is. All day, every day, taking things in, consuming things, conversation, media, TV, phone, all the time, radio, podcasts, all the time. It's just piped into it. The world has a funnel into our brain, just shoving information in there all the time. I mean, if you think about it, almost, I'm 42, I'll be 43 here in a little bit. So almost 30 years ago, I was sitting in the DMV getting my driver's license. And the DMV has made zero innovations in 30 years. And it's still just as satanic as it was then. It's terrible. It's the worst place on earth. And when you go there, because they have engineered it to make you hate it, it's slow. It takes forever. And when I was waiting two hours to go back a car up into some cones, I, you know what I did for those two hours of the DMV? Nothing. You just sat there and you stared at the wall and you counted bricks and you wondered why it was taking so long, and you thought about your life. You contemplated all the decisions that had led you there. If you wanted something to do at the DMV, you took a book. You took a Sudoku thing or something. I don't think they had invented Sudoku in 1997. But you know what you do now? When you have 30 seconds of dead time, you have 30 seconds of something not entertaining you, don't raise your hand. How many of you at traffic lights grab your phone? He's like, I don't know what to do anymore. And you just grab it because you need something to look at, something to inform you, something that you consume. We are the most consumptive generation of people who have ever existed. We have no dead space in our life. So just as an aside, we should seek silence and stillness sometimes so that the Lord can speak to us. But living in the reality of how consumptive we are, when you do consume things, we need a filter. Is this pushing me closer to Jesus or is it pulling me away from him? Is this inspiring me and increasing my desire for Christ or is it decreasing my desire for Christ? The things that we have that take up our attention every day, we ought to at least assess whether or not they are inflaming us and impassioning us towards Jesus or whether they are blunting and muting that passion so that it fades away. We should at least be aware of that. And I'm not advocating that I think it's possible to just pipe spiritual things into ourselves at all times. But I am certain that all of us have some room to grow there. This is the reason why last year I took social media off my phone. Because I just got tired of the time that I was wasting on it and what I was consuming. There's only so many falling videos you can watch in a row before you feel like this can't be edifying twitter just made me angry now i will admit i have tick tock and i need to take that off my phone because it's too often that i'm not doing anything and then now all of a sudden i'm watching dumb videos we need to at least know what we're consuming what are we filling our brains with when we get in the car, when we go on a run, when we sit down at our office, when we have some alone time, when we're doing yard work? What are we consuming? And is what I'm consuming pushing me towards Christ or pulling me away from Christ? So those are the three guiding principles. Anchor your day in Christ, practice the presence of Christ, and then consume what draws you to Christ. If you apply those three things in your life, you will be abiding in Christ. Now, how do we practically do this? I want to look at work, I want to look at home, I want to look at fun, and I want to look at alone. So, at work, how do we practice these principles? Well, one thing that I do, it's the easiest for me in my schedule, is the very first thing I do when I get into the office most days is I pull out my Bible and I read, and then I kneel and I pray. I'm actually lately been thinking I need to switch up that habit, and I'm just saying this for the parents in the room. I have vivid memories in middle school and high school of coming downstairs every morning, and my mom's Bible would be open on the table next to her chair, and there'd be a coffee mug, usually with some lipstick on it. And there was evidence there that she had been spending time in the Word. And that gave me respect for her when she started instructing me on spiritual things. And I don't know what you think it would be like to be my parent, but it wasn't easy. I'll tell you that. But seeing the evidence. Of her dedication to Christ. Gave me respect. And I listened. And so now I've got a daughter. Who's starting to notice things. And I'm going to try to shift. My quiet times back to my office. At home. So that when she gets up. She can see it too. because I have that memory. So parents, if you've got kids growing up in the house, what do you want them to see? Can they see your devotional habits? But for some of us, maybe it makes more sense to have it at work. A very easy way to anchor our day in Christ at work and to practice the presence of Christ at work is to pray before everything. We park. Pray before you get out of the car. Father, remind me that you're with me. Remind me that I'm representing you. Be with me as I go. If you're working from home, when you do whatever you do to tell yourself, now I'm locked in and I'm working, before you do that, pray, Father, be with me today. Carry Christ with you into meetings. Before you go into meetings, pray over the meeting. Before you do the call, pray over the call. Before you write the report, pray over the report. Before you do anything in your work, pray over it. Give it to God. Acknowledge that he is with me and I am with him. And let me just speak especially to the people in the room who lead other people, to the people in the room with direct reports, bosses. It is, I realized it this week, I had not articulated it before, but it's a big goal of mine because we do have, I think, an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. If you're a leader and you call grace home, it is my fervent prayer that the people who work for you would say that their life is better because you're in it, because you care about them and you lead them well. So if you're a leader and you're about to have a conversation with a team member, especially if that conversation is hard or potentially negative or has some conflict or it's critical, please pray before that meeting. Pray before they come into your office. Pray before you pick up the phone. Pray and ask for the Spirit to be with you in that conversation. Practice the presence of Christ in your workplace. How do we practice the presence of Christ in our home? Well, I think it's very similar. One thing, right off the bat, is mom, dad, when you're out and you're working and you're coming home, right? And you know, you know what it is. You're going to open that door. There's going to be a whirlwind of noise. Everything is going to need, everybody is going to need everything from you all at once, right away. You know that routine. Stop and pray. I have a friend who says he, when his daughters were young, he used to pull off the side of the road about a mile short of the house. And he would stop and decompress and take off career hat and put on dad hat and pray that God would be with him before he walked in. And once he felt like he was in the right space, he pulled in the driveway. He was present for his children. He was present for his wife. Stop and bring Jesus with you and that peace into the house. Wake up every day. Spend time in God's word and time in prayer there at your home. Ask yourself, and I think this is a conversation that everybody in the church should have. If you live alone, then you consider it on your own. If you live with other people, talk with them, talk with your spouse. And really ask the question, do we have a Christ-centered home? How often is the name Jesus mentioned here? If we have children still living with us, how often do we talk about faith with them? Did they hear us as adults talking about Jesus? One of my favorite things that I see in my house and that I can brag on because she's not here right now is every morning before Lily and I walk out the door to go to school, I take her to school. I don't still attend. Before we go, Jen grabs Lily and she says, let me pray for you, baby. And she prays. And do you know how non-spiritual I am? Sometimes we're running late. And I'm looking at her going like, yo, the Holy Spirit needs to move you to pray faster. I'm wearing sweatpants. I don't want to walk in that school if they're late. I'm so bad. Every morning, she grabs that little girl, she hugs her, and she prays for her. What a gift to kids to do that. Every night, we do a little devotional with the kids before they, in their beds before they go to bed. We sing them songs. I sing them hym truly the center of your home? And if he's not, how can we make it that way? So that when I'm at home, I'm abiding in Christ. How do we abide in Christ with our friends? Listen, I love friends. Friends are super important to me. I love having a good time with friends. I love messing around with friends. It's great. I think friendships are a gift from God. But how do we abide in Christ in those friendships? And listen, this can be tricky because not all of us, not all of our friends are Christian friends. And that's a good thing because I believe that the most effective form of evangelism is friendship. So we should all have friends in our life who don't know Jesus. We should. But we should also have friends in our life that push us towards Jesus. I learned very young, my dad used to say all the time, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. It's so true. Proverbs says that. It says if you spend your time in the counsel of the wise, you will become wise. If you spend your time in the council of morons, you will become a moron. It's a loose paraphrase. I explain that in the translation guide out there. And we know that research shows that you become the five people you spend the most time around. We know that. So if we are going to abide in Christ, then we're going to need our friends' help. And if we're going to need our friend's help, then we need friends who are abiding in Christ and who push us in our walk with Christ. And here's what can happen sometimes with friends, even Christian friends, is they'll become, and this is what I call them, they'll become yuck-yuck clubs where you just get together and you don't talk about anything that matters. We're just laughing and swapping stories and making fun of people and telling jokes. And everyone's just laughing and giggling the whole time. And listen, I love yuck yuck clubs. I'm the charter member of several of them. They're fantastic. Or other times people get together and all it is is one big juicy gossesh. And if you don't know what that is because you're not as cool as me, they just gossip a lot about other people. They just get together and eventually it's just going to degenerate into, did you hear what so-and-so did? I was disappointed in so-and-so for this. And we just start throwing names around and talking about other people and it's not productive and it's not good and it's not wise. So listen, what I would say to you is this, if your friends never talk about things that matter, change the conversation or get new friends. If the people you spend the most time with never talk about things that matter, have the courage to change the conversation, to introduce new topics, to actually ask them how their marriage and how their spiritual life is going. Have the courage to change the topic. Have the courage to ask a real question amidst the laughter. Have the courage to cut off the gossip and redirect to another place, or, I'm being honest, get new friends. If you look through your landscape of friends and you see that you don't really have anyone there who spiritually encourages you on a regular basis, then truly, maybe your thing this morning is to begin to pray that God would reveal to you some more friends, some new friends that you can grow with. And while we're here, don't forget what I talked about in January when I talked about the importance of community in the middle of the prayer where it says, along with all the saints, and we talked about this idea of sacred spaces. The one or two or three people we have in our life where we can be completely open and completely honest and completely vulnerable. If we want to abide in Christ, we're going to need those spaces. But I do want to encourage you this morning to consider your friendships. Do you carry Jesus into those as well? Do you find them spiritually encouraging? Are they neutral? Do they push you away? We need spaces where we can go for that. And then lastly, how do we abide in Christ when we're alone? This one's a tricky one. I've been told for a long time that your character is who you are when no one is around. And I think when we're alone, this idea of what we consume becomes incredibly important. When you're alone, and I don't know what alone is for you. For me, alone is the family can be upstairs and I can be in the kitchen with earbuds in. I may as well be alone. I'm listening to a book or a podcast or something or when I'm working in the yard. When you have time to yourself, no one else has any input into you, what are you doing? When you go on your runs or your rides or your hikes or your walks, if you're listening to something, what are you listening to? If you're thinking about something, what are you thinking about? When you're in the car, how do you use that time? You're by yourself, how do you use that time? What do you listen to? What do you think about? When do you pray? When it's the end of the day and the house is quiet and you have your own space, and we all need that, what do you consume? What do you watch? What do you play? What do you listen to? What do you read? In the morning, when you wake up, no one else is around. What does your mind go to? What is it that you want to consume? What is it that you should consume? This is where it's really, really important to know what pushes you towards Christ and what pulls you away from Christ. And this is why I'm careful to throw down standards. You should watch these kinds of shows. You should not watch these kinds of shows. These kinds of books. These kinds of books. Whatever it is. Because it's different for everybody. But what I want to encourage in you is this sense. This filter in your heart. That you allow to be triggered with, this isn't really edifying. I don't really think this is what I need to be consuming. And turn it off, or put it down, or go to sleep, or go on a walk. But we need to be thoughtful and not just consume things by default. So if we want to abide in Christ, remember, we anchor our day in Christ. We practice the presence of Christ. We consume what draws us to Christ. We think about how to apply those principles in our work life, in our home life, in our private life, and in our friend life. And then I would simply say this as we wrap up. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. I've had seasons where I've been radical about this, where I just kind of look at my life and I realize I'm watching junk shows that I don't need to be watching. I'm reading books that aren't bad, but they don't really help me in any way. They don't help me get better. They're not pushing me towards Jesus. Maybe I haven't been having my quiet times like I should. I've stopped. My podcasts are all news. There's nothing spiritually encouraging there. I'm just not consuming anything that's helping me. And I go, oh my gosh. And I do a whole reset. And I just, and I'm just, I'm reading, I'm reading a book, I'm listening to a book, both are spiritually edifying, I'm having good conversations with my friends, I'm reading the Bible every day, I'm praying like I'm supposed to, and all the dead spaces is just spiritual, spiritual, spiritual. And maybe it's just me, I can't go that long doing that. Eventually, I want to know what Dan Levitard thought of the Super Bowl. Like eventually, I just get curious about other stuff. And there absolutely, there absolutely needs to be space for dead time. To just exist. To just rest. And that's fine. We all need that space. But use that space to rejuvenate you so that you're ready to begin pursuing Jesus again when you wake up, again when you get done with work, again when you get done with this. No one can be 100% on with this 100% of the time, but we all have big steps to take. So I hope this morning you've identified at least one or two that you can begin to apply in your life right now and that your day tomorrow will change. And I hope that you will ask, particularly if you have a spouse, is Christ the center of our home? How do we turn that dial a little bit more? How do we make him the center of our home? So I hope that you'll start doing a couple things this week. I'd love to hear stories about what you guys started and how that's worked for you. But I'm going to pray, and then're going to come up and we're going to do one more song together. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this great congregation of folks that love each other so well that I love so much. God, I just pray that if we heard things today that made us go, oh gosh, yeah, I need to do that. God, would you help us do it? Would you help us install some of these practices? It's fine that we know about them, God. But help us not be like the person who looks at himself in the mirror and then forgets what he looks like, hears your word and doesn't obey it. But help us to be the people who obey and to do. And God, would you help us to abide in you? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.