John 17

Good morning, my name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here at the early service. As Kyle said, this is the ninth part of our series moving through the book of John. I've been encouraging you every week to grab a reading plan. They're on the information table on the way out in the lobby. We want you reading along, encountering the Savior along with us. We don't want your only perspective on John to be for me and what I say on Sunday morning, but you encounter him with your heart and your intellect as well. This week we arrive at John chapter 17, which I think is one of the most intimate and poignant and important passages in the Bible. It is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. And so I think just if that's all I would say about it, that it's the longest recorded prayer that we have of Jesus, we should want to lean into it and hear it, right? We should want to listen because this is our Savior and he prayed for us. And anytime he prays, we should want to lean in and go, how does he pray? What does he say? Like, I want to do it like he does it. And so we get the longest example that we have in John chapter 17. Before we dive into it, I want to give us a little context and background for when he's praying this and at the end of what he said and why he's praying it. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to John 17. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. And you can turn, it's the fourth book in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, John chapter 17. And we're going to be looking really at the whole chapter, but specifically at verses 20 through 24 this morning. So John 17 comes at the end of what's referred to by scholars as the farewell discourse. So if you've been paying attention in the book of John, we kind of move through the life of Jesus, right? And so the first, he's been ministering now for three years. He's had the disciples for three years, and he's just been moving through ministry and kind of just dropping in at spots and just giving highlights for each year or different things, right? But then time slows down towards the end when Jesus enters into Jerusalem for what we know as Passion Week. And he is in Jerusalem about to be crucified. The wheels have been set in motion for him to be arrested and tried and crucified and then resurrected, which we celebrate on Easter. So all of that stuff has been put in motion and the Gospel of John slows time way down and focuses a big portion of what he writes on just that week, and then a big portion of that week on just the last night that they're together. So they're around eating. They're eating a meal. Jesus looks at Judas, the one who is going to betray him, and he sends him off. He says, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And then he's left with just the 11 faithful disciples in this room together, this really intimate moment after three years of laboring together every day. And listen, his relationship with his disciples is the closest thing that we could experience to having a relationship with children or something like that. They spent every day together. When he called them to follow him, it wasn't like, could you follow me Monday through Friday? Actually, we do 410s here, so just Monday through Thursday. It's every day that you wake up and you talk to him. You wake up and you pray with him. You wake up and you do ministry with him, and you encounter the crowds that he encounters, and you watch him walk in faith every day for three years. They're incredibly, they have this incredibly tight and intimate relationship. And when it's just those 11 that are faithful to him because Judas went to betray him, he starts to teach them. And for a long time he teaches them. He starts to teach them in chapter 13. And we looked at this two weeks ago with the new commandment. He says, this new commandment I give you, that you should love one another as I love you. And then from that new commandment, he launches into 14, 15, 16, those three chapters of teaching. It's the most longest teachings that we have from Jesus. If you have a red letter Bible, and most of you do, and you flip through chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, you'll see that they're all read. And this is one night that Jesus is saying all of these things in one room. And so we looked at one of those things last week in John 15, the idea of abiding in him, obeying him, and bearing fruit. And so then he wraps it up with this prayer. And it says at the beginning, when Jesus had spoken these words, so all the previous chapters from 13 until now, when Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted his eyes up to pray, which is just an interesting aside. There's other ways to pray besides bowing our head and closing our eyes. There's just different postures and different types of prayer, just as an aside. Before we look at Jesus' prayer, before we dive into it, I wanted us to kind of think about it a little bit so we can get a sense of what's being revealed here in this prayer. Those of you with children, I want you to imagine that they're adult children. Those of you without kids, just pretend that you have kids. And this is actually great because they've never sassed you and they're exactly what you want them to be. So just live in that moment. But if you have kids, I want you to imagine a situation where you're gonna part ways with them for a long, long time. Several years, probably decades, dozens of years. You're not gonna see them again. And it's gonna be a long time and you know it. And they know it too. And right before you part ways, you say, hey, let me pray for you. Okay? What would you pray? If you're gonna part ways with your kids for decades, not gonna see them again for a long, long time, you knew you were gonna see them again one day, but not for a while, and you said, hey, let me pray for you, what would you pray? It probably wouldn't be frivolous things, right? It probably wouldn't be like the test goes well tomorrow. It probably wouldn't even be that the interview's good. You would pray deep, meaningful things. You would pray long-term things. And whatever you prayed for them in that moment, I would submit to you is indicative of what your heart is for them. Whatever you pray in that moment is really revelatory of what you feel for them and what you want most for them, isn't it? It's going to show you, if I could listen, I would know what's most important to you for them for their life for the next several years, just by listening to your prayer. And so that's what's happening here. Jesus is about to part ways with the disciples. He's told them, I'm going to go prepare a place for you. Where I'm going, you cannot come for a while. We'll meet again, but it's going to be a minute. And Jesus knows that when he moves on from this moment, when he moves on from this week, he's going to see them a little bit. He's going to go to heaven. And then they've got their lives to live. And they've got the church to lead and the church to grow. We don't find out about Jesus. We never hear this story if the disciples don't do what they were trained to do. And he knows what they have ahead of them, that they have decades, that they're all going to die martyrs, deaths, that some of them are going to get married, that some of them are going to have kids. He knows what awaits them. And so he prays for them. And what I want to submit to you is that Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. In the same way, if you were praying for your kids and they were leaving for a long time, you weren't going to see them again, what would you pray for them? That would reveal what you most wanted for your children. This prayer reveals what he most wants for the disciples, and you'll see it reveals what he most wants for us. The thing I find really remarkable about this prayer is that Jesus prays for you. In verse 20, he says this. He's just in the prayer. If you read the whole thing, and I would really encourage you to do that in one go. Read chapter 17 all the way through. He opens up praying about himself, and then he prays for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, in verse 20, he says this, I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. Do you know who that is? That's you. If you are a Christian, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, if you would say that you are a believer, then Jesus is praying for you here. He's saying, I'm not just praying for the disciples who are here around me, these 11, Father. I'm praying for anyone that comes to faith because of their word, which is everyone ever who has become a Christian. So he's praying for you. And even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, which I'm so happy that you're here. Thanks for trusting us with your morning. And I will try to go quickly. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, he prays for you too. So I want to know what he prays, right? What does he think is most important for us? When Jesus prayed for me 2,000 years ago to the Father, what did he pray? What did he pray for you? Well, here's what he prayed. Let's look at it. He prays, there's five verses that he prays for us, but this is really a good summary verse. This is the nuts and bolts of it us? What does he want for us? What does he pray for us? I think the answer to that is Jesus is praying for a twofold unity. Jesus prays for a twofold unity, two types of unity here. The first is unity with the Father. He says, let them be in us as we are together. Let them be one as we are one. And I love the heart of Jesus in this prayer, praying, God, let them experience what we have experienced. I think it kind of works like this. Like when you go out to eat, right? Let's say you go out to eat when there's five other people at the table and you win the order battle. It's a great feeling. Like all the plates come to the table and they set your plate down in front of you and everybody at the table goes, oh, that looks good. Should have gotten that. And like everybody knows you win. Like everybody now likes their dinner a little bit less because yours looks so good. That's a wonderful feeling, right? And if you're a good friend, now some of us are jerks and we go prison yard and like we cover it. We're like, sorry, you'll know for next time. But most of us, because we're really enjoying what we're eating, what do we do? We cut it and we hand it to people, right? You gotta try this and we put it on their plate or we pester people or like our grandmas when they love something a lot, they just force feed it to us. Like, if you say no to this, I'm just gonna put it directly in your mouth because they want you to try this because we want people to share in good experiences with us. Oh my gosh, this is so good. You have to taste this, right? That's why when we see something funny, when we hear something funny, Kyle lately, our student pastor, there's a comedian on Netflix named Nate Bergazzi. He is like an evangelist for this guy. He loves him and he's hilarious. And so he's telling everybody about him because Kyle likes laughing and he wants you to laugh too, right? He wants you to share in that experience. This is what we do. And this is what Jesus is doing. Jesus is saying, God, let them experience just a taste of what you and I have. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this. We're gonna deep dive in philosophy a little bit. God exists as a triune God. I don't have time to explain it this morning, which is good because I can't. It's just kind of one of these mysteries of the faith that we believe in a trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And they existed before time in eternity as a perfect unit, in perfect love and a perfect relationship, perfectly affirming, perfectly identifying, perfectly loving, perfectly accepting, never experiencing shame, never experiencing loneliness, never experiencing a lack of self-worth or a lack of identity or any sort of anxiety. They loved one another perfectly and they are perfect. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the most loving thing for a perfect being to do is to make other beings so that they can experience his perfection. Does that make sense? So God created man so that we could get a taste of the relationship that he experiences God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. He created us for the sole purpose of allowing us to experience relationship with him. He didn't do it because they needed it. It's not like God the Father and God the Son were looking at each other in heaven going, man, I am lonely. You know who would fix this? Tom Sartorius. That'd make it great. That's what we need. We need more Tom. This place would be great. That's not what he said. I want some company. I want a different perspective. Let's make people. That's not what they did. They said, this is so perfect that the best possible thing to do is to create people to experience in this relationship with us. The whole point of creation, the whole point of humans existing, is so that one day we can be reunited with God and experience the relationship that he designed us for. It's what our souls yearn for. It's what every bit of clawing for happiness is clawing towards. It's back to that relationship that the Father created just so that we could be intimate and united with him. It's the unity that Jesus is praying for here. And Jesus is saying, this is so good, Father, what we have. This is so good and so right and so affirming. Let them experience it too. Let them be in us as we are in one another. Let them experience a all-affirming love, a love that covers over shame, a love that erases anxiety, a love that imbues us with purpose, a love that assigns us an identity. Let them experience that, God. Bring them to oneness with you is what he's praying for. So it's a good, heartfelt prayer. And then he says, let them be one as you and I are one. So the second type of unity he prays for is unity with one another. He prays for unity with one another, right? He prays that you and I would be one, that all Christians would be one and would be unified. And at first, at first it seems like he's trying to almost pray away like denominations in the church. Like he doesn't want us to be Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics and all that stuff. He doesn't want that. He wants us to be one homogenous, like-minded group that agrees on everything. At first, it seems like the prayer is somewhat ineffectual. If you prayed that 2,000 years ago, let them all be one. And then the church launches from that and becomes incredibly diverse. Like I have to drive, when I drive home, I live really close. I live like five minutes away. I live one song away. That's how far I live with no traffic. That's what I know. I get one song on the way to and from work. I pass three churches at least. I guarantee there are things in each of those churches that I wouldn't agree with. I guarantee they would come here and they would not agree with some things. I mean, they'd be wrong, but they wouldn't agree, right? And so it makes me wonder, like, is God, is that prayer that ineffectual? Are we so far off the mark that we're not unified in that way? But as I thought about the unity that Jesus is praying for, I think that that unity is really exemplified in Kyle and Steve. Kyle's our student pastor and Steve is our worship pastor. And they're buddies. They're genuine buddies. As if we needed proof of this, every Wednesday staff goes out for staff lunch. Don't worry, we pay for that ourselves. We don't charge it to the church. We go out for staff lunch and we rotate who gets to pick. When it's your week, you get to pick the restaurant. And so this week, we ate at Pieology over there in North Hills. It will shock you to know that our student pastor chose a pizza place. And so we go there and Steve and Kyle ordered separately. They didn't talk to each other about what they were gonna order, but they both ordered a buffalo chicken pizza, right? And so they sit down and Kyle leans over and he jokingly says, look at us, we're buffalo bros, which is just a dumb joke, which makes it funny. So now they're buffalo bros, right? Like that's the thing. And they really are buddies. Every now and again on Mondays, they go out to eat together. Then when they don't have any plans, they just go eat together and they talk and they hang out. A lot of times when I'm trying to do actual work, they sit in Kyle's office and they distract me by talking to one another. But they're like friends. And it amazes me that they are because they are very different people. Kyle's 25. He's single. He goes out late. He plays Ultimate Frisbee and is good at Fortnite. That's Kyle, right? Steve's 43. I mean, we just started working on a 401K for him. He's so near the end of his career. He's in a different season of life. He's got a kid. He's building a house. Steve's Jewish and grew up in Boston for a little bit, a single mom, and then a stepdad going to Hebrew school. Kyle grew up in the south in a quaint suburb of Atlanta with a dad who worked at a Southern Baptist church with parents who are still together. It's totally different existences. Steve's gone through the loss of a parent. Kyle has both of his parents. Kyle was an athlete in high school, played a ton of sports. Steve's a musician. They don't have those things in common. I think Steve played basketball a couple of times. I question that. Totally different. Kyle doesn't have musical skills. Their interests are different. Kyle recommended Nate Bergazzi to Steve. Steve didn't like him. Kyle took it personal. There is no reason that they should be friends. But they work on the same staff and they're unified by the same goal. They both live to see people get connected to Jesus. They both live to see people experience the unity with God that they have. They both live for the purpose of the gospel. So whether or not they agree on everything, whether or not they're similar in every way, the unifying power of the gospel and the purpose of that has brought them together because it's what they both care most deeply about is seeing themselves walk with Jesus and seeing you walk with Jesus. And so they've leveraged everything in their life around those goals. And so it unites us. This week, I had a guy from South Africa come up. I met him once for a week, six years ago. He's an African-American guy from South Africa who grew up in Ocean View, in the shantytowns there, in extreme poverty, totally different life experience with me. I've only spent a week with him. When he got here on Thursday, he got out of the car and gave me a hug and called me brother. What else but the gospel unifies people in that way? So I do not think that when Jesus is praying here, he's praying that we would be a homogenous group that agrees on everything all the time. I think that he is praying that we would be unified in our goal and in our heart to reach people with the power of the gospel. I think he is praying that we would be brought together by what means most to us. And on a church level, this means that we're not against other churches. This means that we support other churches. This means it doesn't matter if we agree with them on everything. What we agree with them on, the most important thing is they're trying to bring people into the kingdom and we're trying to bring people into the kingdom. People have asked me a bunch of times, Summit's building a big, huge building right around the corner. They're saying, you know, Summit's building this huge building. Are you worried about that? No, no. He's a better pastor than me anyways. Moving closer isn't going to prove it. He's already a better speaker than me. What's it matter? We're all building the kingdom. Who cares? Who cares where anybody goes to church? Just go where you're getting closer to the Father, where you have community. We're all on the same team. That's the unity that I think that Jesus is praying for. And he prays this, and you can see it in the kind of unity that he's praying for. He's praying this. He says at the end, look, at the end of 21, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, and me, and I in you, that they also may be in us so that, listen, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I don't know if you've been paying attention in this series, but if you have, you will notice that this is why Jesus does everything. This is like, this prayer sums up the whole gospel of John. It sums up all of his teaching. It sums up everything. This idea, he wants us to be experienced unity with the Father, that all-fulfilling love of the Father, unity with one another in purpose, and the purpose is so that other people might believe in Jesus. It's what he says over and over and over again. In the very first week of the series, we said that the fundamental questions in life are, was Jesus real, and do I believe that he was who he says he was? And if we answer yes to those two questions, everything has to change. And Jesus keeps bringing us back himself to that question, do you believe in me? The way the gospel starts, John starts, Jesus is God. In the beginning was the Word, Word was with God, Word was God. Without him, nothing was made through him, all things were made. He sets him up as God, and we have to ask the question, do we believe that? The very first miracle that he does, turning water into wine. His mom says, hey, you should do that thing where you turn the water into wine. And Jesus says, it's not yet my time, woman, which is a really interesting verse to have in the Bible. But then he decides that he's going to do it anyways. Why does he do this miracle? Well, at the end, he tells us it's so that the disciples would believe that he was who he says he was. His motivation for the miracle was so that others would believe. We fast forward to maybe his greatest miracle in John 11 when he resurrects Lazarus from the dead. His best friend. He was told two days before his best friend died, hey, Lazarus is sick. You should come heal him. And he stays put for two days and lets his best friend die. And his two sisters, Lazarus' two sisters, Mary and Martha, he watches them get disappointed in such a deep way that when he meets back up with Mary, he weeps with her. He let them die. He let them hurt so he could resurrect them from the dead. And when he comes out, there's a prayer at the end of John 11, and he lifts his eyes up to God, and he says, God, I know. Father, I knew that you would do this, but I'm saying this now so that they might believe, you're following me for the wrong reasons. And they say, what are the right reasons? He says, you're laboring for temporary things. You should labor for eternal things. And they said, how do we do that? What do you tell them? Believe in the one that the Father has sent. Believe in me. Over and over and over again, believe in me. The new commandment that he gives in John 13, love one another as I have loved you. Why? So that others might believe in me. And then here in this prayer, God, I pray all these things for myself. I pray all these things for the disciples. I pray all these things for the church that will grow from the disciples. And I pray that that church will be unified with you and unified with one another. Why? So that they might believe in me. All through the Bible. All through the book of John. This is what Jesus cares about most. And then he prays this peculiar prayer. It's almost vain when we read it. It really kind of took me a minute to figure out why is Jesus praying this at the end of that. Verse 24, Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me, that's the church, may be through their word would see me in my glory, would see me as I am. Say, Father, they've only seen me as this weak and frail human. I pray that they would see me as God, that they would see me as divine, that they would see Jesus in his heavenly state in Revelation. Two or three different glimpses of him, and it's really magnificent. But why is Jesus praying this here? Let them see me as I really am. And as I thought about that, I realized something. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with the Father, what he prays for us? In heaven. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with one another? In heaven. Do you know what Jesus prays over and over again for the disciples in this passage? That God would preserve them. Preserve them for what? Heaven. Do you know where if other people believe because of our unity, because of our love, and because of his miracles, do you know where they go? Heaven. If we're going to ever see Jesus in his glory, do you know where we see him in his glory? Heaven. And so I really believe that what Jesus is praying here can be summed up like this. Father, let them experience heaven. That's what he's praying. If you read through everything here, if you read through John 17 and you want to know what's the heart of Jesus, what's he praying for us, what matters most to him, what he's praying is, Father, let them experience heaven. Let them experience eternity. What he's saying is if there is a perfect God who chose to create us so that we might share in an eternal relationship with him, what he's praying is, Father, bring about the whole purpose of all of creation. Let's go ahead and finish the job that we started all those years ago. Let's bring about the entire purpose why we're here and what we did to bring them to heaven with us that they might experience eternity and a perfect relationship with us and in a perfect relationship with one another. And if you read back through John through this lens, it amazed me as I looked at it this week, you will see that almost the only thing Jesus ever really cares about, it is guiding everything he says, all the miracles that he does, all the teachings that he offers, all the conversations that he has, all the places that he goes, and all of his timing. His primary and sometimes sole motivation is that you would be in heaven with him for eternity. That's his whole life. What matters most to Jesus? That you would be in heaven with him. What does Jesus care about more than anything else? That you would be in heaven with him. Why did Jesus teach all those people all the time? Why did he do all the miracles? Why did he train the disciples? Why did he pray for them? Why did he die on the cross? Why did he live his entire life? Why did he come here? So that you might be reconciled to him and spend eternity in heaven with him and with the Father and with the Spirit and with one another. It's all Jesus cares about is that you would one day go to heaven. And if that's what Jesus cares about most, just eternity, it makes me wonder, do we care about it as much as him? Or are we caught up in the temporary? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of life and death. If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of our friends. We would have a lot different view of our children and of our loved ones. If we cared about heaven for other people as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of people who cut us off in traffic. We would have a lot different view of the person who checks out too many items in the self-checkout aisle in Harris Teeter. Right? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, if we were singularly focused on eternity as Jesus was on eternity, it would change our prayers. It would change our relationships. It would change our interaction. It would change our priorities. It would change everything. And what I see as I go through John is that this prayer is a capstone on all the teachings of Jesus throughout the whole book. And do you know what he really wants for you? Do you know what screams to me out of the book of John? Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. It's the whole reason he created you. It's the whole reason he came here. It's the whole reason he died. It's the whole reason he hung around for three years. It's the only reason that he doesn't snatch you to heaven the exact moment that you accept him because he wants you to be about the business of bringing other people with you. The only reason we are here is to go to heaven and bring as many people as we possibly can with us on the way. And when we believe that, and I'll be the first to confess that I don't all the time do, it changes everything. To me, that's the message from John, that Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. He wants it so badly that he's willing to experience the death of crucifixion to do it. And that's what we're gonna talk about next week. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for your love. Grateful for your son. The way that he ministered to us and for us. The way that he fights for us. The way that his singular focus is to bring us into a relationship with you and him and the spirit that we might experience heaven, that we might experience eternity with him and with you. God, give us an ounce of the concern that Jesus has for the eternity. Give us a glimpse of what it's like to be eternally focused like he was. Give us an appreciation for the beauty of eternity with you. Give us an understanding that we really were designed to be with you and that we will only find purpose and identity and happiness and contentment when we are walking in the middle of your will and we are walking towards heaven. Give us a heart to bring as many people possible with us as we can. God, thanks for loving us in that way. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, my name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here at the early service. As Kyle said, this is the ninth part of our series moving through the book of John. I've been encouraging you every week to grab a reading plan. They're on the information table on the way out in the lobby. We want you reading along, encountering the Savior along with us. We don't want your only perspective on John to be for me and what I say on Sunday morning, but you encounter him with your heart and your intellect as well. This week we arrive at John chapter 17, which I think is one of the most intimate and poignant and important passages in the Bible. It is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. And so I think just if that's all I would say about it, that it's the longest recorded prayer that we have of Jesus, we should want to lean into it and hear it, right? We should want to listen because this is our Savior and he prayed for us. And anytime he prays, we should want to lean in and go, how does he pray? What does he say? Like, I want to do it like he does it. And so we get the longest example that we have in John chapter 17. Before we dive into it, I want to give us a little context and background for when he's praying this and at the end of what he said and why he's praying it. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to John 17. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. And you can turn, it's the fourth book in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, John chapter 17. And we're going to be looking really at the whole chapter, but specifically at verses 20 through 24 this morning. So John 17 comes at the end of what's referred to by scholars as the farewell discourse. So if you've been paying attention in the book of John, we kind of move through the life of Jesus, right? And so the first, he's been ministering now for three years. He's had the disciples for three years, and he's just been moving through ministry and kind of just dropping in at spots and just giving highlights for each year or different things, right? But then time slows down towards the end when Jesus enters into Jerusalem for what we know as Passion Week. And he is in Jerusalem about to be crucified. The wheels have been set in motion for him to be arrested and tried and crucified and then resurrected, which we celebrate on Easter. So all of that stuff has been put in motion and the Gospel of John slows time way down and focuses a big portion of what he writes on just that week, and then a big portion of that week on just the last night that they're together. So they're around eating. They're eating a meal. Jesus looks at Judas, the one who is going to betray him, and he sends him off. He says, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And then he's left with just the 11 faithful disciples in this room together, this really intimate moment after three years of laboring together every day. And listen, his relationship with his disciples is the closest thing that we could experience to having a relationship with children or something like that. They spent every day together. When he called them to follow him, it wasn't like, could you follow me Monday through Friday? Actually, we do 410s here, so just Monday through Thursday. It's every day that you wake up and you talk to him. You wake up and you pray with him. You wake up and you do ministry with him, and you encounter the crowds that he encounters, and you watch him walk in faith every day for three years. They're incredibly, they have this incredibly tight and intimate relationship. And when it's just those 11 that are faithful to him because Judas went to betray him, he starts to teach them. And for a long time he teaches them. He starts to teach them in chapter 13. And we looked at this two weeks ago with the new commandment. He says, this new commandment I give you, that you should love one another as I love you. And then from that new commandment, he launches into 14, 15, 16, those three chapters of teaching. It's the most longest teachings that we have from Jesus. If you have a red letter Bible, and most of you do, and you flip through chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, you'll see that they're all read. And this is one night that Jesus is saying all of these things in one room. And so we looked at one of those things last week in John 15, the idea of abiding in him, obeying him, and bearing fruit. And so then he wraps it up with this prayer. And it says at the beginning, when Jesus had spoken these words, so all the previous chapters from 13 until now, when Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted his eyes up to pray, which is just an interesting aside. There's other ways to pray besides bowing our head and closing our eyes. There's just different postures and different types of prayer, just as an aside. Before we look at Jesus' prayer, before we dive into it, I wanted us to kind of think about it a little bit so we can get a sense of what's being revealed here in this prayer. Those of you with children, I want you to imagine that they're adult children. Those of you without kids, just pretend that you have kids. And this is actually great because they've never sassed you and they're exactly what you want them to be. So just live in that moment. But if you have kids, I want you to imagine a situation where you're gonna part ways with them for a long, long time. Several years, probably decades, dozens of years. You're not gonna see them again. And it's gonna be a long time and you know it. And they know it too. And right before you part ways, you say, hey, let me pray for you. Okay? What would you pray? If you're gonna part ways with your kids for decades, not gonna see them again for a long, long time, you knew you were gonna see them again one day, but not for a while, and you said, hey, let me pray for you, what would you pray? It probably wouldn't be frivolous things, right? It probably wouldn't be like the test goes well tomorrow. It probably wouldn't even be that the interview's good. You would pray deep, meaningful things. You would pray long-term things. And whatever you prayed for them in that moment, I would submit to you is indicative of what your heart is for them. Whatever you pray in that moment is really revelatory of what you feel for them and what you want most for them, isn't it? It's going to show you, if I could listen, I would know what's most important to you for them for their life for the next several years, just by listening to your prayer. And so that's what's happening here. Jesus is about to part ways with the disciples. He's told them, I'm going to go prepare a place for you. Where I'm going, you cannot come for a while. We'll meet again, but it's going to be a minute. And Jesus knows that when he moves on from this moment, when he moves on from this week, he's going to see them a little bit. He's going to go to heaven. And then they've got their lives to live. And they've got the church to lead and the church to grow. We don't find out about Jesus. We never hear this story if the disciples don't do what they were trained to do. And he knows what they have ahead of them, that they have decades, that they're all going to die martyrs, deaths, that some of them are going to get married, that some of them are going to have kids. He knows what awaits them. And so he prays for them. And what I want to submit to you is that Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. In the same way, if you were praying for your kids and they were leaving for a long time, you weren't going to see them again, what would you pray for them? That would reveal what you most wanted for your children. This prayer reveals what he most wants for the disciples, and you'll see it reveals what he most wants for us. The thing I find really remarkable about this prayer is that Jesus prays for you. In verse 20, he says this. He's just in the prayer. If you read the whole thing, and I would really encourage you to do that in one go. Read chapter 17 all the way through. He opens up praying about himself, and then he prays for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, in verse 20, he says this, I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. Do you know who that is? That's you. If you are a Christian, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, if you would say that you are a believer, then Jesus is praying for you here. He's saying, I'm not just praying for the disciples who are here around me, these 11, Father. I'm praying for anyone that comes to faith because of their word, which is everyone ever who has become a Christian. So he's praying for you. And even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, which I'm so happy that you're here. Thanks for trusting us with your morning. And I will try to go quickly. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, he prays for you too. So I want to know what he prays, right? What does he think is most important for us? When Jesus prayed for me 2,000 years ago to the Father, what did he pray? What did he pray for you? Well, here's what he prayed. Let's look at it. He prays, there's five verses that he prays for us, but this is really a good summary verse. This is the nuts and bolts of it us? What does he want for us? What does he pray for us? I think the answer to that is Jesus is praying for a twofold unity. Jesus prays for a twofold unity, two types of unity here. The first is unity with the Father. He says, let them be in us as we are together. Let them be one as we are one. And I love the heart of Jesus in this prayer, praying, God, let them experience what we have experienced. I think it kind of works like this. Like when you go out to eat, right? Let's say you go out to eat when there's five other people at the table and you win the order battle. It's a great feeling. Like all the plates come to the table and they set your plate down in front of you and everybody at the table goes, oh, that looks good. Should have gotten that. And like everybody knows you win. Like everybody now likes their dinner a little bit less because yours looks so good. That's a wonderful feeling, right? And if you're a good friend, now some of us are jerks and we go prison yard and like we cover it. We're like, sorry, you'll know for next time. But most of us, because we're really enjoying what we're eating, what do we do? We cut it and we hand it to people, right? You gotta try this and we put it on their plate or we pester people or like our grandmas when they love something a lot, they just force feed it to us. Like, if you say no to this, I'm just gonna put it directly in your mouth because they want you to try this because we want people to share in good experiences with us. Oh my gosh, this is so good. You have to taste this, right? That's why when we see something funny, when we hear something funny, Kyle lately, our student pastor, there's a comedian on Netflix named Nate Bergazzi. He is like an evangelist for this guy. He loves him and he's hilarious. And so he's telling everybody about him because Kyle likes laughing and he wants you to laugh too, right? He wants you to share in that experience. This is what we do. And this is what Jesus is doing. Jesus is saying, God, let them experience just a taste of what you and I have. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this. We're gonna deep dive in philosophy a little bit. God exists as a triune God. I don't have time to explain it this morning, which is good because I can't. It's just kind of one of these mysteries of the faith that we believe in a trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And they existed before time in eternity as a perfect unit, in perfect love and a perfect relationship, perfectly affirming, perfectly identifying, perfectly loving, perfectly accepting, never experiencing shame, never experiencing loneliness, never experiencing a lack of self-worth or a lack of identity or any sort of anxiety. They loved one another perfectly and they are perfect. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the most loving thing for a perfect being to do is to make other beings so that they can experience his perfection. Does that make sense? So God created man so that we could get a taste of the relationship that he experiences God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. He created us for the sole purpose of allowing us to experience relationship with him. He didn't do it because they needed it. It's not like God the Father and God the Son were looking at each other in heaven going, man, I am lonely. You know who would fix this? Tom Sartorius. That'd make it great. That's what we need. We need more Tom. This place would be great. That's not what he said. I want some company. I want a different perspective. Let's make people. That's not what they did. They said, this is so perfect that the best possible thing to do is to create people to experience in this relationship with us. The whole point of creation, the whole point of humans existing, is so that one day we can be reunited with God and experience the relationship that he designed us for. It's what our souls yearn for. It's what every bit of clawing for happiness is clawing towards. It's back to that relationship that the Father created just so that we could be intimate and united with him. It's the unity that Jesus is praying for here. And Jesus is saying, this is so good, Father, what we have. This is so good and so right and so affirming. Let them experience it too. Let them be in us as we are in one another. Let them experience a all-affirming love, a love that covers over shame, a love that erases anxiety, a love that imbues us with purpose, a love that assigns us an identity. Let them experience that, God. Bring them to oneness with you is what he's praying for. So it's a good, heartfelt prayer. And then he says, let them be one as you and I are one. So the second type of unity he prays for is unity with one another. He prays for unity with one another, right? He prays that you and I would be one, that all Christians would be one and would be unified. And at first, at first it seems like he's trying to almost pray away like denominations in the church. Like he doesn't want us to be Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics and all that stuff. He doesn't want that. He wants us to be one homogenous, like-minded group that agrees on everything. At first, it seems like the prayer is somewhat ineffectual. If you prayed that 2,000 years ago, let them all be one. And then the church launches from that and becomes incredibly diverse. Like I have to drive, when I drive home, I live really close. I live like five minutes away. I live one song away. That's how far I live with no traffic. That's what I know. I get one song on the way to and from work. I pass three churches at least. I guarantee there are things in each of those churches that I wouldn't agree with. I guarantee they would come here and they would not agree with some things. I mean, they'd be wrong, but they wouldn't agree, right? And so it makes me wonder, like, is God, is that prayer that ineffectual? Are we so far off the mark that we're not unified in that way? But as I thought about the unity that Jesus is praying for, I think that that unity is really exemplified in Kyle and Steve. Kyle's our student pastor and Steve is our worship pastor. And they're buddies. They're genuine buddies. As if we needed proof of this, every Wednesday staff goes out for staff lunch. Don't worry, we pay for that ourselves. We don't charge it to the church. We go out for staff lunch and we rotate who gets to pick. When it's your week, you get to pick the restaurant. And so this week, we ate at Pieology over there in North Hills. It will shock you to know that our student pastor chose a pizza place. And so we go there and Steve and Kyle ordered separately. They didn't talk to each other about what they were gonna order, but they both ordered a buffalo chicken pizza, right? And so they sit down and Kyle leans over and he jokingly says, look at us, we're buffalo bros, which is just a dumb joke, which makes it funny. So now they're buffalo bros, right? Like that's the thing. And they really are buddies. Every now and again on Mondays, they go out to eat together. Then when they don't have any plans, they just go eat together and they talk and they hang out. A lot of times when I'm trying to do actual work, they sit in Kyle's office and they distract me by talking to one another. But they're like friends. And it amazes me that they are because they are very different people. Kyle's 25. He's single. He goes out late. He plays Ultimate Frisbee and is good at Fortnite. That's Kyle, right? Steve's 43. I mean, we just started working on a 401K for him. He's so near the end of his career. He's in a different season of life. He's got a kid. He's building a house. Steve's Jewish and grew up in Boston for a little bit, a single mom, and then a stepdad going to Hebrew school. Kyle grew up in the south in a quaint suburb of Atlanta with a dad who worked at a Southern Baptist church with parents who are still together. It's totally different existences. Steve's gone through the loss of a parent. Kyle has both of his parents. Kyle was an athlete in high school, played a ton of sports. Steve's a musician. They don't have those things in common. I think Steve played basketball a couple of times. I question that. Totally different. Kyle doesn't have musical skills. Their interests are different. Kyle recommended Nate Bergazzi to Steve. Steve didn't like him. Kyle took it personal. There is no reason that they should be friends. But they work on the same staff and they're unified by the same goal. They both live to see people get connected to Jesus. They both live to see people experience the unity with God that they have. They both live for the purpose of the gospel. So whether or not they agree on everything, whether or not they're similar in every way, the unifying power of the gospel and the purpose of that has brought them together because it's what they both care most deeply about is seeing themselves walk with Jesus and seeing you walk with Jesus. And so they've leveraged everything in their life around those goals. And so it unites us. This week, I had a guy from South Africa come up. I met him once for a week, six years ago. He's an African-American guy from South Africa who grew up in Ocean View, in the shantytowns there, in extreme poverty, totally different life experience with me. I've only spent a week with him. When he got here on Thursday, he got out of the car and gave me a hug and called me brother. What else but the gospel unifies people in that way? So I do not think that when Jesus is praying here, he's praying that we would be a homogenous group that agrees on everything all the time. I think that he is praying that we would be unified in our goal and in our heart to reach people with the power of the gospel. I think he is praying that we would be brought together by what means most to us. And on a church level, this means that we're not against other churches. This means that we support other churches. This means it doesn't matter if we agree with them on everything. What we agree with them on, the most important thing is they're trying to bring people into the kingdom and we're trying to bring people into the kingdom. People have asked me a bunch of times, Summit's building a big, huge building right around the corner. They're saying, you know, Summit's building this huge building. Are you worried about that? No, no. He's a better pastor than me anyways. Moving closer isn't going to prove it. He's already a better speaker than me. What's it matter? We're all building the kingdom. Who cares? Who cares where anybody goes to church? Just go where you're getting closer to the Father, where you have community. We're all on the same team. That's the unity that I think that Jesus is praying for. And he prays this, and you can see it in the kind of unity that he's praying for. He's praying this. He says at the end, look, at the end of 21, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, and me, and I in you, that they also may be in us so that, listen, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I don't know if you've been paying attention in this series, but if you have, you will notice that this is why Jesus does everything. This is like, this prayer sums up the whole gospel of John. It sums up all of his teaching. It sums up everything. This idea, he wants us to be experienced unity with the Father, that all-fulfilling love of the Father, unity with one another in purpose, and the purpose is so that other people might believe in Jesus. It's what he says over and over and over again. In the very first week of the series, we said that the fundamental questions in life are, was Jesus real, and do I believe that he was who he says he was? And if we answer yes to those two questions, everything has to change. And Jesus keeps bringing us back himself to that question, do you believe in me? The way the gospel starts, John starts, Jesus is God. In the beginning was the Word, Word was with God, Word was God. Without him, nothing was made through him, all things were made. He sets him up as God, and we have to ask the question, do we believe that? The very first miracle that he does, turning water into wine. His mom says, hey, you should do that thing where you turn the water into wine. And Jesus says, it's not yet my time, woman, which is a really interesting verse to have in the Bible. But then he decides that he's going to do it anyways. Why does he do this miracle? Well, at the end, he tells us it's so that the disciples would believe that he was who he says he was. His motivation for the miracle was so that others would believe. We fast forward to maybe his greatest miracle in John 11 when he resurrects Lazarus from the dead. His best friend. He was told two days before his best friend died, hey, Lazarus is sick. You should come heal him. And he stays put for two days and lets his best friend die. And his two sisters, Lazarus' two sisters, Mary and Martha, he watches them get disappointed in such a deep way that when he meets back up with Mary, he weeps with her. He let them die. He let them hurt so he could resurrect them from the dead. And when he comes out, there's a prayer at the end of John 11, and he lifts his eyes up to God, and he says, God, I know. Father, I knew that you would do this, but I'm saying this now so that they might believe, you're following me for the wrong reasons. And they say, what are the right reasons? He says, you're laboring for temporary things. You should labor for eternal things. And they said, how do we do that? What do you tell them? Believe in the one that the Father has sent. Believe in me. Over and over and over again, believe in me. The new commandment that he gives in John 13, love one another as I have loved you. Why? So that others might believe in me. And then here in this prayer, God, I pray all these things for myself. I pray all these things for the disciples. I pray all these things for the church that will grow from the disciples. And I pray that that church will be unified with you and unified with one another. Why? So that they might believe in me. All through the Bible. All through the book of John. This is what Jesus cares about most. And then he prays this peculiar prayer. It's almost vain when we read it. It really kind of took me a minute to figure out why is Jesus praying this at the end of that. Verse 24, Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me, that's the church, may be through their word would see me in my glory, would see me as I am. Say, Father, they've only seen me as this weak and frail human. I pray that they would see me as God, that they would see me as divine, that they would see Jesus in his heavenly state in Revelation. Two or three different glimpses of him, and it's really magnificent. But why is Jesus praying this here? Let them see me as I really am. And as I thought about that, I realized something. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with the Father, what he prays for us? In heaven. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with one another? In heaven. Do you know what Jesus prays over and over again for the disciples in this passage? That God would preserve them. Preserve them for what? Heaven. Do you know where if other people believe because of our unity, because of our love, and because of his miracles, do you know where they go? Heaven. If we're going to ever see Jesus in his glory, do you know where we see him in his glory? Heaven. And so I really believe that what Jesus is praying here can be summed up like this. Father, let them experience heaven. That's what he's praying. If you read through everything here, if you read through John 17 and you want to know what's the heart of Jesus, what's he praying for us, what matters most to him, what he's praying is, Father, let them experience heaven. Let them experience eternity. What he's saying is if there is a perfect God who chose to create us so that we might share in an eternal relationship with him, what he's praying is, Father, bring about the whole purpose of all of creation. Let's go ahead and finish the job that we started all those years ago. Let's bring about the entire purpose why we're here and what we did to bring them to heaven with us that they might experience eternity and a perfect relationship with us and in a perfect relationship with one another. And if you read back through John through this lens, it amazed me as I looked at it this week, you will see that almost the only thing Jesus ever really cares about, it is guiding everything he says, all the miracles that he does, all the teachings that he offers, all the conversations that he has, all the places that he goes, and all of his timing. His primary and sometimes sole motivation is that you would be in heaven with him for eternity. That's his whole life. What matters most to Jesus? That you would be in heaven with him. What does Jesus care about more than anything else? That you would be in heaven with him. Why did Jesus teach all those people all the time? Why did he do all the miracles? Why did he train the disciples? Why did he pray for them? Why did he die on the cross? Why did he live his entire life? Why did he come here? So that you might be reconciled to him and spend eternity in heaven with him and with the Father and with the Spirit and with one another. It's all Jesus cares about is that you would one day go to heaven. And if that's what Jesus cares about most, just eternity, it makes me wonder, do we care about it as much as him? Or are we caught up in the temporary? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of life and death. If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of our friends. We would have a lot different view of our children and of our loved ones. If we cared about heaven for other people as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of people who cut us off in traffic. We would have a lot different view of the person who checks out too many items in the self-checkout aisle in Harris Teeter. Right? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, if we were singularly focused on eternity as Jesus was on eternity, it would change our prayers. It would change our relationships. It would change our interaction. It would change our priorities. It would change everything. And what I see as I go through John is that this prayer is a capstone on all the teachings of Jesus throughout the whole book. And do you know what he really wants for you? Do you know what screams to me out of the book of John? Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. It's the whole reason he created you. It's the whole reason he came here. It's the whole reason he died. It's the whole reason he hung around for three years. It's the only reason that he doesn't snatch you to heaven the exact moment that you accept him because he wants you to be about the business of bringing other people with you. The only reason we are here is to go to heaven and bring as many people as we possibly can with us on the way. And when we believe that, and I'll be the first to confess that I don't all the time do, it changes everything. To me, that's the message from John, that Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. He wants it so badly that he's willing to experience the death of crucifixion to do it. And that's what we're gonna talk about next week. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for your love. Grateful for your son. The way that he ministered to us and for us. The way that he fights for us. The way that his singular focus is to bring us into a relationship with you and him and the spirit that we might experience heaven, that we might experience eternity with him and with you. God, give us an ounce of the concern that Jesus has for the eternity. Give us a glimpse of what it's like to be eternally focused like he was. Give us an appreciation for the beauty of eternity with you. Give us an understanding that we really were designed to be with you and that we will only find purpose and identity and happiness and contentment when we are walking in the middle of your will and we are walking towards heaven. Give us a heart to bring as many people possible with us as we can. God, thanks for loving us in that way. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, my name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here at the early service. As Kyle said, this is the ninth part of our series moving through the book of John. I've been encouraging you every week to grab a reading plan. They're on the information table on the way out in the lobby. We want you reading along, encountering the Savior along with us. We don't want your only perspective on John to be for me and what I say on Sunday morning, but you encounter him with your heart and your intellect as well. This week we arrive at John chapter 17, which I think is one of the most intimate and poignant and important passages in the Bible. It is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. And so I think just if that's all I would say about it, that it's the longest recorded prayer that we have of Jesus, we should want to lean into it and hear it, right? We should want to listen because this is our Savior and he prayed for us. And anytime he prays, we should want to lean in and go, how does he pray? What does he say? Like, I want to do it like he does it. And so we get the longest example that we have in John chapter 17. Before we dive into it, I want to give us a little context and background for when he's praying this and at the end of what he said and why he's praying it. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to John 17. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. And you can turn, it's the fourth book in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, John chapter 17. And we're going to be looking really at the whole chapter, but specifically at verses 20 through 24 this morning. So John 17 comes at the end of what's referred to by scholars as the farewell discourse. So if you've been paying attention in the book of John, we kind of move through the life of Jesus, right? And so the first, he's been ministering now for three years. He's had the disciples for three years, and he's just been moving through ministry and kind of just dropping in at spots and just giving highlights for each year or different things, right? But then time slows down towards the end when Jesus enters into Jerusalem for what we know as Passion Week. And he is in Jerusalem about to be crucified. The wheels have been set in motion for him to be arrested and tried and crucified and then resurrected, which we celebrate on Easter. So all of that stuff has been put in motion and the Gospel of John slows time way down and focuses a big portion of what he writes on just that week, and then a big portion of that week on just the last night that they're together. So they're around eating. They're eating a meal. Jesus looks at Judas, the one who is going to betray him, and he sends him off. He says, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And then he's left with just the 11 faithful disciples in this room together, this really intimate moment after three years of laboring together every day. And listen, his relationship with his disciples is the closest thing that we could experience to having a relationship with children or something like that. They spent every day together. When he called them to follow him, it wasn't like, could you follow me Monday through Friday? Actually, we do 410s here, so just Monday through Thursday. It's every day that you wake up and you talk to him. You wake up and you pray with him. You wake up and you do ministry with him, and you encounter the crowds that he encounters, and you watch him walk in faith every day for three years. They're incredibly, they have this incredibly tight and intimate relationship. And when it's just those 11 that are faithful to him because Judas went to betray him, he starts to teach them. And for a long time he teaches them. He starts to teach them in chapter 13. And we looked at this two weeks ago with the new commandment. He says, this new commandment I give you, that you should love one another as I love you. And then from that new commandment, he launches into 14, 15, 16, those three chapters of teaching. It's the most longest teachings that we have from Jesus. If you have a red letter Bible, and most of you do, and you flip through chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, you'll see that they're all read. And this is one night that Jesus is saying all of these things in one room. And so we looked at one of those things last week in John 15, the idea of abiding in him, obeying him, and bearing fruit. And so then he wraps it up with this prayer. And it says at the beginning, when Jesus had spoken these words, so all the previous chapters from 13 until now, when Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted his eyes up to pray, which is just an interesting aside. There's other ways to pray besides bowing our head and closing our eyes. There's just different postures and different types of prayer, just as an aside. Before we look at Jesus' prayer, before we dive into it, I wanted us to kind of think about it a little bit so we can get a sense of what's being revealed here in this prayer. Those of you with children, I want you to imagine that they're adult children. Those of you without kids, just pretend that you have kids. And this is actually great because they've never sassed you and they're exactly what you want them to be. So just live in that moment. But if you have kids, I want you to imagine a situation where you're gonna part ways with them for a long, long time. Several years, probably decades, dozens of years. You're not gonna see them again. And it's gonna be a long time and you know it. And they know it too. And right before you part ways, you say, hey, let me pray for you. Okay? What would you pray? If you're gonna part ways with your kids for decades, not gonna see them again for a long, long time, you knew you were gonna see them again one day, but not for a while, and you said, hey, let me pray for you, what would you pray? It probably wouldn't be frivolous things, right? It probably wouldn't be like the test goes well tomorrow. It probably wouldn't even be that the interview's good. You would pray deep, meaningful things. You would pray long-term things. And whatever you prayed for them in that moment, I would submit to you is indicative of what your heart is for them. Whatever you pray in that moment is really revelatory of what you feel for them and what you want most for them, isn't it? It's going to show you, if I could listen, I would know what's most important to you for them for their life for the next several years, just by listening to your prayer. And so that's what's happening here. Jesus is about to part ways with the disciples. He's told them, I'm going to go prepare a place for you. Where I'm going, you cannot come for a while. We'll meet again, but it's going to be a minute. And Jesus knows that when he moves on from this moment, when he moves on from this week, he's going to see them a little bit. He's going to go to heaven. And then they've got their lives to live. And they've got the church to lead and the church to grow. We don't find out about Jesus. We never hear this story if the disciples don't do what they were trained to do. And he knows what they have ahead of them, that they have decades, that they're all going to die martyrs, deaths, that some of them are going to get married, that some of them are going to have kids. He knows what awaits them. And so he prays for them. And what I want to submit to you is that Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. In the same way, if you were praying for your kids and they were leaving for a long time, you weren't going to see them again, what would you pray for them? That would reveal what you most wanted for your children. This prayer reveals what he most wants for the disciples, and you'll see it reveals what he most wants for us. The thing I find really remarkable about this prayer is that Jesus prays for you. In verse 20, he says this. He's just in the prayer. If you read the whole thing, and I would really encourage you to do that in one go. Read chapter 17 all the way through. He opens up praying about himself, and then he prays for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, in verse 20, he says this, I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. Do you know who that is? That's you. If you are a Christian, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, if you would say that you are a believer, then Jesus is praying for you here. He's saying, I'm not just praying for the disciples who are here around me, these 11, Father. I'm praying for anyone that comes to faith because of their word, which is everyone ever who has become a Christian. So he's praying for you. And even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, which I'm so happy that you're here. Thanks for trusting us with your morning. And I will try to go quickly. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, he prays for you too. So I want to know what he prays, right? What does he think is most important for us? When Jesus prayed for me 2,000 years ago to the Father, what did he pray? What did he pray for you? Well, here's what he prayed. Let's look at it. He prays, there's five verses that he prays for us, but this is really a good summary verse. This is the nuts and bolts of it us? What does he want for us? What does he pray for us? I think the answer to that is Jesus is praying for a twofold unity. Jesus prays for a twofold unity, two types of unity here. The first is unity with the Father. He says, let them be in us as we are together. Let them be one as we are one. And I love the heart of Jesus in this prayer, praying, God, let them experience what we have experienced. I think it kind of works like this. Like when you go out to eat, right? Let's say you go out to eat when there's five other people at the table and you win the order battle. It's a great feeling. Like all the plates come to the table and they set your plate down in front of you and everybody at the table goes, oh, that looks good. Should have gotten that. And like everybody knows you win. Like everybody now likes their dinner a little bit less because yours looks so good. That's a wonderful feeling, right? And if you're a good friend, now some of us are jerks and we go prison yard and like we cover it. We're like, sorry, you'll know for next time. But most of us, because we're really enjoying what we're eating, what do we do? We cut it and we hand it to people, right? You gotta try this and we put it on their plate or we pester people or like our grandmas when they love something a lot, they just force feed it to us. Like, if you say no to this, I'm just gonna put it directly in your mouth because they want you to try this because we want people to share in good experiences with us. Oh my gosh, this is so good. You have to taste this, right? That's why when we see something funny, when we hear something funny, Kyle lately, our student pastor, there's a comedian on Netflix named Nate Bergazzi. He is like an evangelist for this guy. He loves him and he's hilarious. And so he's telling everybody about him because Kyle likes laughing and he wants you to laugh too, right? He wants you to share in that experience. This is what we do. And this is what Jesus is doing. Jesus is saying, God, let them experience just a taste of what you and I have. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this. We're gonna deep dive in philosophy a little bit. God exists as a triune God. I don't have time to explain it this morning, which is good because I can't. It's just kind of one of these mysteries of the faith that we believe in a trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And they existed before time in eternity as a perfect unit, in perfect love and a perfect relationship, perfectly affirming, perfectly identifying, perfectly loving, perfectly accepting, never experiencing shame, never experiencing loneliness, never experiencing a lack of self-worth or a lack of identity or any sort of anxiety. They loved one another perfectly and they are perfect. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the most loving thing for a perfect being to do is to make other beings so that they can experience his perfection. Does that make sense? So God created man so that we could get a taste of the relationship that he experiences God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. He created us for the sole purpose of allowing us to experience relationship with him. He didn't do it because they needed it. It's not like God the Father and God the Son were looking at each other in heaven going, man, I am lonely. You know who would fix this? Tom Sartorius. That'd make it great. That's what we need. We need more Tom. This place would be great. That's not what he said. I want some company. I want a different perspective. Let's make people. That's not what they did. They said, this is so perfect that the best possible thing to do is to create people to experience in this relationship with us. The whole point of creation, the whole point of humans existing, is so that one day we can be reunited with God and experience the relationship that he designed us for. It's what our souls yearn for. It's what every bit of clawing for happiness is clawing towards. It's back to that relationship that the Father created just so that we could be intimate and united with him. It's the unity that Jesus is praying for here. And Jesus is saying, this is so good, Father, what we have. This is so good and so right and so affirming. Let them experience it too. Let them be in us as we are in one another. Let them experience a all-affirming love, a love that covers over shame, a love that erases anxiety, a love that imbues us with purpose, a love that assigns us an identity. Let them experience that, God. Bring them to oneness with you is what he's praying for. So it's a good, heartfelt prayer. And then he says, let them be one as you and I are one. So the second type of unity he prays for is unity with one another. He prays for unity with one another, right? He prays that you and I would be one, that all Christians would be one and would be unified. And at first, at first it seems like he's trying to almost pray away like denominations in the church. Like he doesn't want us to be Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics and all that stuff. He doesn't want that. He wants us to be one homogenous, like-minded group that agrees on everything. At first, it seems like the prayer is somewhat ineffectual. If you prayed that 2,000 years ago, let them all be one. And then the church launches from that and becomes incredibly diverse. Like I have to drive, when I drive home, I live really close. I live like five minutes away. I live one song away. That's how far I live with no traffic. That's what I know. I get one song on the way to and from work. I pass three churches at least. I guarantee there are things in each of those churches that I wouldn't agree with. I guarantee they would come here and they would not agree with some things. I mean, they'd be wrong, but they wouldn't agree, right? And so it makes me wonder, like, is God, is that prayer that ineffectual? Are we so far off the mark that we're not unified in that way? But as I thought about the unity that Jesus is praying for, I think that that unity is really exemplified in Kyle and Steve. Kyle's our student pastor and Steve is our worship pastor. And they're buddies. They're genuine buddies. As if we needed proof of this, every Wednesday staff goes out for staff lunch. Don't worry, we pay for that ourselves. We don't charge it to the church. We go out for staff lunch and we rotate who gets to pick. When it's your week, you get to pick the restaurant. And so this week, we ate at Pieology over there in North Hills. It will shock you to know that our student pastor chose a pizza place. And so we go there and Steve and Kyle ordered separately. They didn't talk to each other about what they were gonna order, but they both ordered a buffalo chicken pizza, right? And so they sit down and Kyle leans over and he jokingly says, look at us, we're buffalo bros, which is just a dumb joke, which makes it funny. So now they're buffalo bros, right? Like that's the thing. And they really are buddies. Every now and again on Mondays, they go out to eat together. Then when they don't have any plans, they just go eat together and they talk and they hang out. A lot of times when I'm trying to do actual work, they sit in Kyle's office and they distract me by talking to one another. But they're like friends. And it amazes me that they are because they are very different people. Kyle's 25. He's single. He goes out late. He plays Ultimate Frisbee and is good at Fortnite. That's Kyle, right? Steve's 43. I mean, we just started working on a 401K for him. He's so near the end of his career. He's in a different season of life. He's got a kid. He's building a house. Steve's Jewish and grew up in Boston for a little bit, a single mom, and then a stepdad going to Hebrew school. Kyle grew up in the south in a quaint suburb of Atlanta with a dad who worked at a Southern Baptist church with parents who are still together. It's totally different existences. Steve's gone through the loss of a parent. Kyle has both of his parents. Kyle was an athlete in high school, played a ton of sports. Steve's a musician. They don't have those things in common. I think Steve played basketball a couple of times. I question that. Totally different. Kyle doesn't have musical skills. Their interests are different. Kyle recommended Nate Bergazzi to Steve. Steve didn't like him. Kyle took it personal. There is no reason that they should be friends. But they work on the same staff and they're unified by the same goal. They both live to see people get connected to Jesus. They both live to see people experience the unity with God that they have. They both live for the purpose of the gospel. So whether or not they agree on everything, whether or not they're similar in every way, the unifying power of the gospel and the purpose of that has brought them together because it's what they both care most deeply about is seeing themselves walk with Jesus and seeing you walk with Jesus. And so they've leveraged everything in their life around those goals. And so it unites us. This week, I had a guy from South Africa come up. I met him once for a week, six years ago. He's an African-American guy from South Africa who grew up in Ocean View, in the shantytowns there, in extreme poverty, totally different life experience with me. I've only spent a week with him. When he got here on Thursday, he got out of the car and gave me a hug and called me brother. What else but the gospel unifies people in that way? So I do not think that when Jesus is praying here, he's praying that we would be a homogenous group that agrees on everything all the time. I think that he is praying that we would be unified in our goal and in our heart to reach people with the power of the gospel. I think he is praying that we would be brought together by what means most to us. And on a church level, this means that we're not against other churches. This means that we support other churches. This means it doesn't matter if we agree with them on everything. What we agree with them on, the most important thing is they're trying to bring people into the kingdom and we're trying to bring people into the kingdom. People have asked me a bunch of times, Summit's building a big, huge building right around the corner. They're saying, you know, Summit's building this huge building. Are you worried about that? No, no. He's a better pastor than me anyways. Moving closer isn't going to prove it. He's already a better speaker than me. What's it matter? We're all building the kingdom. Who cares? Who cares where anybody goes to church? Just go where you're getting closer to the Father, where you have community. We're all on the same team. That's the unity that I think that Jesus is praying for. And he prays this, and you can see it in the kind of unity that he's praying for. He's praying this. He says at the end, look, at the end of 21, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, and me, and I in you, that they also may be in us so that, listen, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I don't know if you've been paying attention in this series, but if you have, you will notice that this is why Jesus does everything. This is like, this prayer sums up the whole gospel of John. It sums up all of his teaching. It sums up everything. This idea, he wants us to be experienced unity with the Father, that all-fulfilling love of the Father, unity with one another in purpose, and the purpose is so that other people might believe in Jesus. It's what he says over and over and over again. In the very first week of the series, we said that the fundamental questions in life are, was Jesus real, and do I believe that he was who he says he was? And if we answer yes to those two questions, everything has to change. And Jesus keeps bringing us back himself to that question, do you believe in me? The way the gospel starts, John starts, Jesus is God. In the beginning was the Word, Word was with God, Word was God. Without him, nothing was made through him, all things were made. He sets him up as God, and we have to ask the question, do we believe that? The very first miracle that he does, turning water into wine. His mom says, hey, you should do that thing where you turn the water into wine. And Jesus says, it's not yet my time, woman, which is a really interesting verse to have in the Bible. But then he decides that he's going to do it anyways. Why does he do this miracle? Well, at the end, he tells us it's so that the disciples would believe that he was who he says he was. His motivation for the miracle was so that others would believe. We fast forward to maybe his greatest miracle in John 11 when he resurrects Lazarus from the dead. His best friend. He was told two days before his best friend died, hey, Lazarus is sick. You should come heal him. And he stays put for two days and lets his best friend die. And his two sisters, Lazarus' two sisters, Mary and Martha, he watches them get disappointed in such a deep way that when he meets back up with Mary, he weeps with her. He let them die. He let them hurt so he could resurrect them from the dead. And when he comes out, there's a prayer at the end of John 11, and he lifts his eyes up to God, and he says, God, I know. Father, I knew that you would do this, but I'm saying this now so that they might believe, you're following me for the wrong reasons. And they say, what are the right reasons? He says, you're laboring for temporary things. You should labor for eternal things. And they said, how do we do that? What do you tell them? Believe in the one that the Father has sent. Believe in me. Over and over and over again, believe in me. The new commandment that he gives in John 13, love one another as I have loved you. Why? So that others might believe in me. And then here in this prayer, God, I pray all these things for myself. I pray all these things for the disciples. I pray all these things for the church that will grow from the disciples. And I pray that that church will be unified with you and unified with one another. Why? So that they might believe in me. All through the Bible. All through the book of John. This is what Jesus cares about most. And then he prays this peculiar prayer. It's almost vain when we read it. It really kind of took me a minute to figure out why is Jesus praying this at the end of that. Verse 24, Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me, that's the church, may be through their word would see me in my glory, would see me as I am. Say, Father, they've only seen me as this weak and frail human. I pray that they would see me as God, that they would see me as divine, that they would see Jesus in his heavenly state in Revelation. Two or three different glimpses of him, and it's really magnificent. But why is Jesus praying this here? Let them see me as I really am. And as I thought about that, I realized something. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with the Father, what he prays for us? In heaven. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with one another? In heaven. Do you know what Jesus prays over and over again for the disciples in this passage? That God would preserve them. Preserve them for what? Heaven. Do you know where if other people believe because of our unity, because of our love, and because of his miracles, do you know where they go? Heaven. If we're going to ever see Jesus in his glory, do you know where we see him in his glory? Heaven. And so I really believe that what Jesus is praying here can be summed up like this. Father, let them experience heaven. That's what he's praying. If you read through everything here, if you read through John 17 and you want to know what's the heart of Jesus, what's he praying for us, what matters most to him, what he's praying is, Father, let them experience heaven. Let them experience eternity. What he's saying is if there is a perfect God who chose to create us so that we might share in an eternal relationship with him, what he's praying is, Father, bring about the whole purpose of all of creation. Let's go ahead and finish the job that we started all those years ago. Let's bring about the entire purpose why we're here and what we did to bring them to heaven with us that they might experience eternity and a perfect relationship with us and in a perfect relationship with one another. And if you read back through John through this lens, it amazed me as I looked at it this week, you will see that almost the only thing Jesus ever really cares about, it is guiding everything he says, all the miracles that he does, all the teachings that he offers, all the conversations that he has, all the places that he goes, and all of his timing. His primary and sometimes sole motivation is that you would be in heaven with him for eternity. That's his whole life. What matters most to Jesus? That you would be in heaven with him. What does Jesus care about more than anything else? That you would be in heaven with him. Why did Jesus teach all those people all the time? Why did he do all the miracles? Why did he train the disciples? Why did he pray for them? Why did he die on the cross? Why did he live his entire life? Why did he come here? So that you might be reconciled to him and spend eternity in heaven with him and with the Father and with the Spirit and with one another. It's all Jesus cares about is that you would one day go to heaven. And if that's what Jesus cares about most, just eternity, it makes me wonder, do we care about it as much as him? Or are we caught up in the temporary? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of life and death. If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of our friends. We would have a lot different view of our children and of our loved ones. If we cared about heaven for other people as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of people who cut us off in traffic. We would have a lot different view of the person who checks out too many items in the self-checkout aisle in Harris Teeter. Right? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, if we were singularly focused on eternity as Jesus was on eternity, it would change our prayers. It would change our relationships. It would change our interaction. It would change our priorities. It would change everything. And what I see as I go through John is that this prayer is a capstone on all the teachings of Jesus throughout the whole book. And do you know what he really wants for you? Do you know what screams to me out of the book of John? Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. It's the whole reason he created you. It's the whole reason he came here. It's the whole reason he died. It's the whole reason he hung around for three years. It's the only reason that he doesn't snatch you to heaven the exact moment that you accept him because he wants you to be about the business of bringing other people with you. The only reason we are here is to go to heaven and bring as many people as we possibly can with us on the way. And when we believe that, and I'll be the first to confess that I don't all the time do, it changes everything. To me, that's the message from John, that Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. He wants it so badly that he's willing to experience the death of crucifixion to do it. And that's what we're gonna talk about next week. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for your love. Grateful for your son. The way that he ministered to us and for us. The way that he fights for us. The way that his singular focus is to bring us into a relationship with you and him and the spirit that we might experience heaven, that we might experience eternity with him and with you. God, give us an ounce of the concern that Jesus has for the eternity. Give us a glimpse of what it's like to be eternally focused like he was. Give us an appreciation for the beauty of eternity with you. Give us an understanding that we really were designed to be with you and that we will only find purpose and identity and happiness and contentment when we are walking in the middle of your will and we are walking towards heaven. Give us a heart to bring as many people possible with us as we can. God, thanks for loving us in that way. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, my name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here at the early service. As Kyle said, this is the ninth part of our series moving through the book of John. I've been encouraging you every week to grab a reading plan. They're on the information table on the way out in the lobby. We want you reading along, encountering the Savior along with us. We don't want your only perspective on John to be for me and what I say on Sunday morning, but you encounter him with your heart and your intellect as well. This week we arrive at John chapter 17, which I think is one of the most intimate and poignant and important passages in the Bible. It is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. And so I think just if that's all I would say about it, that it's the longest recorded prayer that we have of Jesus, we should want to lean into it and hear it, right? We should want to listen because this is our Savior and he prayed for us. And anytime he prays, we should want to lean in and go, how does he pray? What does he say? Like, I want to do it like he does it. And so we get the longest example that we have in John chapter 17. Before we dive into it, I want to give us a little context and background for when he's praying this and at the end of what he said and why he's praying it. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to John 17. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. And you can turn, it's the fourth book in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, John chapter 17. And we're going to be looking really at the whole chapter, but specifically at verses 20 through 24 this morning. So John 17 comes at the end of what's referred to by scholars as the farewell discourse. So if you've been paying attention in the book of John, we kind of move through the life of Jesus, right? And so the first, he's been ministering now for three years. He's had the disciples for three years, and he's just been moving through ministry and kind of just dropping in at spots and just giving highlights for each year or different things, right? But then time slows down towards the end when Jesus enters into Jerusalem for what we know as Passion Week. And he is in Jerusalem about to be crucified. The wheels have been set in motion for him to be arrested and tried and crucified and then resurrected, which we celebrate on Easter. So all of that stuff has been put in motion and the Gospel of John slows time way down and focuses a big portion of what he writes on just that week, and then a big portion of that week on just the last night that they're together. So they're around eating. They're eating a meal. Jesus looks at Judas, the one who is going to betray him, and he sends him off. He says, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And then he's left with just the 11 faithful disciples in this room together, this really intimate moment after three years of laboring together every day. And listen, his relationship with his disciples is the closest thing that we could experience to having a relationship with children or something like that. They spent every day together. When he called them to follow him, it wasn't like, could you follow me Monday through Friday? Actually, we do 410s here, so just Monday through Thursday. It's every day that you wake up and you talk to him. You wake up and you pray with him. You wake up and you do ministry with him, and you encounter the crowds that he encounters, and you watch him walk in faith every day for three years. They're incredibly, they have this incredibly tight and intimate relationship. And when it's just those 11 that are faithful to him because Judas went to betray him, he starts to teach them. And for a long time he teaches them. He starts to teach them in chapter 13. And we looked at this two weeks ago with the new commandment. He says, this new commandment I give you, that you should love one another as I love you. And then from that new commandment, he launches into 14, 15, 16, those three chapters of teaching. It's the most longest teachings that we have from Jesus. If you have a red letter Bible, and most of you do, and you flip through chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, you'll see that they're all read. And this is one night that Jesus is saying all of these things in one room. And so we looked at one of those things last week in John 15, the idea of abiding in him, obeying him, and bearing fruit. And so then he wraps it up with this prayer. And it says at the beginning, when Jesus had spoken these words, so all the previous chapters from 13 until now, when Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted his eyes up to pray, which is just an interesting aside. There's other ways to pray besides bowing our head and closing our eyes. There's just different postures and different types of prayer, just as an aside. Before we look at Jesus' prayer, before we dive into it, I wanted us to kind of think about it a little bit so we can get a sense of what's being revealed here in this prayer. Those of you with children, I want you to imagine that they're adult children. Those of you without kids, just pretend that you have kids. And this is actually great because they've never sassed you and they're exactly what you want them to be. So just live in that moment. But if you have kids, I want you to imagine a situation where you're gonna part ways with them for a long, long time. Several years, probably decades, dozens of years. You're not gonna see them again. And it's gonna be a long time and you know it. And they know it too. And right before you part ways, you say, hey, let me pray for you. Okay? What would you pray? If you're gonna part ways with your kids for decades, not gonna see them again for a long, long time, you knew you were gonna see them again one day, but not for a while, and you said, hey, let me pray for you, what would you pray? It probably wouldn't be frivolous things, right? It probably wouldn't be like the test goes well tomorrow. It probably wouldn't even be that the interview's good. You would pray deep, meaningful things. You would pray long-term things. And whatever you prayed for them in that moment, I would submit to you is indicative of what your heart is for them. Whatever you pray in that moment is really revelatory of what you feel for them and what you want most for them, isn't it? It's going to show you, if I could listen, I would know what's most important to you for them for their life for the next several years, just by listening to your prayer. And so that's what's happening here. Jesus is about to part ways with the disciples. He's told them, I'm going to go prepare a place for you. Where I'm going, you cannot come for a while. We'll meet again, but it's going to be a minute. And Jesus knows that when he moves on from this moment, when he moves on from this week, he's going to see them a little bit. He's going to go to heaven. And then they've got their lives to live. And they've got the church to lead and the church to grow. We don't find out about Jesus. We never hear this story if the disciples don't do what they were trained to do. And he knows what they have ahead of them, that they have decades, that they're all going to die martyrs, deaths, that some of them are going to get married, that some of them are going to have kids. He knows what awaits them. And so he prays for them. And what I want to submit to you is that Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. In the same way, if you were praying for your kids and they were leaving for a long time, you weren't going to see them again, what would you pray for them? That would reveal what you most wanted for your children. This prayer reveals what he most wants for the disciples, and you'll see it reveals what he most wants for us. The thing I find really remarkable about this prayer is that Jesus prays for you. In verse 20, he says this. He's just in the prayer. If you read the whole thing, and I would really encourage you to do that in one go. Read chapter 17 all the way through. He opens up praying about himself, and then he prays for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, in verse 20, he says this, I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. Do you know who that is? That's you. If you are a Christian, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, if you would say that you are a believer, then Jesus is praying for you here. He's saying, I'm not just praying for the disciples who are here around me, these 11, Father. I'm praying for anyone that comes to faith because of their word, which is everyone ever who has become a Christian. So he's praying for you. And even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, which I'm so happy that you're here. Thanks for trusting us with your morning. And I will try to go quickly. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, he prays for you too. So I want to know what he prays, right? What does he think is most important for us? When Jesus prayed for me 2,000 years ago to the Father, what did he pray? What did he pray for you? Well, here's what he prayed. Let's look at it. He prays, there's five verses that he prays for us, but this is really a good summary verse. This is the nuts and bolts of it us? What does he want for us? What does he pray for us? I think the answer to that is Jesus is praying for a twofold unity. Jesus prays for a twofold unity, two types of unity here. The first is unity with the Father. He says, let them be in us as we are together. Let them be one as we are one. And I love the heart of Jesus in this prayer, praying, God, let them experience what we have experienced. I think it kind of works like this. Like when you go out to eat, right? Let's say you go out to eat when there's five other people at the table and you win the order battle. It's a great feeling. Like all the plates come to the table and they set your plate down in front of you and everybody at the table goes, oh, that looks good. Should have gotten that. And like everybody knows you win. Like everybody now likes their dinner a little bit less because yours looks so good. That's a wonderful feeling, right? And if you're a good friend, now some of us are jerks and we go prison yard and like we cover it. We're like, sorry, you'll know for next time. But most of us, because we're really enjoying what we're eating, what do we do? We cut it and we hand it to people, right? You gotta try this and we put it on their plate or we pester people or like our grandmas when they love something a lot, they just force feed it to us. Like, if you say no to this, I'm just gonna put it directly in your mouth because they want you to try this because we want people to share in good experiences with us. Oh my gosh, this is so good. You have to taste this, right? That's why when we see something funny, when we hear something funny, Kyle lately, our student pastor, there's a comedian on Netflix named Nate Bergazzi. He is like an evangelist for this guy. He loves him and he's hilarious. And so he's telling everybody about him because Kyle likes laughing and he wants you to laugh too, right? He wants you to share in that experience. This is what we do. And this is what Jesus is doing. Jesus is saying, God, let them experience just a taste of what you and I have. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this. We're gonna deep dive in philosophy a little bit. God exists as a triune God. I don't have time to explain it this morning, which is good because I can't. It's just kind of one of these mysteries of the faith that we believe in a trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And they existed before time in eternity as a perfect unit, in perfect love and a perfect relationship, perfectly affirming, perfectly identifying, perfectly loving, perfectly accepting, never experiencing shame, never experiencing loneliness, never experiencing a lack of self-worth or a lack of identity or any sort of anxiety. They loved one another perfectly and they are perfect. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the most loving thing for a perfect being to do is to make other beings so that they can experience his perfection. Does that make sense? So God created man so that we could get a taste of the relationship that he experiences God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. He created us for the sole purpose of allowing us to experience relationship with him. He didn't do it because they needed it. It's not like God the Father and God the Son were looking at each other in heaven going, man, I am lonely. You know who would fix this? Tom Sartorius. That'd make it great. That's what we need. We need more Tom. This place would be great. That's not what he said. I want some company. I want a different perspective. Let's make people. That's not what they did. They said, this is so perfect that the best possible thing to do is to create people to experience in this relationship with us. The whole point of creation, the whole point of humans existing, is so that one day we can be reunited with God and experience the relationship that he designed us for. It's what our souls yearn for. It's what every bit of clawing for happiness is clawing towards. It's back to that relationship that the Father created just so that we could be intimate and united with him. It's the unity that Jesus is praying for here. And Jesus is saying, this is so good, Father, what we have. This is so good and so right and so affirming. Let them experience it too. Let them be in us as we are in one another. Let them experience a all-affirming love, a love that covers over shame, a love that erases anxiety, a love that imbues us with purpose, a love that assigns us an identity. Let them experience that, God. Bring them to oneness with you is what he's praying for. So it's a good, heartfelt prayer. And then he says, let them be one as you and I are one. So the second type of unity he prays for is unity with one another. He prays for unity with one another, right? He prays that you and I would be one, that all Christians would be one and would be unified. And at first, at first it seems like he's trying to almost pray away like denominations in the church. Like he doesn't want us to be Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics and all that stuff. He doesn't want that. He wants us to be one homogenous, like-minded group that agrees on everything. At first, it seems like the prayer is somewhat ineffectual. If you prayed that 2,000 years ago, let them all be one. And then the church launches from that and becomes incredibly diverse. Like I have to drive, when I drive home, I live really close. I live like five minutes away. I live one song away. That's how far I live with no traffic. That's what I know. I get one song on the way to and from work. I pass three churches at least. I guarantee there are things in each of those churches that I wouldn't agree with. I guarantee they would come here and they would not agree with some things. I mean, they'd be wrong, but they wouldn't agree, right? And so it makes me wonder, like, is God, is that prayer that ineffectual? Are we so far off the mark that we're not unified in that way? But as I thought about the unity that Jesus is praying for, I think that that unity is really exemplified in Kyle and Steve. Kyle's our student pastor and Steve is our worship pastor. And they're buddies. They're genuine buddies. As if we needed proof of this, every Wednesday staff goes out for staff lunch. Don't worry, we pay for that ourselves. We don't charge it to the church. We go out for staff lunch and we rotate who gets to pick. When it's your week, you get to pick the restaurant. And so this week, we ate at Pieology over there in North Hills. It will shock you to know that our student pastor chose a pizza place. And so we go there and Steve and Kyle ordered separately. They didn't talk to each other about what they were gonna order, but they both ordered a buffalo chicken pizza, right? And so they sit down and Kyle leans over and he jokingly says, look at us, we're buffalo bros, which is just a dumb joke, which makes it funny. So now they're buffalo bros, right? Like that's the thing. And they really are buddies. Every now and again on Mondays, they go out to eat together. Then when they don't have any plans, they just go eat together and they talk and they hang out. A lot of times when I'm trying to do actual work, they sit in Kyle's office and they distract me by talking to one another. But they're like friends. And it amazes me that they are because they are very different people. Kyle's 25. He's single. He goes out late. He plays Ultimate Frisbee and is good at Fortnite. That's Kyle, right? Steve's 43. I mean, we just started working on a 401K for him. He's so near the end of his career. He's in a different season of life. He's got a kid. He's building a house. Steve's Jewish and grew up in Boston for a little bit, a single mom, and then a stepdad going to Hebrew school. Kyle grew up in the south in a quaint suburb of Atlanta with a dad who worked at a Southern Baptist church with parents who are still together. It's totally different existences. Steve's gone through the loss of a parent. Kyle has both of his parents. Kyle was an athlete in high school, played a ton of sports. Steve's a musician. They don't have those things in common. I think Steve played basketball a couple of times. I question that. Totally different. Kyle doesn't have musical skills. Their interests are different. Kyle recommended Nate Bergazzi to Steve. Steve didn't like him. Kyle took it personal. There is no reason that they should be friends. But they work on the same staff and they're unified by the same goal. They both live to see people get connected to Jesus. They both live to see people experience the unity with God that they have. They both live for the purpose of the gospel. So whether or not they agree on everything, whether or not they're similar in every way, the unifying power of the gospel and the purpose of that has brought them together because it's what they both care most deeply about is seeing themselves walk with Jesus and seeing you walk with Jesus. And so they've leveraged everything in their life around those goals. And so it unites us. This week, I had a guy from South Africa come up. I met him once for a week, six years ago. He's an African-American guy from South Africa who grew up in Ocean View, in the shantytowns there, in extreme poverty, totally different life experience with me. I've only spent a week with him. When he got here on Thursday, he got out of the car and gave me a hug and called me brother. What else but the gospel unifies people in that way? So I do not think that when Jesus is praying here, he's praying that we would be a homogenous group that agrees on everything all the time. I think that he is praying that we would be unified in our goal and in our heart to reach people with the power of the gospel. I think he is praying that we would be brought together by what means most to us. And on a church level, this means that we're not against other churches. This means that we support other churches. This means it doesn't matter if we agree with them on everything. What we agree with them on, the most important thing is they're trying to bring people into the kingdom and we're trying to bring people into the kingdom. People have asked me a bunch of times, Summit's building a big, huge building right around the corner. They're saying, you know, Summit's building this huge building. Are you worried about that? No, no. He's a better pastor than me anyways. Moving closer isn't going to prove it. He's already a better speaker than me. What's it matter? We're all building the kingdom. Who cares? Who cares where anybody goes to church? Just go where you're getting closer to the Father, where you have community. We're all on the same team. That's the unity that I think that Jesus is praying for. And he prays this, and you can see it in the kind of unity that he's praying for. He's praying this. He says at the end, look, at the end of 21, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, and me, and I in you, that they also may be in us so that, listen, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I don't know if you've been paying attention in this series, but if you have, you will notice that this is why Jesus does everything. This is like, this prayer sums up the whole gospel of John. It sums up all of his teaching. It sums up everything. This idea, he wants us to be experienced unity with the Father, that all-fulfilling love of the Father, unity with one another in purpose, and the purpose is so that other people might believe in Jesus. It's what he says over and over and over again. In the very first week of the series, we said that the fundamental questions in life are, was Jesus real, and do I believe that he was who he says he was? And if we answer yes to those two questions, everything has to change. And Jesus keeps bringing us back himself to that question, do you believe in me? The way the gospel starts, John starts, Jesus is God. In the beginning was the Word, Word was with God, Word was God. Without him, nothing was made through him, all things were made. He sets him up as God, and we have to ask the question, do we believe that? The very first miracle that he does, turning water into wine. His mom says, hey, you should do that thing where you turn the water into wine. And Jesus says, it's not yet my time, woman, which is a really interesting verse to have in the Bible. But then he decides that he's going to do it anyways. Why does he do this miracle? Well, at the end, he tells us it's so that the disciples would believe that he was who he says he was. His motivation for the miracle was so that others would believe. We fast forward to maybe his greatest miracle in John 11 when he resurrects Lazarus from the dead. His best friend. He was told two days before his best friend died, hey, Lazarus is sick. You should come heal him. And he stays put for two days and lets his best friend die. And his two sisters, Lazarus' two sisters, Mary and Martha, he watches them get disappointed in such a deep way that when he meets back up with Mary, he weeps with her. He let them die. He let them hurt so he could resurrect them from the dead. And when he comes out, there's a prayer at the end of John 11, and he lifts his eyes up to God, and he says, God, I know. Father, I knew that you would do this, but I'm saying this now so that they might believe, you're following me for the wrong reasons. And they say, what are the right reasons? He says, you're laboring for temporary things. You should labor for eternal things. And they said, how do we do that? What do you tell them? Believe in the one that the Father has sent. Believe in me. Over and over and over again, believe in me. The new commandment that he gives in John 13, love one another as I have loved you. Why? So that others might believe in me. And then here in this prayer, God, I pray all these things for myself. I pray all these things for the disciples. I pray all these things for the church that will grow from the disciples. And I pray that that church will be unified with you and unified with one another. Why? So that they might believe in me. All through the Bible. All through the book of John. This is what Jesus cares about most. And then he prays this peculiar prayer. It's almost vain when we read it. It really kind of took me a minute to figure out why is Jesus praying this at the end of that. Verse 24, Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me, that's the church, may be through their word would see me in my glory, would see me as I am. Say, Father, they've only seen me as this weak and frail human. I pray that they would see me as God, that they would see me as divine, that they would see Jesus in his heavenly state in Revelation. Two or three different glimpses of him, and it's really magnificent. But why is Jesus praying this here? Let them see me as I really am. And as I thought about that, I realized something. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with the Father, what he prays for us? In heaven. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with one another? In heaven. Do you know what Jesus prays over and over again for the disciples in this passage? That God would preserve them. Preserve them for what? Heaven. Do you know where if other people believe because of our unity, because of our love, and because of his miracles, do you know where they go? Heaven. If we're going to ever see Jesus in his glory, do you know where we see him in his glory? Heaven. And so I really believe that what Jesus is praying here can be summed up like this. Father, let them experience heaven. That's what he's praying. If you read through everything here, if you read through John 17 and you want to know what's the heart of Jesus, what's he praying for us, what matters most to him, what he's praying is, Father, let them experience heaven. Let them experience eternity. What he's saying is if there is a perfect God who chose to create us so that we might share in an eternal relationship with him, what he's praying is, Father, bring about the whole purpose of all of creation. Let's go ahead and finish the job that we started all those years ago. Let's bring about the entire purpose why we're here and what we did to bring them to heaven with us that they might experience eternity and a perfect relationship with us and in a perfect relationship with one another. And if you read back through John through this lens, it amazed me as I looked at it this week, you will see that almost the only thing Jesus ever really cares about, it is guiding everything he says, all the miracles that he does, all the teachings that he offers, all the conversations that he has, all the places that he goes, and all of his timing. His primary and sometimes sole motivation is that you would be in heaven with him for eternity. That's his whole life. What matters most to Jesus? That you would be in heaven with him. What does Jesus care about more than anything else? That you would be in heaven with him. Why did Jesus teach all those people all the time? Why did he do all the miracles? Why did he train the disciples? Why did he pray for them? Why did he die on the cross? Why did he live his entire life? Why did he come here? So that you might be reconciled to him and spend eternity in heaven with him and with the Father and with the Spirit and with one another. It's all Jesus cares about is that you would one day go to heaven. And if that's what Jesus cares about most, just eternity, it makes me wonder, do we care about it as much as him? Or are we caught up in the temporary? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of life and death. If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of our friends. We would have a lot different view of our children and of our loved ones. If we cared about heaven for other people as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of people who cut us off in traffic. We would have a lot different view of the person who checks out too many items in the self-checkout aisle in Harris Teeter. Right? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, if we were singularly focused on eternity as Jesus was on eternity, it would change our prayers. It would change our relationships. It would change our interaction. It would change our priorities. It would change everything. And what I see as I go through John is that this prayer is a capstone on all the teachings of Jesus throughout the whole book. And do you know what he really wants for you? Do you know what screams to me out of the book of John? Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. It's the whole reason he created you. It's the whole reason he came here. It's the whole reason he died. It's the whole reason he hung around for three years. It's the only reason that he doesn't snatch you to heaven the exact moment that you accept him because he wants you to be about the business of bringing other people with you. The only reason we are here is to go to heaven and bring as many people as we possibly can with us on the way. And when we believe that, and I'll be the first to confess that I don't all the time do, it changes everything. To me, that's the message from John, that Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. He wants it so badly that he's willing to experience the death of crucifixion to do it. And that's what we're gonna talk about next week. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for your love. Grateful for your son. The way that he ministered to us and for us. The way that he fights for us. The way that his singular focus is to bring us into a relationship with you and him and the spirit that we might experience heaven, that we might experience eternity with him and with you. God, give us an ounce of the concern that Jesus has for the eternity. Give us a glimpse of what it's like to be eternally focused like he was. Give us an appreciation for the beauty of eternity with you. Give us an understanding that we really were designed to be with you and that we will only find purpose and identity and happiness and contentment when we are walking in the middle of your will and we are walking towards heaven. Give us a heart to bring as many people possible with us as we can. God, thanks for loving us in that way. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your September Sunday. Happy kickoff day to those who are celebrating. If you're joining us online, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, we are grateful for that. This morning is our own kickoff of sorts as we kick off our new series called Gentle and Lowly, titled for the book, Gentle and Lowly, that we still have available in the lobby. We got 20 more copies last week, so there's some out there. Those are available for $10 a piece. Just grab some on the honor code. You can drop cash in the acrylic boxes on the way out. You can put them in the baskets if and when they come by. You can send us a money order and I will sign for it. Whatever you want to do for your $10, you feel free. But take a book if you'd like one. We're going to be going through that this fall together. And I have found that the church always thrives. There seems to be kind of a greater pulse. We kind of come alive a little bit when we all have a shared experience, when we're doing some of the same things together. And so this is an opportunity for that. It's how we kind of, you might not know this, but at Grace on staff, for me, as I think about the year, our ministry year starts in September, and then we sprint all the way to Memorial Day, and then we kind of, we have summer extreme, then we take a breath and then we get ready for September again. So I wanted to start our ministry year on the same page together, going through this book. This is a book that the staff has gone through. Kyle, our now family pastor, recommended it to us. We went through it as a staff. It was a very impactful book. We've had a small group go through it and they really loved it. And so I thought it would be good for the whole church to move through this book as well. Now in the book, there's something like 16 chapters or maybe more. And this series is only eight weeks. So clearly I'm not going to cover every chapter. I've chosen the ones that I feel are most relevant to grace, which is by the way, one of my favorite things about being a pastor of a small church is that I feel like we know each other and I know you. So when I go through a book like this, I can pick the chapters that will probably be most relevant to us, which is something that I take. I feel a great privilege in being able to do. But if you want the full experience, then you'll need to read it on your own as we move through. We will move through the chapters chronologically, but I will not hit each one. So I would encourage you to grab that book and be reading it this fall as we go through it. As we begin the series, I want to start with a little thought experiment, okay? And now this is going to require us to activate our calcified, recalcitrant imaginations, okay, that many of you have not used in a long time. I have a four-year-old son. I'm 44. I'm too old to have a four-year-old son, especially one as imaginative as he is. That kid will talk to you for 10 minutes straight, and 85% of it is complete nonsense, untethered to reality. He's got the most active imagination, and I'm bad at imaginative play. I would have been better at 24, but not much better. Okay. I haven't used my imagination since I was three. And then I, then I, then I cut that guy off. It was like, that's useless. That's not practical in the adult world. And I moved forward. Some of us are like that. We haven't imagined anything in a long time, but I want to ask you to dust it off and imagine this with me. okay? Let's pretend, and I know, I just said pretend and you guys are like, you lost me. Let's pretend together that you're going to go see a movie. And this movie you've seen from the trailers is about a creator, a deity that builds a world. And this world, the people or the beings that inhabit it, rebel against him, do not follow his rules, do not care about his presence. Most of them live lives that essentially ignore him. And they turn themselves from him. Now, I know that this is not difficult to know where I'm going. But I do want you to depict that world in your head. There is a deity. He is the main character of the movie. He creates a universe. And the center of that universe is a world. And the people, the things occupying that world are made in his image to glorify him. And yet they don't do that. They turn against him. They rebel against him. They do not care about him. And so to rectify this deity, to rectify this creation back to himself, he sends his son and says, go fix it. He sends his son to this creation and he says, I want you to go get these, get my beings, get my creations rectified back to me, facing me, serving me, and right relationship with me. Go fix what's broken. If you're imagining that with me, it's a movie that we're going to go see, and this character is sent down to creation to rectify creation back to the creator on behalf of the Father. Let me ask you this question. How would he have the right to describe himself? How would he have the right to describe himself? How would that character be able to describe himself? This character comes down, the son of the deity comes down. He says, I'm here to rectify this and to get you facing back towards God, back towards your creator. How would that character have a right to describe himself? Angry? Authoritative? Vindictive? Powerful? Just? He would have the right to be ticked, wouldn't he? He would have the right to bow up and say, you are humans, I am deity. I'm more important than you. I'm a bigger deal than you. If you don't listen to me, I'm going to get you right. Wouldn't he have every right to come down here, to be angry, to go down there, sorry, and be angry and be upset with the inhabitants and get right and say, you better cower in front of me because I'm not a problem that you want to have. And right now you do. If we imagine that movie and we imagine that character, I think it's very easy to imagine how that character might describe himself when asked. The parallel is very simple and very easy, and you guys spotted it as soon as I started the idea. But this is what Jesus does. This is the movie that we live in. God created us. He populated at the center of the universe. He populated this world with people that were made in his own image. And those people have rejected their God. And so God sends his son to rectify the situation and to turn creation back to him. He sends his son Jesus and says, go fix it. And then we ask, how would this person have the right to describe themselves? What would make sense? How would you describe yourself? How would you expect him to describe himself? And this, to me, is the arresting principle of the book Gentle and Lowly. Because according to the author, Dane Ortlund, there is but one place in Scripture where Jesus describes himself. There is but one place where Jesus gives a description of himself. In the Gospels, he's described many, many times, but it's always by his followers. It's always by the people around him. Jesus never goes on about himself. He never describes himself. He's very humble like that. But we have one place where he does. And this to me is the arresting principle of the book. What is the one place in scripture where Jesus describes himself and what does he say about himself given how he has the right to describe himself, which is any way that he wants, given what his attitude, what we would expect it to be if we were watching that movie. Given all of that, Jesus describes himself in one place. How does he do it? Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is the one way that our Savior describes himself. And I memorized this verse as a kid in the King's English. So to me, it's still, come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. For I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the one descriptor Jesus gives of himself. And it is profound in myriad ways. So this morning, I want us to sit in these words and reflect on what they mean with the goal of launching us into a series in which we will marvel at our unexpected Savior. That's where we want to end today. But where we begin is with the words of Christ when he describes himself. And the first thing he says is, Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. And as I thought about that, this occurred to me. We come to Jesus when we come to Jesus, we are exhausted. Have you ever thought about that? When we in our lives reach a place where we reach out for Christ, where we turn our countenance towards him, where we say, God, I need you. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, I welcome you. Jesus, I'm done with this. Whether it's for the first time, and maybe there's those of you in here who would not yet call yourself a Christian, but you're kicking the tires because spirituality seems important to you right now. And you're not quite sure, and you might not have all the answers, and you might not be totally on board with have all the answers and you might not be totally on board with this church thing and you might not be totally on board with this Bible thing, but you know that you need something. So here you sit in church curious about spirituality. And so maybe for the first time in your life you're considering reaching out to Jesus. Or maybe like most of us, you're here and you've had times in your life when you've reached to Jesus. You've had times in your life when you've forgotten. Times in your life when you held him at arm's reach. Times in your life when you allowed yourself to get too busy and you didn't prioritize him in your life. But something happens to bring you back to him. To cause you to reach out for him, to cause you to recognize your need for him and to be relieved by him. And do you know what we have in common, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, when we reach out to Jesus, do you know what's common about that that I think is remarkable? Every time you do it, you're tired. We reach to Jesus when we are exhausted. I've never known anyone who is crushing it. Their days are good. Their burden is light. Everything's going well. They're in cruise control. Their kids are awesome. Their marriage is happy. Business is good. Everything around me is great. That person doesn't tend to go, you know what I need? Jesus. That person just tends to love the goodness of life. But the people that I see in my life, again, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, who are reaching for Jesus, you know what they have in common? They're tired. Life feels heavy. It feels hard. There's this latent unhappiness or discontent that I can't seem to shake. Every now and again, we'll have a good day and we'll have a good smile and we'll have a good interaction and that feels nice. But then when we just kind of get back to ourselves, we just kind of shrink back in because we're exhausted and we're tired. And so I think, and I don't know this to be sure, I cannot interpret the intentions of Jesus himself, but it would make sense to me that Jesus says, come to me. When he invites people, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come to me, those who are exhausted, because I think it's possible that Jesus knows there's no other way that we go to him until we are exhausted, until we have worn ourselves out, forgetting about him and going about our lives however we want. And then there's an emptiness in that that causes us dissatisfaction. And eventually, in that exhaustion, Jesus in his goodness invites us to him. And so I think he says, come to me all you who are exhausted because that's the only way we go. Energized people don't run to him. They think they're fine. And so maybe simply today, if you have been crushing it and you have been cruising, maybe today we don't drop something on the ground and wait for it to break to start asking Jesus to pick up the pieces. Maybe today we go to him before we get tired. Maybe this fall, as we commit to this series, and we commit to going through this together as a church, maybe September isn't just the start of our ministry year here. Maybe it's a renewal of the fervency of your faith. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe it doesn't feel like summer was long enough, or if you have young kids, it feels like it was way too long. And maybe you are just catapulting into September and all the things and you're already tired. You need a vacation from your vacation. Let this, this verse, Jesus's invitation, be a lighthouse to us, beckoning us in to go to Jesus this fall, to reconnect with Jesus this fall, especially if we are tired, especially if we are burdened. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. If that's you, let's go to Jesus this fall. If we're tired, let's turn to him. He beckons us. But he doesn't stop there. He follows it with this interesting statement. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, which is an interesting, oh yeah, this is what that means, which is an interesting thought. It's an interesting verbal flourish, right? Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. It's, we kind of get the connotation. We understand that a yoke, at least I hope you do, if this is new information to you, your school failed you at some point, but a yoke is the thing that goes across the back of the ox so that they can pull the plow or they can pull the cart or whatever it is. It's the thing that goes over the animals so that they can pull it and be used. So he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And so we kind of understand that imagery on a visceral level already. But here's what you may not know about that word yoke and what it means. In Jesus's time and in the times in Israel prior to, rabbis were the teachers. And I'm not going to go through what it takes to become a rabbi, but there wasn't a lot of them. It was like making the NFL. And the rabbis, they were the religious teachers. They were the ones charged with teaching God's people about God's word. But there was differences in interpretation. And different rabbis would see things differently. One easy example of this is, it's said in scripture that you should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. You were not to work on the Sabbath day, which for them was Friday night to Saturday night, those 24 hours. And some rabbis looked at that and interpreted very, very strictly and very piously. And they said, if you have sandals that use a nail to fasten the leather to the sole of the sandals, those sandals have metal in them, and you can't wear them because it's requiring more of your body to pick up your foot, and that counts as work. So you cannot wear those sandals on the Sabbath. And other rabbis went, that's absurd, wear whatever you want, right? Those would be our rabbis, right? Nobody in this room is like, I'm pro-nail guy. That's the one I want. There was disagreements. If your donkey falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, can you pull it out or do you have to leave it there until Monday? When you tithe, what do you tithe? When the laws contradict each other, do I lie and protect somebody or do I tell the truth and get them in trouble? When the laws contradict each other and you don't know which way to go, that's what the rabbis were for. And so they had, they each had a way of understanding all understanding and applying and teaching all of the rules and the law and the old Testament. And that way of understanding those things was called their yoke. So when you would follow a rabbi, you would take their yoke upon you and follow the rules their way, which is not very much different than our current day denominations. Some people think that we should sprinkle water on a head of a baby, and that's baptism. Some people think that baptism is you get maximum wet, and it's for professing believers. We have difference of opinion on that. So we started the Presbyterians and the Baptists, right? Methodists have different ways that they interpret things. Lutherans, Pentecostals, we have these different things. And so back to this point, and now we can put it back up there, Laura, yoke equals religion. Yoke equals religion. It's not just an image. It's not just a metaphor. It really does mean religion. Way of thinking about faith. Way of following the rules. Way of living up to the standards of God. And so Jesus says, and this is what makes it remarkable, come to me you who are exhausted for my yoke, my religion, my way of living out your faith is easy, and my burden is light. And here's the way he makes it easy. Jesus does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He says, at one point in his ministry, somebody asked him, what's the greatest commandment? And he asked it back to them, what do you say it is? And the person answers, to love your Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have spoken wisely. On these hang the whole law and the prophets. And what Jesus meant in that statement is, if you'll simply love God and love others, you will capture all the Old Testament. You will live out the truth and the rules that are found in the Old Testament law. The 630 something rules that Moses brought down the mountain. If you will simply love God and love others, you will fulfill those things. And then he further simplifies it in the upper room discourse in John 14 through 17. We spent a spring there one time. They're, to me, the greatest collection of chapters in the Bible. It's God's, it's Jesus's final instructions to his disciples. And he says in John 14, this new command I give you, this new command I give you, do you know what it is? Go love others as I have loved you. He drops off the God part. And he says, this one command, you live by this one command, this one rule, this one thing encumbering the yoke. And that's what I'm asking you to do. And it might feel odd that he leaves off the God part, but what Jesus knows is there is no possible way for us to love others sacrificially unless Jesus himself is the one empowering and infusing that love. I cannot love you the way that I'm supposed to love you the way that Jesus loved you. I can't even sniff at it unless I am actively, adamantly, and ferociously loving God first. Then I can love you. That's why Jesus sums it up this way. And he does not encumber us with rules. Because rules are tricky anyways, aren't they? Think about one of the most basic rules. Honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. Great. What if your dad's a degenerate? What if he left the family? What if your mom's abusive? What does it look like then to honor them? What if they tell you to do things that are actively wrong? What does it look like to honor them? Maybe you have great parents. What does it look like to honor them when you're eight? And what does it look like to honor them when you're 48? That simple rule, honor your father and mother, gets tricky. And so you know what Jesus says? Let's not worry about the pedantics of that. Let's simply love others as I have loved you. How did he love? Sacrificially. He gave of himself. Always. Always patient. He was always gracious. He was always kind. And in this way, he forces us into relationships. This is why we say at Grace that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. Because our faith necessarily presses us into relationship with Jesus and then into relationship with others as we are tasked with loving one another as Jesus loves us. So when he says, come to me if you're tired, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, it's not to encumber us with rules. It's not to encumber us with do's and don'ts. It's simply to love your neighbor. We can make a rule that you shouldn't flip somebody off in traffic when they cut you off. We could make that rule. We could write it down. We could agree to it. We could abide by it. We could probably find something in Scripture that would lend itself to this idea that hanging your finger out the window is probably not a great idea in traffic. We could do that rule. But doesn't just love of our neighbor dictate that we would never do that anyways? And in this love, doesn't it make the relationship more genuine? What if every Monday, Jen sent me an email, and she said, this is what I need you to do for me to feel loved this week. And it was just a to-do list. And that was the basis of our marriage. And I did the things, and by Thursday, I'm lovable. I did them all. We good? Yes. She gives me a big hug and a kiss. Yes. Great. Now, here's the thing that she and I both know. I wouldn't do it. I'd want to. I'd really be up for it. I kind of like that policy. That makes things a lot simpler, doesn't it? But that's not how relationships work. So that's not how our relationship with Jesus works. So if we're compelled to go to him, it's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's a relationship that we lean further into with him, and then we lean outward into others. And the love of Jesus is what makes those relationships possible and makes us able to love well. So I would say if we are tired and we're not loving others well, maybe it's because we haven't been fueled by Jesus in a long time, and we should again choose to go to him. Now, that sentence is hugely important for who to know who he's inviting and what he intends for us. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We go to him for relief. But this is the part where he describes himself. And what's remarkable is he describes himself as gentle and lowly. But it's important to understand Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Do you understand that? He doesn't have to do that. If we go back to the movie and think about what that character might be who comes down from on high to rectify creation, what attitude might he be carrying with him? Again, how would he have the right to describe himself? And we don't actually have to imagine this very much. There's actually an example of this movie in scripture. If we keep turning the pages of Matthew, eventually we'll get to this parable that Jesus tells. And it's a picture of the Old Testament prophets and Israel's reaction to Christ. And he says there was this owner of the vineyard, and he rented it to some workers with the agreement that they would give him an allocated amount of the profits, of the goods goods they would take, they would take some of the harvest. He would take a big portion of the harvest. And so when harvest season came, he sent some representatives, the owner of the vineyard sent some representatives to the workers, three of them. And it said, okay, it's time for us to collect the owner's share of the harvest. And the workers killed one, beat one up and st stoned the other one, and sent the two back to tell the owner, get lost. And so the owner sends some more of his representatives, and they do the same thing. And they tell him to get lost. And so then the owner says, I'm going to send my son. Surely they will respect him and give me my profits. And then when his son shows up, they kill him. Because now we can claim the inheritance for ourselves. This is a picture of the prophets that God sent to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. They rejected them and they stoned them and they beat them up. And then eventually sending Christ. But again, if you're the son going to these ungrateful workers, what would your attitude towards them be? How might you feel towards them? What might you want to say? I remember I was playing a pickup soccer game in South Africa one time. And my dad and I were playing together. And dad he dad was I think was playing in goal and somebody was coming approaching the goal we're playing indoors and they kicked the ball and they kicked it as hard as they could and it hit my dad right in the face and snapped his snapped him back and it was like point blank it's from like me to Tom and it's indoor and we're all having fun there's's no reason to kick the ball that hard. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I saw red. I like, and I, it couldn't be helped. As soon as play started again, I ran into that guy as hard as I could. And I took him out in front of all the kids and in front of the people that we took there. I was one of the leaders of the trip. He was one of the people that we were ministering to. He was one of the camp leads. I flew 10 days to minister to him out of the overflow of the goodness of my heart. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I didn't care who he was. And after I did it, I was like, well, that's probably not the best way to handle this. How might that son feel going to that vineyard to rectify those people back to his father? Angry, entitled, knowing that he could squash him like a bug if he wanted to. And yet, gentle and lowly in heart. And I don't do this often, but that Greek word heart that's used in the text means center of your person, essence of your being. It is who you are in character to your core. And our Savior, who has every right to be angry. Who has every right to chide us for our betrayal. Who has every right to squash us under his thumb. Who has every right to say, I am here and you better come to me for I am fierce and I am angry and I am powerful and you've got about three seconds to cower before I prove it. Instead, he says, I am gentle and lowly at my core. It is the essence of who I am. And that word gentle is so interesting. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Have you ever experienced the gentleness of God and how he works to turn our hearts towards him? Where there's something in your life that you know doesn't need to be there. You know it's wrong. You know that attitude or that behavior or that pattern is unacceptable to God. You know that. And yet you persist. And God has every right to crack you over the head with a two-by-four, to come running at you and knock you over in the middle of a soccer field. He has every right to just sweep your legs out from under you and force you in your humiliation to see the errors of your ways and begin to walk right. Doesn't he? But he almost never does. Gently, humbly, graciously, he massages the areas of our life as he cradles us and offers us comfort and walks us humbly into a profound submission and conviction of our sins. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Maybe you're experiencing it now, this morning, as you hear Jesus calling you back to him. And maybe it's not some big thing. Your life's not going to blow up. He's not going to hit you with a two-by-four, but maybe this morning he's gently urging you back towards him. Jesus describes himself as gentle, and I don't think that we often enough marvel at how profound and meaningful that is. Because he didn't have to. And then he said, he's lowly in heart. He's humble. And this morning, what I want us to understand is that to be lowly is to be accessible. To be lowly, the way that Jesus is talking about, is to be accessible. And now, imagine, let's go back to the movie. This deity comes down from on high to right the wrongs and to rectify us back to our creator. Do you think you're going to get a face-to-face with that person? Like, do you think you're going to get to talk to them? Who's going to talk to that person? Who's going to talk to that entity that comes down? World leaders? The Pope? Rich people? Let me tell you what I'm sure of. That person comes down tomorrow to rectify the world back to the Creator. He's not taking a meeting with any of you. Years ago, and I still kick myself to it because it was a complete waste of time. Years ago, I emailed a United States Senator. I'm not going to tell you which one, and I'm not going to tell you what about. But I emailed a Senator because there was something happening that concerned me, and I wanted to express it. And here's what I know happened. Some 23-year-old intern read it and went, this is dumb, and deleted it and never told a soul about it. I wrote an email to an unnamed intern is what I did. It was a complete waste of time. We understand accessibility. This person who comes down from heaven is not someone that is accessible to the likes of us, unless, he says, I am lowly and gentle. I am meek. I am accessible. And we learn that he is accessible through his Holy Spirit. And we learn that where two or more are gathered in his name, that Jesus is there also. Jesus' presence is with us now in this room today. He offers that to us. He makes himself accessible. So that when we pray, when I pray in a few minutes, if you pray with me, the Holy Spirit is uttering things too deep for words to God to tell him what I really mean through the heart of my prayers. And Jesus himself is sitting at the right hand of the Father as he offers us his presence and he is interjecting to the Father on our behalf. He is that accessible. So here's what I want us to do this fall. Here's what I want us to do with gentle and lowly. Let us this fall marvel together at this unexpected Savior. Let us just take these eight weeks and read through this book and learn more about who our Jesus is and let us collectively marvel together at this unexpected Savior who comes down and he says, are you tired? Then you're who I'm looking for. Are the rules hard? Let me invite you into relationship. And let me tell you about myself. I am gentle. I don't have to be. But I am gentle at my very core. I am accessible and lowly at my very core. I hold on to none of the rights and privileges that you might impugn upon me. I am the most unexpected of saviors. And so this fall, what I want us to do is marvel at him together. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for your son and how he loves us, how he shows up for us. Jesus, thank you for being gentle when so often that gentleness is not what we deserve. Thank you for being humble and lowly and accessible that we might come to you. Thank you for being an unexpected Savior. Father, thank you for sending him to us. Jesus, thank you for leaving us with your spirit. I pray that we would together marvel at you, Jesus, and who you are, and that we would be more desirous of you with each week that goes by and that for those of us who are tired that we would use this morning as a reminder to run to you and seek rest. Jesus, it's in your name that we ask these things as you advocate for us to the Father. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your September Sunday. Happy kickoff day to those who are celebrating. If you're joining us online, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, we are grateful for that. This morning is our own kickoff of sorts as we kick off our new series called Gentle and Lowly, titled for the book, Gentle and Lowly, that we still have available in the lobby. We got 20 more copies last week, so there's some out there. Those are available for $10 a piece. Just grab some on the honor code. You can drop cash in the acrylic boxes on the way out. You can put them in the baskets if and when they come by. You can send us a money order and I will sign for it. Whatever you want to do for your $10, you feel free. But take a book if you'd like one. We're going to be going through that this fall together. And I have found that the church always thrives. There seems to be kind of a greater pulse. We kind of come alive a little bit when we all have a shared experience, when we're doing some of the same things together. And so this is an opportunity for that. It's how we kind of, you might not know this, but at Grace on staff, for me, as I think about the year, our ministry year starts in September, and then we sprint all the way to Memorial Day, and then we kind of, we have summer extreme, then we take a breath and then we get ready for September again. So I wanted to start our ministry year on the same page together, going through this book. This is a book that the staff has gone through. Kyle, our now family pastor, recommended it to us. We went through it as a staff. It was a very impactful book. We've had a small group go through it and they really loved it. And so I thought it would be good for the whole church to move through this book as well. Now in the book, there's something like 16 chapters or maybe more. And this series is only eight weeks. So clearly I'm not going to cover every chapter. I've chosen the ones that I feel are most relevant to grace, which is by the way, one of my favorite things about being a pastor of a small church is that I feel like we know each other and I know you. So when I go through a book like this, I can pick the chapters that will probably be most relevant to us, which is something that I take. I feel a great privilege in being able to do. But if you want the full experience, then you'll need to read it on your own as we move through. We will move through the chapters chronologically, but I will not hit each one. So I would encourage you to grab that book and be reading it this fall as we go through it. As we begin the series, I want to start with a little thought experiment, okay? And now this is going to require us to activate our calcified, recalcitrant imaginations, okay, that many of you have not used in a long time. I have a four-year-old son. I'm 44. I'm too old to have a four-year-old son, especially one as imaginative as he is. That kid will talk to you for 10 minutes straight, and 85% of it is complete nonsense, untethered to reality. He's got the most active imagination, and I'm bad at imaginative play. I would have been better at 24, but not much better. Okay. I haven't used my imagination since I was three. And then I, then I, then I cut that guy off. It was like, that's useless. That's not practical in the adult world. And I moved forward. Some of us are like that. We haven't imagined anything in a long time, but I want to ask you to dust it off and imagine this with me. okay? Let's pretend, and I know, I just said pretend and you guys are like, you lost me. Let's pretend together that you're going to go see a movie. And this movie you've seen from the trailers is about a creator, a deity that builds a world. And this world, the people or the beings that inhabit it, rebel against him, do not follow his rules, do not care about his presence. Most of them live lives that essentially ignore him. And they turn themselves from him. Now, I know that this is not difficult to know where I'm going. But I do want you to depict that world in your head. There is a deity. He is the main character of the movie. He creates a universe. And the center of that universe is a world. And the people, the things occupying that world are made in his image to glorify him. And yet they don't do that. They turn against him. They rebel against him. They do not care about him. And so to rectify this deity, to rectify this creation back to himself, he sends his son and says, go fix it. He sends his son to this creation and he says, I want you to go get these, get my beings, get my creations rectified back to me, facing me, serving me, and right relationship with me. Go fix what's broken. If you're imagining that with me, it's a movie that we're going to go see, and this character is sent down to creation to rectify creation back to the creator on behalf of the Father. Let me ask you this question. How would he have the right to describe himself? How would he have the right to describe himself? How would that character be able to describe himself? This character comes down, the son of the deity comes down. He says, I'm here to rectify this and to get you facing back towards God, back towards your creator. How would that character have a right to describe himself? Angry? Authoritative? Vindictive? Powerful? Just? He would have the right to be ticked, wouldn't he? He would have the right to bow up and say, you are humans, I am deity. I'm more important than you. I'm a bigger deal than you. If you don't listen to me, I'm going to get you right. Wouldn't he have every right to come down here, to be angry, to go down there, sorry, and be angry and be upset with the inhabitants and get right and say, you better cower in front of me because I'm not a problem that you want to have. And right now you do. If we imagine that movie and we imagine that character, I think it's very easy to imagine how that character might describe himself when asked. The parallel is very simple and very easy, and you guys spotted it as soon as I started the idea. But this is what Jesus does. This is the movie that we live in. God created us. He populated at the center of the universe. He populated this world with people that were made in his own image. And those people have rejected their God. And so God sends his son to rectify the situation and to turn creation back to him. He sends his son Jesus and says, go fix it. And then we ask, how would this person have the right to describe themselves? What would make sense? How would you describe yourself? How would you expect him to describe himself? And this, to me, is the arresting principle of the book Gentle and Lowly. Because according to the author, Dane Ortlund, there is but one place in Scripture where Jesus describes himself. There is but one place where Jesus gives a description of himself. In the Gospels, he's described many, many times, but it's always by his followers. It's always by the people around him. Jesus never goes on about himself. He never describes himself. He's very humble like that. But we have one place where he does. And this to me is the arresting principle of the book. What is the one place in scripture where Jesus describes himself and what does he say about himself given how he has the right to describe himself, which is any way that he wants, given what his attitude, what we would expect it to be if we were watching that movie. Given all of that, Jesus describes himself in one place. How does he do it? Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is the one way that our Savior describes himself. And I memorized this verse as a kid in the King's English. So to me, it's still, come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. For I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the one descriptor Jesus gives of himself. And it is profound in myriad ways. So this morning, I want us to sit in these words and reflect on what they mean with the goal of launching us into a series in which we will marvel at our unexpected Savior. That's where we want to end today. But where we begin is with the words of Christ when he describes himself. And the first thing he says is, Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. And as I thought about that, this occurred to me. We come to Jesus when we come to Jesus, we are exhausted. Have you ever thought about that? When we in our lives reach a place where we reach out for Christ, where we turn our countenance towards him, where we say, God, I need you. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, I welcome you. Jesus, I'm done with this. Whether it's for the first time, and maybe there's those of you in here who would not yet call yourself a Christian, but you're kicking the tires because spirituality seems important to you right now. And you're not quite sure, and you might not have all the answers, and you might not be totally on board with have all the answers and you might not be totally on board with this church thing and you might not be totally on board with this Bible thing, but you know that you need something. So here you sit in church curious about spirituality. And so maybe for the first time in your life you're considering reaching out to Jesus. Or maybe like most of us, you're here and you've had times in your life when you've reached to Jesus. You've had times in your life when you've forgotten. Times in your life when you held him at arm's reach. Times in your life when you allowed yourself to get too busy and you didn't prioritize him in your life. But something happens to bring you back to him. To cause you to reach out for him, to cause you to recognize your need for him and to be relieved by him. And do you know what we have in common, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, when we reach out to Jesus, do you know what's common about that that I think is remarkable? Every time you do it, you're tired. We reach to Jesus when we are exhausted. I've never known anyone who is crushing it. Their days are good. Their burden is light. Everything's going well. They're in cruise control. Their kids are awesome. Their marriage is happy. Business is good. Everything around me is great. That person doesn't tend to go, you know what I need? Jesus. That person just tends to love the goodness of life. But the people that I see in my life, again, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, who are reaching for Jesus, you know what they have in common? They're tired. Life feels heavy. It feels hard. There's this latent unhappiness or discontent that I can't seem to shake. Every now and again, we'll have a good day and we'll have a good smile and we'll have a good interaction and that feels nice. But then when we just kind of get back to ourselves, we just kind of shrink back in because we're exhausted and we're tired. And so I think, and I don't know this to be sure, I cannot interpret the intentions of Jesus himself, but it would make sense to me that Jesus says, come to me. When he invites people, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come to me, those who are exhausted, because I think it's possible that Jesus knows there's no other way that we go to him until we are exhausted, until we have worn ourselves out, forgetting about him and going about our lives however we want. And then there's an emptiness in that that causes us dissatisfaction. And eventually, in that exhaustion, Jesus in his goodness invites us to him. And so I think he says, come to me all you who are exhausted because that's the only way we go. Energized people don't run to him. They think they're fine. And so maybe simply today, if you have been crushing it and you have been cruising, maybe today we don't drop something on the ground and wait for it to break to start asking Jesus to pick up the pieces. Maybe today we go to him before we get tired. Maybe this fall, as we commit to this series, and we commit to going through this together as a church, maybe September isn't just the start of our ministry year here. Maybe it's a renewal of the fervency of your faith. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe it doesn't feel like summer was long enough, or if you have young kids, it feels like it was way too long. And maybe you are just catapulting into September and all the things and you're already tired. You need a vacation from your vacation. Let this, this verse, Jesus's invitation, be a lighthouse to us, beckoning us in to go to Jesus this fall, to reconnect with Jesus this fall, especially if we are tired, especially if we are burdened. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. If that's you, let's go to Jesus this fall. If we're tired, let's turn to him. He beckons us. But he doesn't stop there. He follows it with this interesting statement. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, which is an interesting, oh yeah, this is what that means, which is an interesting thought. It's an interesting verbal flourish, right? Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. It's, we kind of get the connotation. We understand that a yoke, at least I hope you do, if this is new information to you, your school failed you at some point, but a yoke is the thing that goes across the back of the ox so that they can pull the plow or they can pull the cart or whatever it is. It's the thing that goes over the animals so that they can pull it and be used. So he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And so we kind of understand that imagery on a visceral level already. But here's what you may not know about that word yoke and what it means. In Jesus's time and in the times in Israel prior to, rabbis were the teachers. And I'm not going to go through what it takes to become a rabbi, but there wasn't a lot of them. It was like making the NFL. And the rabbis, they were the religious teachers. They were the ones charged with teaching God's people about God's word. But there was differences in interpretation. And different rabbis would see things differently. One easy example of this is, it's said in scripture that you should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. You were not to work on the Sabbath day, which for them was Friday night to Saturday night, those 24 hours. And some rabbis looked at that and interpreted very, very strictly and very piously. And they said, if you have sandals that use a nail to fasten the leather to the sole of the sandals, those sandals have metal in them, and you can't wear them because it's requiring more of your body to pick up your foot, and that counts as work. So you cannot wear those sandals on the Sabbath. And other rabbis went, that's absurd, wear whatever you want, right? Those would be our rabbis, right? Nobody in this room is like, I'm pro-nail guy. That's the one I want. There was disagreements. If your donkey falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, can you pull it out or do you have to leave it there until Monday? When you tithe, what do you tithe? When the laws contradict each other, do I lie and protect somebody or do I tell the truth and get them in trouble? When the laws contradict each other and you don't know which way to go, that's what the rabbis were for. And so they had, they each had a way of understanding all understanding and applying and teaching all of the rules and the law and the old Testament. And that way of understanding those things was called their yoke. So when you would follow a rabbi, you would take their yoke upon you and follow the rules their way, which is not very much different than our current day denominations. Some people think that we should sprinkle water on a head of a baby, and that's baptism. Some people think that baptism is you get maximum wet, and it's for professing believers. We have difference of opinion on that. So we started the Presbyterians and the Baptists, right? Methodists have different ways that they interpret things. Lutherans, Pentecostals, we have these different things. And so back to this point, and now we can put it back up there, Laura, yoke equals religion. Yoke equals religion. It's not just an image. It's not just a metaphor. It really does mean religion. Way of thinking about faith. Way of following the rules. Way of living up to the standards of God. And so Jesus says, and this is what makes it remarkable, come to me you who are exhausted for my yoke, my religion, my way of living out your faith is easy, and my burden is light. And here's the way he makes it easy. Jesus does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He says, at one point in his ministry, somebody asked him, what's the greatest commandment? And he asked it back to them, what do you say it is? And the person answers, to love your Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have spoken wisely. On these hang the whole law and the prophets. And what Jesus meant in that statement is, if you'll simply love God and love others, you will capture all the Old Testament. You will live out the truth and the rules that are found in the Old Testament law. The 630 something rules that Moses brought down the mountain. If you will simply love God and love others, you will fulfill those things. And then he further simplifies it in the upper room discourse in John 14 through 17. We spent a spring there one time. They're, to me, the greatest collection of chapters in the Bible. It's God's, it's Jesus's final instructions to his disciples. And he says in John 14, this new command I give you, this new command I give you, do you know what it is? Go love others as I have loved you. He drops off the God part. And he says, this one command, you live by this one command, this one rule, this one thing encumbering the yoke. And that's what I'm asking you to do. And it might feel odd that he leaves off the God part, but what Jesus knows is there is no possible way for us to love others sacrificially unless Jesus himself is the one empowering and infusing that love. I cannot love you the way that I'm supposed to love you the way that Jesus loved you. I can't even sniff at it unless I am actively, adamantly, and ferociously loving God first. Then I can love you. That's why Jesus sums it up this way. And he does not encumber us with rules. Because rules are tricky anyways, aren't they? Think about one of the most basic rules. Honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. Great. What if your dad's a degenerate? What if he left the family? What if your mom's abusive? What does it look like then to honor them? What if they tell you to do things that are actively wrong? What does it look like to honor them? Maybe you have great parents. What does it look like to honor them when you're eight? And what does it look like to honor them when you're 48? That simple rule, honor your father and mother, gets tricky. And so you know what Jesus says? Let's not worry about the pedantics of that. Let's simply love others as I have loved you. How did he love? Sacrificially. He gave of himself. Always. Always patient. He was always gracious. He was always kind. And in this way, he forces us into relationships. This is why we say at Grace that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. Because our faith necessarily presses us into relationship with Jesus and then into relationship with others as we are tasked with loving one another as Jesus loves us. So when he says, come to me if you're tired, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, it's not to encumber us with rules. It's not to encumber us with do's and don'ts. It's simply to love your neighbor. We can make a rule that you shouldn't flip somebody off in traffic when they cut you off. We could make that rule. We could write it down. We could agree to it. We could abide by it. We could probably find something in Scripture that would lend itself to this idea that hanging your finger out the window is probably not a great idea in traffic. We could do that rule. But doesn't just love of our neighbor dictate that we would never do that anyways? And in this love, doesn't it make the relationship more genuine? What if every Monday, Jen sent me an email, and she said, this is what I need you to do for me to feel loved this week. And it was just a to-do list. And that was the basis of our marriage. And I did the things, and by Thursday, I'm lovable. I did them all. We good? Yes. She gives me a big hug and a kiss. Yes. Great. Now, here's the thing that she and I both know. I wouldn't do it. I'd want to. I'd really be up for it. I kind of like that policy. That makes things a lot simpler, doesn't it? But that's not how relationships work. So that's not how our relationship with Jesus works. So if we're compelled to go to him, it's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's a relationship that we lean further into with him, and then we lean outward into others. And the love of Jesus is what makes those relationships possible and makes us able to love well. So I would say if we are tired and we're not loving others well, maybe it's because we haven't been fueled by Jesus in a long time, and we should again choose to go to him. Now, that sentence is hugely important for who to know who he's inviting and what he intends for us. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We go to him for relief. But this is the part where he describes himself. And what's remarkable is he describes himself as gentle and lowly. But it's important to understand Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Do you understand that? He doesn't have to do that. If we go back to the movie and think about what that character might be who comes down from on high to rectify creation, what attitude might he be carrying with him? Again, how would he have the right to describe himself? And we don't actually have to imagine this very much. There's actually an example of this movie in scripture. If we keep turning the pages of Matthew, eventually we'll get to this parable that Jesus tells. And it's a picture of the Old Testament prophets and Israel's reaction to Christ. And he says there was this owner of the vineyard, and he rented it to some workers with the agreement that they would give him an allocated amount of the profits, of the goods goods they would take, they would take some of the harvest. He would take a big portion of the harvest. And so when harvest season came, he sent some representatives, the owner of the vineyard sent some representatives to the workers, three of them. And it said, okay, it's time for us to collect the owner's share of the harvest. And the workers killed one, beat one up and st stoned the other one, and sent the two back to tell the owner, get lost. And so the owner sends some more of his representatives, and they do the same thing. And they tell him to get lost. And so then the owner says, I'm going to send my son. Surely they will respect him and give me my profits. And then when his son shows up, they kill him. Because now we can claim the inheritance for ourselves. This is a picture of the prophets that God sent to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. They rejected them and they stoned them and they beat them up. And then eventually sending Christ. But again, if you're the son going to these ungrateful workers, what would your attitude towards them be? How might you feel towards them? What might you want to say? I remember I was playing a pickup soccer game in South Africa one time. And my dad and I were playing together. And dad he dad was I think was playing in goal and somebody was coming approaching the goal we're playing indoors and they kicked the ball and they kicked it as hard as they could and it hit my dad right in the face and snapped his snapped him back and it was like point blank it's from like me to Tom and it's indoor and we're all having fun there's's no reason to kick the ball that hard. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I saw red. I like, and I, it couldn't be helped. As soon as play started again, I ran into that guy as hard as I could. And I took him out in front of all the kids and in front of the people that we took there. I was one of the leaders of the trip. He was one of the people that we were ministering to. He was one of the camp leads. I flew 10 days to minister to him out of the overflow of the goodness of my heart. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I didn't care who he was. And after I did it, I was like, well, that's probably not the best way to handle this. How might that son feel going to that vineyard to rectify those people back to his father? Angry, entitled, knowing that he could squash him like a bug if he wanted to. And yet, gentle and lowly in heart. And I don't do this often, but that Greek word heart that's used in the text means center of your person, essence of your being. It is who you are in character to your core. And our Savior, who has every right to be angry. Who has every right to chide us for our betrayal. Who has every right to squash us under his thumb. Who has every right to say, I am here and you better come to me for I am fierce and I am angry and I am powerful and you've got about three seconds to cower before I prove it. Instead, he says, I am gentle and lowly at my core. It is the essence of who I am. And that word gentle is so interesting. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Have you ever experienced the gentleness of God and how he works to turn our hearts towards him? Where there's something in your life that you know doesn't need to be there. You know it's wrong. You know that attitude or that behavior or that pattern is unacceptable to God. You know that. And yet you persist. And God has every right to crack you over the head with a two-by-four, to come running at you and knock you over in the middle of a soccer field. He has every right to just sweep your legs out from under you and force you in your humiliation to see the errors of your ways and begin to walk right. Doesn't he? But he almost never does. Gently, humbly, graciously, he massages the areas of our life as he cradles us and offers us comfort and walks us humbly into a profound submission and conviction of our sins. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Maybe you're experiencing it now, this morning, as you hear Jesus calling you back to him. And maybe it's not some big thing. Your life's not going to blow up. He's not going to hit you with a two-by-four, but maybe this morning he's gently urging you back towards him. Jesus describes himself as gentle, and I don't think that we often enough marvel at how profound and meaningful that is. Because he didn't have to. And then he said, he's lowly in heart. He's humble. And this morning, what I want us to understand is that to be lowly is to be accessible. To be lowly, the way that Jesus is talking about, is to be accessible. And now, imagine, let's go back to the movie. This deity comes down from on high to right the wrongs and to rectify us back to our creator. Do you think you're going to get a face-to-face with that person? Like, do you think you're going to get to talk to them? Who's going to talk to that person? Who's going to talk to that entity that comes down? World leaders? The Pope? Rich people? Let me tell you what I'm sure of. That person comes down tomorrow to rectify the world back to the Creator. He's not taking a meeting with any of you. Years ago, and I still kick myself to it because it was a complete waste of time. Years ago, I emailed a United States Senator. I'm not going to tell you which one, and I'm not going to tell you what about. But I emailed a Senator because there was something happening that concerned me, and I wanted to express it. And here's what I know happened. Some 23-year-old intern read it and went, this is dumb, and deleted it and never told a soul about it. I wrote an email to an unnamed intern is what I did. It was a complete waste of time. We understand accessibility. This person who comes down from heaven is not someone that is accessible to the likes of us, unless, he says, I am lowly and gentle. I am meek. I am accessible. And we learn that he is accessible through his Holy Spirit. And we learn that where two or more are gathered in his name, that Jesus is there also. Jesus' presence is with us now in this room today. He offers that to us. He makes himself accessible. So that when we pray, when I pray in a few minutes, if you pray with me, the Holy Spirit is uttering things too deep for words to God to tell him what I really mean through the heart of my prayers. And Jesus himself is sitting at the right hand of the Father as he offers us his presence and he is interjecting to the Father on our behalf. He is that accessible. So here's what I want us to do this fall. Here's what I want us to do with gentle and lowly. Let us this fall marvel together at this unexpected Savior. Let us just take these eight weeks and read through this book and learn more about who our Jesus is and let us collectively marvel together at this unexpected Savior who comes down and he says, are you tired? Then you're who I'm looking for. Are the rules hard? Let me invite you into relationship. And let me tell you about myself. I am gentle. I don't have to be. But I am gentle at my very core. I am accessible and lowly at my very core. I hold on to none of the rights and privileges that you might impugn upon me. I am the most unexpected of saviors. And so this fall, what I want us to do is marvel at him together. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for your son and how he loves us, how he shows up for us. Jesus, thank you for being gentle when so often that gentleness is not what we deserve. Thank you for being humble and lowly and accessible that we might come to you. Thank you for being an unexpected Savior. Father, thank you for sending him to us. Jesus, thank you for leaving us with your spirit. I pray that we would together marvel at you, Jesus, and who you are, and that we would be more desirous of you with each week that goes by and that for those of us who are tired that we would use this morning as a reminder to run to you and seek rest. Jesus, it's in your name that we ask these things as you advocate for us to the Father. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your September Sunday. Happy kickoff day to those who are celebrating. If you're joining us online, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, we are grateful for that. This morning is our own kickoff of sorts as we kick off our new series called Gentle and Lowly, titled for the book, Gentle and Lowly, that we still have available in the lobby. We got 20 more copies last week, so there's some out there. Those are available for $10 a piece. Just grab some on the honor code. You can drop cash in the acrylic boxes on the way out. You can put them in the baskets if and when they come by. You can send us a money order and I will sign for it. Whatever you want to do for your $10, you feel free. But take a book if you'd like one. We're going to be going through that this fall together. And I have found that the church always thrives. There seems to be kind of a greater pulse. We kind of come alive a little bit when we all have a shared experience, when we're doing some of the same things together. And so this is an opportunity for that. It's how we kind of, you might not know this, but at Grace on staff, for me, as I think about the year, our ministry year starts in September, and then we sprint all the way to Memorial Day, and then we kind of, we have summer extreme, then we take a breath and then we get ready for September again. So I wanted to start our ministry year on the same page together, going through this book. This is a book that the staff has gone through. Kyle, our now family pastor, recommended it to us. We went through it as a staff. It was a very impactful book. We've had a small group go through it and they really loved it. And so I thought it would be good for the whole church to move through this book as well. Now in the book, there's something like 16 chapters or maybe more. And this series is only eight weeks. So clearly I'm not going to cover every chapter. I've chosen the ones that I feel are most relevant to grace, which is by the way, one of my favorite things about being a pastor of a small church is that I feel like we know each other and I know you. So when I go through a book like this, I can pick the chapters that will probably be most relevant to us, which is something that I take. I feel a great privilege in being able to do. But if you want the full experience, then you'll need to read it on your own as we move through. We will move through the chapters chronologically, but I will not hit each one. So I would encourage you to grab that book and be reading it this fall as we go through it. As we begin the series, I want to start with a little thought experiment, okay? And now this is going to require us to activate our calcified, recalcitrant imaginations, okay, that many of you have not used in a long time. I have a four-year-old son. I'm 44. I'm too old to have a four-year-old son, especially one as imaginative as he is. That kid will talk to you for 10 minutes straight, and 85% of it is complete nonsense, untethered to reality. He's got the most active imagination, and I'm bad at imaginative play. I would have been better at 24, but not much better. Okay. I haven't used my imagination since I was three. And then I, then I, then I cut that guy off. It was like, that's useless. That's not practical in the adult world. And I moved forward. Some of us are like that. We haven't imagined anything in a long time, but I want to ask you to dust it off and imagine this with me. okay? Let's pretend, and I know, I just said pretend and you guys are like, you lost me. Let's pretend together that you're going to go see a movie. And this movie you've seen from the trailers is about a creator, a deity that builds a world. And this world, the people or the beings that inhabit it, rebel against him, do not follow his rules, do not care about his presence. Most of them live lives that essentially ignore him. And they turn themselves from him. Now, I know that this is not difficult to know where I'm going. But I do want you to depict that world in your head. There is a deity. He is the main character of the movie. He creates a universe. And the center of that universe is a world. And the people, the things occupying that world are made in his image to glorify him. And yet they don't do that. They turn against him. They rebel against him. They do not care about him. And so to rectify this deity, to rectify this creation back to himself, he sends his son and says, go fix it. He sends his son to this creation and he says, I want you to go get these, get my beings, get my creations rectified back to me, facing me, serving me, and right relationship with me. Go fix what's broken. If you're imagining that with me, it's a movie that we're going to go see, and this character is sent down to creation to rectify creation back to the creator on behalf of the Father. Let me ask you this question. How would he have the right to describe himself? How would he have the right to describe himself? How would that character be able to describe himself? This character comes down, the son of the deity comes down. He says, I'm here to rectify this and to get you facing back towards God, back towards your creator. How would that character have a right to describe himself? Angry? Authoritative? Vindictive? Powerful? Just? He would have the right to be ticked, wouldn't he? He would have the right to bow up and say, you are humans, I am deity. I'm more important than you. I'm a bigger deal than you. If you don't listen to me, I'm going to get you right. Wouldn't he have every right to come down here, to be angry, to go down there, sorry, and be angry and be upset with the inhabitants and get right and say, you better cower in front of me because I'm not a problem that you want to have. And right now you do. If we imagine that movie and we imagine that character, I think it's very easy to imagine how that character might describe himself when asked. The parallel is very simple and very easy, and you guys spotted it as soon as I started the idea. But this is what Jesus does. This is the movie that we live in. God created us. He populated at the center of the universe. He populated this world with people that were made in his own image. And those people have rejected their God. And so God sends his son to rectify the situation and to turn creation back to him. He sends his son Jesus and says, go fix it. And then we ask, how would this person have the right to describe themselves? What would make sense? How would you describe yourself? How would you expect him to describe himself? And this, to me, is the arresting principle of the book Gentle and Lowly. Because according to the author, Dane Ortlund, there is but one place in Scripture where Jesus describes himself. There is but one place where Jesus gives a description of himself. In the Gospels, he's described many, many times, but it's always by his followers. It's always by the people around him. Jesus never goes on about himself. He never describes himself. He's very humble like that. But we have one place where he does. And this to me is the arresting principle of the book. What is the one place in scripture where Jesus describes himself and what does he say about himself given how he has the right to describe himself, which is any way that he wants, given what his attitude, what we would expect it to be if we were watching that movie. Given all of that, Jesus describes himself in one place. How does he do it? Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is the one way that our Savior describes himself. And I memorized this verse as a kid in the King's English. So to me, it's still, come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. For I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the one descriptor Jesus gives of himself. And it is profound in myriad ways. So this morning, I want us to sit in these words and reflect on what they mean with the goal of launching us into a series in which we will marvel at our unexpected Savior. That's where we want to end today. But where we begin is with the words of Christ when he describes himself. And the first thing he says is, Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. And as I thought about that, this occurred to me. We come to Jesus when we come to Jesus, we are exhausted. Have you ever thought about that? When we in our lives reach a place where we reach out for Christ, where we turn our countenance towards him, where we say, God, I need you. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, I welcome you. Jesus, I'm done with this. Whether it's for the first time, and maybe there's those of you in here who would not yet call yourself a Christian, but you're kicking the tires because spirituality seems important to you right now. And you're not quite sure, and you might not have all the answers, and you might not be totally on board with have all the answers and you might not be totally on board with this church thing and you might not be totally on board with this Bible thing, but you know that you need something. So here you sit in church curious about spirituality. And so maybe for the first time in your life you're considering reaching out to Jesus. Or maybe like most of us, you're here and you've had times in your life when you've reached to Jesus. You've had times in your life when you've forgotten. Times in your life when you held him at arm's reach. Times in your life when you allowed yourself to get too busy and you didn't prioritize him in your life. But something happens to bring you back to him. To cause you to reach out for him, to cause you to recognize your need for him and to be relieved by him. And do you know what we have in common, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, when we reach out to Jesus, do you know what's common about that that I think is remarkable? Every time you do it, you're tired. We reach to Jesus when we are exhausted. I've never known anyone who is crushing it. Their days are good. Their burden is light. Everything's going well. They're in cruise control. Their kids are awesome. Their marriage is happy. Business is good. Everything around me is great. That person doesn't tend to go, you know what I need? Jesus. That person just tends to love the goodness of life. But the people that I see in my life, again, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, who are reaching for Jesus, you know what they have in common? They're tired. Life feels heavy. It feels hard. There's this latent unhappiness or discontent that I can't seem to shake. Every now and again, we'll have a good day and we'll have a good smile and we'll have a good interaction and that feels nice. But then when we just kind of get back to ourselves, we just kind of shrink back in because we're exhausted and we're tired. And so I think, and I don't know this to be sure, I cannot interpret the intentions of Jesus himself, but it would make sense to me that Jesus says, come to me. When he invites people, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come to me, those who are exhausted, because I think it's possible that Jesus knows there's no other way that we go to him until we are exhausted, until we have worn ourselves out, forgetting about him and going about our lives however we want. And then there's an emptiness in that that causes us dissatisfaction. And eventually, in that exhaustion, Jesus in his goodness invites us to him. And so I think he says, come to me all you who are exhausted because that's the only way we go. Energized people don't run to him. They think they're fine. And so maybe simply today, if you have been crushing it and you have been cruising, maybe today we don't drop something on the ground and wait for it to break to start asking Jesus to pick up the pieces. Maybe today we go to him before we get tired. Maybe this fall, as we commit to this series, and we commit to going through this together as a church, maybe September isn't just the start of our ministry year here. Maybe it's a renewal of the fervency of your faith. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe it doesn't feel like summer was long enough, or if you have young kids, it feels like it was way too long. And maybe you are just catapulting into September and all the things and you're already tired. You need a vacation from your vacation. Let this, this verse, Jesus's invitation, be a lighthouse to us, beckoning us in to go to Jesus this fall, to reconnect with Jesus this fall, especially if we are tired, especially if we are burdened. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. If that's you, let's go to Jesus this fall. If we're tired, let's turn to him. He beckons us. But he doesn't stop there. He follows it with this interesting statement. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, which is an interesting, oh yeah, this is what that means, which is an interesting thought. It's an interesting verbal flourish, right? Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. It's, we kind of get the connotation. We understand that a yoke, at least I hope you do, if this is new information to you, your school failed you at some point, but a yoke is the thing that goes across the back of the ox so that they can pull the plow or they can pull the cart or whatever it is. It's the thing that goes over the animals so that they can pull it and be used. So he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And so we kind of understand that imagery on a visceral level already. But here's what you may not know about that word yoke and what it means. In Jesus's time and in the times in Israel prior to, rabbis were the teachers. And I'm not going to go through what it takes to become a rabbi, but there wasn't a lot of them. It was like making the NFL. And the rabbis, they were the religious teachers. They were the ones charged with teaching God's people about God's word. But there was differences in interpretation. And different rabbis would see things differently. One easy example of this is, it's said in scripture that you should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. You were not to work on the Sabbath day, which for them was Friday night to Saturday night, those 24 hours. And some rabbis looked at that and interpreted very, very strictly and very piously. And they said, if you have sandals that use a nail to fasten the leather to the sole of the sandals, those sandals have metal in them, and you can't wear them because it's requiring more of your body to pick up your foot, and that counts as work. So you cannot wear those sandals on the Sabbath. And other rabbis went, that's absurd, wear whatever you want, right? Those would be our rabbis, right? Nobody in this room is like, I'm pro-nail guy. That's the one I want. There was disagreements. If your donkey falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, can you pull it out or do you have to leave it there until Monday? When you tithe, what do you tithe? When the laws contradict each other, do I lie and protect somebody or do I tell the truth and get them in trouble? When the laws contradict each other and you don't know which way to go, that's what the rabbis were for. And so they had, they each had a way of understanding all understanding and applying and teaching all of the rules and the law and the old Testament. And that way of understanding those things was called their yoke. So when you would follow a rabbi, you would take their yoke upon you and follow the rules their way, which is not very much different than our current day denominations. Some people think that we should sprinkle water on a head of a baby, and that's baptism. Some people think that baptism is you get maximum wet, and it's for professing believers. We have difference of opinion on that. So we started the Presbyterians and the Baptists, right? Methodists have different ways that they interpret things. Lutherans, Pentecostals, we have these different things. And so back to this point, and now we can put it back up there, Laura, yoke equals religion. Yoke equals religion. It's not just an image. It's not just a metaphor. It really does mean religion. Way of thinking about faith. Way of following the rules. Way of living up to the standards of God. And so Jesus says, and this is what makes it remarkable, come to me you who are exhausted for my yoke, my religion, my way of living out your faith is easy, and my burden is light. And here's the way he makes it easy. Jesus does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He says, at one point in his ministry, somebody asked him, what's the greatest commandment? And he asked it back to them, what do you say it is? And the person answers, to love your Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have spoken wisely. On these hang the whole law and the prophets. And what Jesus meant in that statement is, if you'll simply love God and love others, you will capture all the Old Testament. You will live out the truth and the rules that are found in the Old Testament law. The 630 something rules that Moses brought down the mountain. If you will simply love God and love others, you will fulfill those things. And then he further simplifies it in the upper room discourse in John 14 through 17. We spent a spring there one time. They're, to me, the greatest collection of chapters in the Bible. It's God's, it's Jesus's final instructions to his disciples. And he says in John 14, this new command I give you, this new command I give you, do you know what it is? Go love others as I have loved you. He drops off the God part. And he says, this one command, you live by this one command, this one rule, this one thing encumbering the yoke. And that's what I'm asking you to do. And it might feel odd that he leaves off the God part, but what Jesus knows is there is no possible way for us to love others sacrificially unless Jesus himself is the one empowering and infusing that love. I cannot love you the way that I'm supposed to love you the way that Jesus loved you. I can't even sniff at it unless I am actively, adamantly, and ferociously loving God first. Then I can love you. That's why Jesus sums it up this way. And he does not encumber us with rules. Because rules are tricky anyways, aren't they? Think about one of the most basic rules. Honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. Great. What if your dad's a degenerate? What if he left the family? What if your mom's abusive? What does it look like then to honor them? What if they tell you to do things that are actively wrong? What does it look like to honor them? Maybe you have great parents. What does it look like to honor them when you're eight? And what does it look like to honor them when you're 48? That simple rule, honor your father and mother, gets tricky. And so you know what Jesus says? Let's not worry about the pedantics of that. Let's simply love others as I have loved you. How did he love? Sacrificially. He gave of himself. Always. Always patient. He was always gracious. He was always kind. And in this way, he forces us into relationships. This is why we say at Grace that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. Because our faith necessarily presses us into relationship with Jesus and then into relationship with others as we are tasked with loving one another as Jesus loves us. So when he says, come to me if you're tired, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, it's not to encumber us with rules. It's not to encumber us with do's and don'ts. It's simply to love your neighbor. We can make a rule that you shouldn't flip somebody off in traffic when they cut you off. We could make that rule. We could write it down. We could agree to it. We could abide by it. We could probably find something in Scripture that would lend itself to this idea that hanging your finger out the window is probably not a great idea in traffic. We could do that rule. But doesn't just love of our neighbor dictate that we would never do that anyways? And in this love, doesn't it make the relationship more genuine? What if every Monday, Jen sent me an email, and she said, this is what I need you to do for me to feel loved this week. And it was just a to-do list. And that was the basis of our marriage. And I did the things, and by Thursday, I'm lovable. I did them all. We good? Yes. She gives me a big hug and a kiss. Yes. Great. Now, here's the thing that she and I both know. I wouldn't do it. I'd want to. I'd really be up for it. I kind of like that policy. That makes things a lot simpler, doesn't it? But that's not how relationships work. So that's not how our relationship with Jesus works. So if we're compelled to go to him, it's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's a relationship that we lean further into with him, and then we lean outward into others. And the love of Jesus is what makes those relationships possible and makes us able to love well. So I would say if we are tired and we're not loving others well, maybe it's because we haven't been fueled by Jesus in a long time, and we should again choose to go to him. Now, that sentence is hugely important for who to know who he's inviting and what he intends for us. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We go to him for relief. But this is the part where he describes himself. And what's remarkable is he describes himself as gentle and lowly. But it's important to understand Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Do you understand that? He doesn't have to do that. If we go back to the movie and think about what that character might be who comes down from on high to rectify creation, what attitude might he be carrying with him? Again, how would he have the right to describe himself? And we don't actually have to imagine this very much. There's actually an example of this movie in scripture. If we keep turning the pages of Matthew, eventually we'll get to this parable that Jesus tells. And it's a picture of the Old Testament prophets and Israel's reaction to Christ. And he says there was this owner of the vineyard, and he rented it to some workers with the agreement that they would give him an allocated amount of the profits, of the goods goods they would take, they would take some of the harvest. He would take a big portion of the harvest. And so when harvest season came, he sent some representatives, the owner of the vineyard sent some representatives to the workers, three of them. And it said, okay, it's time for us to collect the owner's share of the harvest. And the workers killed one, beat one up and st stoned the other one, and sent the two back to tell the owner, get lost. And so the owner sends some more of his representatives, and they do the same thing. And they tell him to get lost. And so then the owner says, I'm going to send my son. Surely they will respect him and give me my profits. And then when his son shows up, they kill him. Because now we can claim the inheritance for ourselves. This is a picture of the prophets that God sent to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. They rejected them and they stoned them and they beat them up. And then eventually sending Christ. But again, if you're the son going to these ungrateful workers, what would your attitude towards them be? How might you feel towards them? What might you want to say? I remember I was playing a pickup soccer game in South Africa one time. And my dad and I were playing together. And dad he dad was I think was playing in goal and somebody was coming approaching the goal we're playing indoors and they kicked the ball and they kicked it as hard as they could and it hit my dad right in the face and snapped his snapped him back and it was like point blank it's from like me to Tom and it's indoor and we're all having fun there's's no reason to kick the ball that hard. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I saw red. I like, and I, it couldn't be helped. As soon as play started again, I ran into that guy as hard as I could. And I took him out in front of all the kids and in front of the people that we took there. I was one of the leaders of the trip. He was one of the people that we were ministering to. He was one of the camp leads. I flew 10 days to minister to him out of the overflow of the goodness of my heart. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I didn't care who he was. And after I did it, I was like, well, that's probably not the best way to handle this. How might that son feel going to that vineyard to rectify those people back to his father? Angry, entitled, knowing that he could squash him like a bug if he wanted to. And yet, gentle and lowly in heart. And I don't do this often, but that Greek word heart that's used in the text means center of your person, essence of your being. It is who you are in character to your core. And our Savior, who has every right to be angry. Who has every right to chide us for our betrayal. Who has every right to squash us under his thumb. Who has every right to say, I am here and you better come to me for I am fierce and I am angry and I am powerful and you've got about three seconds to cower before I prove it. Instead, he says, I am gentle and lowly at my core. It is the essence of who I am. And that word gentle is so interesting. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Have you ever experienced the gentleness of God and how he works to turn our hearts towards him? Where there's something in your life that you know doesn't need to be there. You know it's wrong. You know that attitude or that behavior or that pattern is unacceptable to God. You know that. And yet you persist. And God has every right to crack you over the head with a two-by-four, to come running at you and knock you over in the middle of a soccer field. He has every right to just sweep your legs out from under you and force you in your humiliation to see the errors of your ways and begin to walk right. Doesn't he? But he almost never does. Gently, humbly, graciously, he massages the areas of our life as he cradles us and offers us comfort and walks us humbly into a profound submission and conviction of our sins. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Maybe you're experiencing it now, this morning, as you hear Jesus calling you back to him. And maybe it's not some big thing. Your life's not going to blow up. He's not going to hit you with a two-by-four, but maybe this morning he's gently urging you back towards him. Jesus describes himself as gentle, and I don't think that we often enough marvel at how profound and meaningful that is. Because he didn't have to. And then he said, he's lowly in heart. He's humble. And this morning, what I want us to understand is that to be lowly is to be accessible. To be lowly, the way that Jesus is talking about, is to be accessible. And now, imagine, let's go back to the movie. This deity comes down from on high to right the wrongs and to rectify us back to our creator. Do you think you're going to get a face-to-face with that person? Like, do you think you're going to get to talk to them? Who's going to talk to that person? Who's going to talk to that entity that comes down? World leaders? The Pope? Rich people? Let me tell you what I'm sure of. That person comes down tomorrow to rectify the world back to the Creator. He's not taking a meeting with any of you. Years ago, and I still kick myself to it because it was a complete waste of time. Years ago, I emailed a United States Senator. I'm not going to tell you which one, and I'm not going to tell you what about. But I emailed a Senator because there was something happening that concerned me, and I wanted to express it. And here's what I know happened. Some 23-year-old intern read it and went, this is dumb, and deleted it and never told a soul about it. I wrote an email to an unnamed intern is what I did. It was a complete waste of time. We understand accessibility. This person who comes down from heaven is not someone that is accessible to the likes of us, unless, he says, I am lowly and gentle. I am meek. I am accessible. And we learn that he is accessible through his Holy Spirit. And we learn that where two or more are gathered in his name, that Jesus is there also. Jesus' presence is with us now in this room today. He offers that to us. He makes himself accessible. So that when we pray, when I pray in a few minutes, if you pray with me, the Holy Spirit is uttering things too deep for words to God to tell him what I really mean through the heart of my prayers. And Jesus himself is sitting at the right hand of the Father as he offers us his presence and he is interjecting to the Father on our behalf. He is that accessible. So here's what I want us to do this fall. Here's what I want us to do with gentle and lowly. Let us this fall marvel together at this unexpected Savior. Let us just take these eight weeks and read through this book and learn more about who our Jesus is and let us collectively marvel together at this unexpected Savior who comes down and he says, are you tired? Then you're who I'm looking for. Are the rules hard? Let me invite you into relationship. And let me tell you about myself. I am gentle. I don't have to be. But I am gentle at my very core. I am accessible and lowly at my very core. I hold on to none of the rights and privileges that you might impugn upon me. I am the most unexpected of saviors. And so this fall, what I want us to do is marvel at him together. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for your son and how he loves us, how he shows up for us. Jesus, thank you for being gentle when so often that gentleness is not what we deserve. Thank you for being humble and lowly and accessible that we might come to you. Thank you for being an unexpected Savior. Father, thank you for sending him to us. Jesus, thank you for leaving us with your spirit. I pray that we would together marvel at you, Jesus, and who you are, and that we would be more desirous of you with each week that goes by and that for those of us who are tired that we would use this morning as a reminder to run to you and seek rest. Jesus, it's in your name that we ask these things as you advocate for us to the Father. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your September Sunday. Happy kickoff day to those who are celebrating. If you're joining us online, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, we are grateful for that. This morning is our own kickoff of sorts as we kick off our new series called Gentle and Lowly, titled for the book, Gentle and Lowly, that we still have available in the lobby. We got 20 more copies last week, so there's some out there. Those are available for $10 a piece. Just grab some on the honor code. You can drop cash in the acrylic boxes on the way out. You can put them in the baskets if and when they come by. You can send us a money order and I will sign for it. Whatever you want to do for your $10, you feel free. But take a book if you'd like one. We're going to be going through that this fall together. And I have found that the church always thrives. There seems to be kind of a greater pulse. We kind of come alive a little bit when we all have a shared experience, when we're doing some of the same things together. And so this is an opportunity for that. It's how we kind of, you might not know this, but at Grace on staff, for me, as I think about the year, our ministry year starts in September, and then we sprint all the way to Memorial Day, and then we kind of, we have summer extreme, then we take a breath and then we get ready for September again. So I wanted to start our ministry year on the same page together, going through this book. This is a book that the staff has gone through. Kyle, our now family pastor, recommended it to us. We went through it as a staff. It was a very impactful book. We've had a small group go through it and they really loved it. And so I thought it would be good for the whole church to move through this book as well. Now in the book, there's something like 16 chapters or maybe more. And this series is only eight weeks. So clearly I'm not going to cover every chapter. I've chosen the ones that I feel are most relevant to grace, which is by the way, one of my favorite things about being a pastor of a small church is that I feel like we know each other and I know you. So when I go through a book like this, I can pick the chapters that will probably be most relevant to us, which is something that I take. I feel a great privilege in being able to do. But if you want the full experience, then you'll need to read it on your own as we move through. We will move through the chapters chronologically, but I will not hit each one. So I would encourage you to grab that book and be reading it this fall as we go through it. As we begin the series, I want to start with a little thought experiment, okay? And now this is going to require us to activate our calcified, recalcitrant imaginations, okay, that many of you have not used in a long time. I have a four-year-old son. I'm 44. I'm too old to have a four-year-old son, especially one as imaginative as he is. That kid will talk to you for 10 minutes straight, and 85% of it is complete nonsense, untethered to reality. He's got the most active imagination, and I'm bad at imaginative play. I would have been better at 24, but not much better. Okay. I haven't used my imagination since I was three. And then I, then I, then I cut that guy off. It was like, that's useless. That's not practical in the adult world. And I moved forward. Some of us are like that. We haven't imagined anything in a long time, but I want to ask you to dust it off and imagine this with me. okay? Let's pretend, and I know, I just said pretend and you guys are like, you lost me. Let's pretend together that you're going to go see a movie. And this movie you've seen from the trailers is about a creator, a deity that builds a world. And this world, the people or the beings that inhabit it, rebel against him, do not follow his rules, do not care about his presence. Most of them live lives that essentially ignore him. And they turn themselves from him. Now, I know that this is not difficult to know where I'm going. But I do want you to depict that world in your head. There is a deity. He is the main character of the movie. He creates a universe. And the center of that universe is a world. And the people, the things occupying that world are made in his image to glorify him. And yet they don't do that. They turn against him. They rebel against him. They do not care about him. And so to rectify this deity, to rectify this creation back to himself, he sends his son and says, go fix it. He sends his son to this creation and he says, I want you to go get these, get my beings, get my creations rectified back to me, facing me, serving me, and right relationship with me. Go fix what's broken. If you're imagining that with me, it's a movie that we're going to go see, and this character is sent down to creation to rectify creation back to the creator on behalf of the Father. Let me ask you this question. How would he have the right to describe himself? How would he have the right to describe himself? How would that character be able to describe himself? This character comes down, the son of the deity comes down. He says, I'm here to rectify this and to get you facing back towards God, back towards your creator. How would that character have a right to describe himself? Angry? Authoritative? Vindictive? Powerful? Just? He would have the right to be ticked, wouldn't he? He would have the right to bow up and say, you are humans, I am deity. I'm more important than you. I'm a bigger deal than you. If you don't listen to me, I'm going to get you right. Wouldn't he have every right to come down here, to be angry, to go down there, sorry, and be angry and be upset with the inhabitants and get right and say, you better cower in front of me because I'm not a problem that you want to have. And right now you do. If we imagine that movie and we imagine that character, I think it's very easy to imagine how that character might describe himself when asked. The parallel is very simple and very easy, and you guys spotted it as soon as I started the idea. But this is what Jesus does. This is the movie that we live in. God created us. He populated at the center of the universe. He populated this world with people that were made in his own image. And those people have rejected their God. And so God sends his son to rectify the situation and to turn creation back to him. He sends his son Jesus and says, go fix it. And then we ask, how would this person have the right to describe themselves? What would make sense? How would you describe yourself? How would you expect him to describe himself? And this, to me, is the arresting principle of the book Gentle and Lowly. Because according to the author, Dane Ortlund, there is but one place in Scripture where Jesus describes himself. There is but one place where Jesus gives a description of himself. In the Gospels, he's described many, many times, but it's always by his followers. It's always by the people around him. Jesus never goes on about himself. He never describes himself. He's very humble like that. But we have one place where he does. And this to me is the arresting principle of the book. What is the one place in scripture where Jesus describes himself and what does he say about himself given how he has the right to describe himself, which is any way that he wants, given what his attitude, what we would expect it to be if we were watching that movie. Given all of that, Jesus describes himself in one place. How does he do it? Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is the one way that our Savior describes himself. And I memorized this verse as a kid in the King's English. So to me, it's still, come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. For I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the one descriptor Jesus gives of himself. And it is profound in myriad ways. So this morning, I want us to sit in these words and reflect on what they mean with the goal of launching us into a series in which we will marvel at our unexpected Savior. That's where we want to end today. But where we begin is with the words of Christ when he describes himself. And the first thing he says is, Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. And as I thought about that, this occurred to me. We come to Jesus when we come to Jesus, we are exhausted. Have you ever thought about that? When we in our lives reach a place where we reach out for Christ, where we turn our countenance towards him, where we say, God, I need you. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, I welcome you. Jesus, I'm done with this. Whether it's for the first time, and maybe there's those of you in here who would not yet call yourself a Christian, but you're kicking the tires because spirituality seems important to you right now. And you're not quite sure, and you might not have all the answers, and you might not be totally on board with have all the answers and you might not be totally on board with this church thing and you might not be totally on board with this Bible thing, but you know that you need something. So here you sit in church curious about spirituality. And so maybe for the first time in your life you're considering reaching out to Jesus. Or maybe like most of us, you're here and you've had times in your life when you've reached to Jesus. You've had times in your life when you've forgotten. Times in your life when you held him at arm's reach. Times in your life when you allowed yourself to get too busy and you didn't prioritize him in your life. But something happens to bring you back to him. To cause you to reach out for him, to cause you to recognize your need for him and to be relieved by him. And do you know what we have in common, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, when we reach out to Jesus, do you know what's common about that that I think is remarkable? Every time you do it, you're tired. We reach to Jesus when we are exhausted. I've never known anyone who is crushing it. Their days are good. Their burden is light. Everything's going well. They're in cruise control. Their kids are awesome. Their marriage is happy. Business is good. Everything around me is great. That person doesn't tend to go, you know what I need? Jesus. That person just tends to love the goodness of life. But the people that I see in my life, again, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, who are reaching for Jesus, you know what they have in common? They're tired. Life feels heavy. It feels hard. There's this latent unhappiness or discontent that I can't seem to shake. Every now and again, we'll have a good day and we'll have a good smile and we'll have a good interaction and that feels nice. But then when we just kind of get back to ourselves, we just kind of shrink back in because we're exhausted and we're tired. And so I think, and I don't know this to be sure, I cannot interpret the intentions of Jesus himself, but it would make sense to me that Jesus says, come to me. When he invites people, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come to me, those who are exhausted, because I think it's possible that Jesus knows there's no other way that we go to him until we are exhausted, until we have worn ourselves out, forgetting about him and going about our lives however we want. And then there's an emptiness in that that causes us dissatisfaction. And eventually, in that exhaustion, Jesus in his goodness invites us to him. And so I think he says, come to me all you who are exhausted because that's the only way we go. Energized people don't run to him. They think they're fine. And so maybe simply today, if you have been crushing it and you have been cruising, maybe today we don't drop something on the ground and wait for it to break to start asking Jesus to pick up the pieces. Maybe today we go to him before we get tired. Maybe this fall, as we commit to this series, and we commit to going through this together as a church, maybe September isn't just the start of our ministry year here. Maybe it's a renewal of the fervency of your faith. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe it doesn't feel like summer was long enough, or if you have young kids, it feels like it was way too long. And maybe you are just catapulting into September and all the things and you're already tired. You need a vacation from your vacation. Let this, this verse, Jesus's invitation, be a lighthouse to us, beckoning us in to go to Jesus this fall, to reconnect with Jesus this fall, especially if we are tired, especially if we are burdened. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. If that's you, let's go to Jesus this fall. If we're tired, let's turn to him. He beckons us. But he doesn't stop there. He follows it with this interesting statement. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, which is an interesting, oh yeah, this is what that means, which is an interesting thought. It's an interesting verbal flourish, right? Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. It's, we kind of get the connotation. We understand that a yoke, at least I hope you do, if this is new information to you, your school failed you at some point, but a yoke is the thing that goes across the back of the ox so that they can pull the plow or they can pull the cart or whatever it is. It's the thing that goes over the animals so that they can pull it and be used. So he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And so we kind of understand that imagery on a visceral level already. But here's what you may not know about that word yoke and what it means. In Jesus's time and in the times in Israel prior to, rabbis were the teachers. And I'm not going to go through what it takes to become a rabbi, but there wasn't a lot of them. It was like making the NFL. And the rabbis, they were the religious teachers. They were the ones charged with teaching God's people about God's word. But there was differences in interpretation. And different rabbis would see things differently. One easy example of this is, it's said in scripture that you should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. You were not to work on the Sabbath day, which for them was Friday night to Saturday night, those 24 hours. And some rabbis looked at that and interpreted very, very strictly and very piously. And they said, if you have sandals that use a nail to fasten the leather to the sole of the sandals, those sandals have metal in them, and you can't wear them because it's requiring more of your body to pick up your foot, and that counts as work. So you cannot wear those sandals on the Sabbath. And other rabbis went, that's absurd, wear whatever you want, right? Those would be our rabbis, right? Nobody in this room is like, I'm pro-nail guy. That's the one I want. There was disagreements. If your donkey falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, can you pull it out or do you have to leave it there until Monday? When you tithe, what do you tithe? When the laws contradict each other, do I lie and protect somebody or do I tell the truth and get them in trouble? When the laws contradict each other and you don't know which way to go, that's what the rabbis were for. And so they had, they each had a way of understanding all understanding and applying and teaching all of the rules and the law and the old Testament. And that way of understanding those things was called their yoke. So when you would follow a rabbi, you would take their yoke upon you and follow the rules their way, which is not very much different than our current day denominations. Some people think that we should sprinkle water on a head of a baby, and that's baptism. Some people think that baptism is you get maximum wet, and it's for professing believers. We have difference of opinion on that. So we started the Presbyterians and the Baptists, right? Methodists have different ways that they interpret things. Lutherans, Pentecostals, we have these different things. And so back to this point, and now we can put it back up there, Laura, yoke equals religion. Yoke equals religion. It's not just an image. It's not just a metaphor. It really does mean religion. Way of thinking about faith. Way of following the rules. Way of living up to the standards of God. And so Jesus says, and this is what makes it remarkable, come to me you who are exhausted for my yoke, my religion, my way of living out your faith is easy, and my burden is light. And here's the way he makes it easy. Jesus does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He says, at one point in his ministry, somebody asked him, what's the greatest commandment? And he asked it back to them, what do you say it is? And the person answers, to love your Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have spoken wisely. On these hang the whole law and the prophets. And what Jesus meant in that statement is, if you'll simply love God and love others, you will capture all the Old Testament. You will live out the truth and the rules that are found in the Old Testament law. The 630 something rules that Moses brought down the mountain. If you will simply love God and love others, you will fulfill those things. And then he further simplifies it in the upper room discourse in John 14 through 17. We spent a spring there one time. They're, to me, the greatest collection of chapters in the Bible. It's God's, it's Jesus's final instructions to his disciples. And he says in John 14, this new command I give you, this new command I give you, do you know what it is? Go love others as I have loved you. He drops off the God part. And he says, this one command, you live by this one command, this one rule, this one thing encumbering the yoke. And that's what I'm asking you to do. And it might feel odd that he leaves off the God part, but what Jesus knows is there is no possible way for us to love others sacrificially unless Jesus himself is the one empowering and infusing that love. I cannot love you the way that I'm supposed to love you the way that Jesus loved you. I can't even sniff at it unless I am actively, adamantly, and ferociously loving God first. Then I can love you. That's why Jesus sums it up this way. And he does not encumber us with rules. Because rules are tricky anyways, aren't they? Think about one of the most basic rules. Honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. Great. What if your dad's a degenerate? What if he left the family? What if your mom's abusive? What does it look like then to honor them? What if they tell you to do things that are actively wrong? What does it look like to honor them? Maybe you have great parents. What does it look like to honor them when you're eight? And what does it look like to honor them when you're 48? That simple rule, honor your father and mother, gets tricky. And so you know what Jesus says? Let's not worry about the pedantics of that. Let's simply love others as I have loved you. How did he love? Sacrificially. He gave of himself. Always. Always patient. He was always gracious. He was always kind. And in this way, he forces us into relationships. This is why we say at Grace that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. Because our faith necessarily presses us into relationship with Jesus and then into relationship with others as we are tasked with loving one another as Jesus loves us. So when he says, come to me if you're tired, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, it's not to encumber us with rules. It's not to encumber us with do's and don'ts. It's simply to love your neighbor. We can make a rule that you shouldn't flip somebody off in traffic when they cut you off. We could make that rule. We could write it down. We could agree to it. We could abide by it. We could probably find something in Scripture that would lend itself to this idea that hanging your finger out the window is probably not a great idea in traffic. We could do that rule. But doesn't just love of our neighbor dictate that we would never do that anyways? And in this love, doesn't it make the relationship more genuine? What if every Monday, Jen sent me an email, and she said, this is what I need you to do for me to feel loved this week. And it was just a to-do list. And that was the basis of our marriage. And I did the things, and by Thursday, I'm lovable. I did them all. We good? Yes. She gives me a big hug and a kiss. Yes. Great. Now, here's the thing that she and I both know. I wouldn't do it. I'd want to. I'd really be up for it. I kind of like that policy. That makes things a lot simpler, doesn't it? But that's not how relationships work. So that's not how our relationship with Jesus works. So if we're compelled to go to him, it's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's a relationship that we lean further into with him, and then we lean outward into others. And the love of Jesus is what makes those relationships possible and makes us able to love well. So I would say if we are tired and we're not loving others well, maybe it's because we haven't been fueled by Jesus in a long time, and we should again choose to go to him. Now, that sentence is hugely important for who to know who he's inviting and what he intends for us. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We go to him for relief. But this is the part where he describes himself. And what's remarkable is he describes himself as gentle and lowly. But it's important to understand Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Do you understand that? He doesn't have to do that. If we go back to the movie and think about what that character might be who comes down from on high to rectify creation, what attitude might he be carrying with him? Again, how would he have the right to describe himself? And we don't actually have to imagine this very much. There's actually an example of this movie in scripture. If we keep turning the pages of Matthew, eventually we'll get to this parable that Jesus tells. And it's a picture of the Old Testament prophets and Israel's reaction to Christ. And he says there was this owner of the vineyard, and he rented it to some workers with the agreement that they would give him an allocated amount of the profits, of the goods goods they would take, they would take some of the harvest. He would take a big portion of the harvest. And so when harvest season came, he sent some representatives, the owner of the vineyard sent some representatives to the workers, three of them. And it said, okay, it's time for us to collect the owner's share of the harvest. And the workers killed one, beat one up and st stoned the other one, and sent the two back to tell the owner, get lost. And so the owner sends some more of his representatives, and they do the same thing. And they tell him to get lost. And so then the owner says, I'm going to send my son. Surely they will respect him and give me my profits. And then when his son shows up, they kill him. Because now we can claim the inheritance for ourselves. This is a picture of the prophets that God sent to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. They rejected them and they stoned them and they beat them up. And then eventually sending Christ. But again, if you're the son going to these ungrateful workers, what would your attitude towards them be? How might you feel towards them? What might you want to say? I remember I was playing a pickup soccer game in South Africa one time. And my dad and I were playing together. And dad he dad was I think was playing in goal and somebody was coming approaching the goal we're playing indoors and they kicked the ball and they kicked it as hard as they could and it hit my dad right in the face and snapped his snapped him back and it was like point blank it's from like me to Tom and it's indoor and we're all having fun there's's no reason to kick the ball that hard. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I saw red. I like, and I, it couldn't be helped. As soon as play started again, I ran into that guy as hard as I could. And I took him out in front of all the kids and in front of the people that we took there. I was one of the leaders of the trip. He was one of the people that we were ministering to. He was one of the camp leads. I flew 10 days to minister to him out of the overflow of the goodness of my heart. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I didn't care who he was. And after I did it, I was like, well, that's probably not the best way to handle this. How might that son feel going to that vineyard to rectify those people back to his father? Angry, entitled, knowing that he could squash him like a bug if he wanted to. And yet, gentle and lowly in heart. And I don't do this often, but that Greek word heart that's used in the text means center of your person, essence of your being. It is who you are in character to your core. And our Savior, who has every right to be angry. Who has every right to chide us for our betrayal. Who has every right to squash us under his thumb. Who has every right to say, I am here and you better come to me for I am fierce and I am angry and I am powerful and you've got about three seconds to cower before I prove it. Instead, he says, I am gentle and lowly at my core. It is the essence of who I am. And that word gentle is so interesting. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Have you ever experienced the gentleness of God and how he works to turn our hearts towards him? Where there's something in your life that you know doesn't need to be there. You know it's wrong. You know that attitude or that behavior or that pattern is unacceptable to God. You know that. And yet you persist. And God has every right to crack you over the head with a two-by-four, to come running at you and knock you over in the middle of a soccer field. He has every right to just sweep your legs out from under you and force you in your humiliation to see the errors of your ways and begin to walk right. Doesn't he? But he almost never does. Gently, humbly, graciously, he massages the areas of our life as he cradles us and offers us comfort and walks us humbly into a profound submission and conviction of our sins. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Maybe you're experiencing it now, this morning, as you hear Jesus calling you back to him. And maybe it's not some big thing. Your life's not going to blow up. He's not going to hit you with a two-by-four, but maybe this morning he's gently urging you back towards him. Jesus describes himself as gentle, and I don't think that we often enough marvel at how profound and meaningful that is. Because he didn't have to. And then he said, he's lowly in heart. He's humble. And this morning, what I want us to understand is that to be lowly is to be accessible. To be lowly, the way that Jesus is talking about, is to be accessible. And now, imagine, let's go back to the movie. This deity comes down from on high to right the wrongs and to rectify us back to our creator. Do you think you're going to get a face-to-face with that person? Like, do you think you're going to get to talk to them? Who's going to talk to that person? Who's going to talk to that entity that comes down? World leaders? The Pope? Rich people? Let me tell you what I'm sure of. That person comes down tomorrow to rectify the world back to the Creator. He's not taking a meeting with any of you. Years ago, and I still kick myself to it because it was a complete waste of time. Years ago, I emailed a United States Senator. I'm not going to tell you which one, and I'm not going to tell you what about. But I emailed a Senator because there was something happening that concerned me, and I wanted to express it. And here's what I know happened. Some 23-year-old intern read it and went, this is dumb, and deleted it and never told a soul about it. I wrote an email to an unnamed intern is what I did. It was a complete waste of time. We understand accessibility. This person who comes down from heaven is not someone that is accessible to the likes of us, unless, he says, I am lowly and gentle. I am meek. I am accessible. And we learn that he is accessible through his Holy Spirit. And we learn that where two or more are gathered in his name, that Jesus is there also. Jesus' presence is with us now in this room today. He offers that to us. He makes himself accessible. So that when we pray, when I pray in a few minutes, if you pray with me, the Holy Spirit is uttering things too deep for words to God to tell him what I really mean through the heart of my prayers. And Jesus himself is sitting at the right hand of the Father as he offers us his presence and he is interjecting to the Father on our behalf. He is that accessible. So here's what I want us to do this fall. Here's what I want us to do with gentle and lowly. Let us this fall marvel together at this unexpected Savior. Let us just take these eight weeks and read through this book and learn more about who our Jesus is and let us collectively marvel together at this unexpected Savior who comes down and he says, are you tired? Then you're who I'm looking for. Are the rules hard? Let me invite you into relationship. And let me tell you about myself. I am gentle. I don't have to be. But I am gentle at my very core. I am accessible and lowly at my very core. I hold on to none of the rights and privileges that you might impugn upon me. I am the most unexpected of saviors. And so this fall, what I want us to do is marvel at him together. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for your son and how he loves us, how he shows up for us. Jesus, thank you for being gentle when so often that gentleness is not what we deserve. Thank you for being humble and lowly and accessible that we might come to you. Thank you for being an unexpected Savior. Father, thank you for sending him to us. Jesus, thank you for leaving us with your spirit. I pray that we would together marvel at you, Jesus, and who you are, and that we would be more desirous of you with each week that goes by and that for those of us who are tired that we would use this morning as a reminder to run to you and seek rest. Jesus, it's in your name that we ask these things as you advocate for us to the Father. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your September Sunday. Happy kickoff day to those who are celebrating. If you're joining us online, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, we are grateful for that. This morning is our own kickoff of sorts as we kick off our new series called Gentle and Lowly, titled for the book, Gentle and Lowly, that we still have available in the lobby. We got 20 more copies last week, so there's some out there. Those are available for $10 a piece. Just grab some on the honor code. You can drop cash in the acrylic boxes on the way out. You can put them in the baskets if and when they come by. You can send us a money order and I will sign for it. Whatever you want to do for your $10, you feel free. But take a book if you'd like one. We're going to be going through that this fall together. And I have found that the church always thrives. There seems to be kind of a greater pulse. We kind of come alive a little bit when we all have a shared experience, when we're doing some of the same things together. And so this is an opportunity for that. It's how we kind of, you might not know this, but at Grace on staff, for me, as I think about the year, our ministry year starts in September, and then we sprint all the way to Memorial Day, and then we kind of, we have summer extreme, then we take a breath and then we get ready for September again. So I wanted to start our ministry year on the same page together, going through this book. This is a book that the staff has gone through. Kyle, our now family pastor, recommended it to us. We went through it as a staff. It was a very impactful book. We've had a small group go through it and they really loved it. And so I thought it would be good for the whole church to move through this book as well. Now in the book, there's something like 16 chapters or maybe more. And this series is only eight weeks. So clearly I'm not going to cover every chapter. I've chosen the ones that I feel are most relevant to grace, which is by the way, one of my favorite things about being a pastor of a small church is that I feel like we know each other and I know you. So when I go through a book like this, I can pick the chapters that will probably be most relevant to us, which is something that I take. I feel a great privilege in being able to do. But if you want the full experience, then you'll need to read it on your own as we move through. We will move through the chapters chronologically, but I will not hit each one. So I would encourage you to grab that book and be reading it this fall as we go through it. As we begin the series, I want to start with a little thought experiment, okay? And now this is going to require us to activate our calcified, recalcitrant imaginations, okay, that many of you have not used in a long time. I have a four-year-old son. I'm 44. I'm too old to have a four-year-old son, especially one as imaginative as he is. That kid will talk to you for 10 minutes straight, and 85% of it is complete nonsense, untethered to reality. He's got the most active imagination, and I'm bad at imaginative play. I would have been better at 24, but not much better. Okay. I haven't used my imagination since I was three. And then I, then I, then I cut that guy off. It was like, that's useless. That's not practical in the adult world. And I moved forward. Some of us are like that. We haven't imagined anything in a long time, but I want to ask you to dust it off and imagine this with me. okay? Let's pretend, and I know, I just said pretend and you guys are like, you lost me. Let's pretend together that you're going to go see a movie. And this movie you've seen from the trailers is about a creator, a deity that builds a world. And this world, the people or the beings that inhabit it, rebel against him, do not follow his rules, do not care about his presence. Most of them live lives that essentially ignore him. And they turn themselves from him. Now, I know that this is not difficult to know where I'm going. But I do want you to depict that world in your head. There is a deity. He is the main character of the movie. He creates a universe. And the center of that universe is a world. And the people, the things occupying that world are made in his image to glorify him. And yet they don't do that. They turn against him. They rebel against him. They do not care about him. And so to rectify this deity, to rectify this creation back to himself, he sends his son and says, go fix it. He sends his son to this creation and he says, I want you to go get these, get my beings, get my creations rectified back to me, facing me, serving me, and right relationship with me. Go fix what's broken. If you're imagining that with me, it's a movie that we're going to go see, and this character is sent down to creation to rectify creation back to the creator on behalf of the Father. Let me ask you this question. How would he have the right to describe himself? How would he have the right to describe himself? How would that character be able to describe himself? This character comes down, the son of the deity comes down. He says, I'm here to rectify this and to get you facing back towards God, back towards your creator. How would that character have a right to describe himself? Angry? Authoritative? Vindictive? Powerful? Just? He would have the right to be ticked, wouldn't he? He would have the right to bow up and say, you are humans, I am deity. I'm more important than you. I'm a bigger deal than you. If you don't listen to me, I'm going to get you right. Wouldn't he have every right to come down here, to be angry, to go down there, sorry, and be angry and be upset with the inhabitants and get right and say, you better cower in front of me because I'm not a problem that you want to have. And right now you do. If we imagine that movie and we imagine that character, I think it's very easy to imagine how that character might describe himself when asked. The parallel is very simple and very easy, and you guys spotted it as soon as I started the idea. But this is what Jesus does. This is the movie that we live in. God created us. He populated at the center of the universe. He populated this world with people that were made in his own image. And those people have rejected their God. And so God sends his son to rectify the situation and to turn creation back to him. He sends his son Jesus and says, go fix it. And then we ask, how would this person have the right to describe themselves? What would make sense? How would you describe yourself? How would you expect him to describe himself? And this, to me, is the arresting principle of the book Gentle and Lowly. Because according to the author, Dane Ortlund, there is but one place in Scripture where Jesus describes himself. There is but one place where Jesus gives a description of himself. In the Gospels, he's described many, many times, but it's always by his followers. It's always by the people around him. Jesus never goes on about himself. He never describes himself. He's very humble like that. But we have one place where he does. And this to me is the arresting principle of the book. What is the one place in scripture where Jesus describes himself and what does he say about himself given how he has the right to describe himself, which is any way that he wants, given what his attitude, what we would expect it to be if we were watching that movie. Given all of that, Jesus describes himself in one place. How does he do it? Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is the one way that our Savior describes himself. And I memorized this verse as a kid in the King's English. So to me, it's still, come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. For I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the one descriptor Jesus gives of himself. And it is profound in myriad ways. So this morning, I want us to sit in these words and reflect on what they mean with the goal of launching us into a series in which we will marvel at our unexpected Savior. That's where we want to end today. But where we begin is with the words of Christ when he describes himself. And the first thing he says is, Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. And as I thought about that, this occurred to me. We come to Jesus when we come to Jesus, we are exhausted. Have you ever thought about that? When we in our lives reach a place where we reach out for Christ, where we turn our countenance towards him, where we say, God, I need you. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, I welcome you. Jesus, I'm done with this. Whether it's for the first time, and maybe there's those of you in here who would not yet call yourself a Christian, but you're kicking the tires because spirituality seems important to you right now. And you're not quite sure, and you might not have all the answers, and you might not be totally on board with have all the answers and you might not be totally on board with this church thing and you might not be totally on board with this Bible thing, but you know that you need something. So here you sit in church curious about spirituality. And so maybe for the first time in your life you're considering reaching out to Jesus. Or maybe like most of us, you're here and you've had times in your life when you've reached to Jesus. You've had times in your life when you've forgotten. Times in your life when you held him at arm's reach. Times in your life when you allowed yourself to get too busy and you didn't prioritize him in your life. But something happens to bring you back to him. To cause you to reach out for him, to cause you to recognize your need for him and to be relieved by him. And do you know what we have in common, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, when we reach out to Jesus, do you know what's common about that that I think is remarkable? Every time you do it, you're tired. We reach to Jesus when we are exhausted. I've never known anyone who is crushing it. Their days are good. Their burden is light. Everything's going well. They're in cruise control. Their kids are awesome. Their marriage is happy. Business is good. Everything around me is great. That person doesn't tend to go, you know what I need? Jesus. That person just tends to love the goodness of life. But the people that I see in my life, again, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, who are reaching for Jesus, you know what they have in common? They're tired. Life feels heavy. It feels hard. There's this latent unhappiness or discontent that I can't seem to shake. Every now and again, we'll have a good day and we'll have a good smile and we'll have a good interaction and that feels nice. But then when we just kind of get back to ourselves, we just kind of shrink back in because we're exhausted and we're tired. And so I think, and I don't know this to be sure, I cannot interpret the intentions of Jesus himself, but it would make sense to me that Jesus says, come to me. When he invites people, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come to me, those who are exhausted, because I think it's possible that Jesus knows there's no other way that we go to him until we are exhausted, until we have worn ourselves out, forgetting about him and going about our lives however we want. And then there's an emptiness in that that causes us dissatisfaction. And eventually, in that exhaustion, Jesus in his goodness invites us to him. And so I think he says, come to me all you who are exhausted because that's the only way we go. Energized people don't run to him. They think they're fine. And so maybe simply today, if you have been crushing it and you have been cruising, maybe today we don't drop something on the ground and wait for it to break to start asking Jesus to pick up the pieces. Maybe today we go to him before we get tired. Maybe this fall, as we commit to this series, and we commit to going through this together as a church, maybe September isn't just the start of our ministry year here. Maybe it's a renewal of the fervency of your faith. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe it doesn't feel like summer was long enough, or if you have young kids, it feels like it was way too long. And maybe you are just catapulting into September and all the things and you're already tired. You need a vacation from your vacation. Let this, this verse, Jesus's invitation, be a lighthouse to us, beckoning us in to go to Jesus this fall, to reconnect with Jesus this fall, especially if we are tired, especially if we are burdened. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. If that's you, let's go to Jesus this fall. If we're tired, let's turn to him. He beckons us. But he doesn't stop there. He follows it with this interesting statement. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, which is an interesting, oh yeah, this is what that means, which is an interesting thought. It's an interesting verbal flourish, right? Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. It's, we kind of get the connotation. We understand that a yoke, at least I hope you do, if this is new information to you, your school failed you at some point, but a yoke is the thing that goes across the back of the ox so that they can pull the plow or they can pull the cart or whatever it is. It's the thing that goes over the animals so that they can pull it and be used. So he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And so we kind of understand that imagery on a visceral level already. But here's what you may not know about that word yoke and what it means. In Jesus's time and in the times in Israel prior to, rabbis were the teachers. And I'm not going to go through what it takes to become a rabbi, but there wasn't a lot of them. It was like making the NFL. And the rabbis, they were the religious teachers. They were the ones charged with teaching God's people about God's word. But there was differences in interpretation. And different rabbis would see things differently. One easy example of this is, it's said in scripture that you should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. You were not to work on the Sabbath day, which for them was Friday night to Saturday night, those 24 hours. And some rabbis looked at that and interpreted very, very strictly and very piously. And they said, if you have sandals that use a nail to fasten the leather to the sole of the sandals, those sandals have metal in them, and you can't wear them because it's requiring more of your body to pick up your foot, and that counts as work. So you cannot wear those sandals on the Sabbath. And other rabbis went, that's absurd, wear whatever you want, right? Those would be our rabbis, right? Nobody in this room is like, I'm pro-nail guy. That's the one I want. There was disagreements. If your donkey falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, can you pull it out or do you have to leave it there until Monday? When you tithe, what do you tithe? When the laws contradict each other, do I lie and protect somebody or do I tell the truth and get them in trouble? When the laws contradict each other and you don't know which way to go, that's what the rabbis were for. And so they had, they each had a way of understanding all understanding and applying and teaching all of the rules and the law and the old Testament. And that way of understanding those things was called their yoke. So when you would follow a rabbi, you would take their yoke upon you and follow the rules their way, which is not very much different than our current day denominations. Some people think that we should sprinkle water on a head of a baby, and that's baptism. Some people think that baptism is you get maximum wet, and it's for professing believers. We have difference of opinion on that. So we started the Presbyterians and the Baptists, right? Methodists have different ways that they interpret things. Lutherans, Pentecostals, we have these different things. And so back to this point, and now we can put it back up there, Laura, yoke equals religion. Yoke equals religion. It's not just an image. It's not just a metaphor. It really does mean religion. Way of thinking about faith. Way of following the rules. Way of living up to the standards of God. And so Jesus says, and this is what makes it remarkable, come to me you who are exhausted for my yoke, my religion, my way of living out your faith is easy, and my burden is light. And here's the way he makes it easy. Jesus does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He says, at one point in his ministry, somebody asked him, what's the greatest commandment? And he asked it back to them, what do you say it is? And the person answers, to love your Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have spoken wisely. On these hang the whole law and the prophets. And what Jesus meant in that statement is, if you'll simply love God and love others, you will capture all the Old Testament. You will live out the truth and the rules that are found in the Old Testament law. The 630 something rules that Moses brought down the mountain. If you will simply love God and love others, you will fulfill those things. And then he further simplifies it in the upper room discourse in John 14 through 17. We spent a spring there one time. They're, to me, the greatest collection of chapters in the Bible. It's God's, it's Jesus's final instructions to his disciples. And he says in John 14, this new command I give you, this new command I give you, do you know what it is? Go love others as I have loved you. He drops off the God part. And he says, this one command, you live by this one command, this one rule, this one thing encumbering the yoke. And that's what I'm asking you to do. And it might feel odd that he leaves off the God part, but what Jesus knows is there is no possible way for us to love others sacrificially unless Jesus himself is the one empowering and infusing that love. I cannot love you the way that I'm supposed to love you the way that Jesus loved you. I can't even sniff at it unless I am actively, adamantly, and ferociously loving God first. Then I can love you. That's why Jesus sums it up this way. And he does not encumber us with rules. Because rules are tricky anyways, aren't they? Think about one of the most basic rules. Honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. Great. What if your dad's a degenerate? What if he left the family? What if your mom's abusive? What does it look like then to honor them? What if they tell you to do things that are actively wrong? What does it look like to honor them? Maybe you have great parents. What does it look like to honor them when you're eight? And what does it look like to honor them when you're 48? That simple rule, honor your father and mother, gets tricky. And so you know what Jesus says? Let's not worry about the pedantics of that. Let's simply love others as I have loved you. How did he love? Sacrificially. He gave of himself. Always. Always patient. He was always gracious. He was always kind. And in this way, he forces us into relationships. This is why we say at Grace that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. Because our faith necessarily presses us into relationship with Jesus and then into relationship with others as we are tasked with loving one another as Jesus loves us. So when he says, come to me if you're tired, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, it's not to encumber us with rules. It's not to encumber us with do's and don'ts. It's simply to love your neighbor. We can make a rule that you shouldn't flip somebody off in traffic when they cut you off. We could make that rule. We could write it down. We could agree to it. We could abide by it. We could probably find something in Scripture that would lend itself to this idea that hanging your finger out the window is probably not a great idea in traffic. We could do that rule. But doesn't just love of our neighbor dictate that we would never do that anyways? And in this love, doesn't it make the relationship more genuine? What if every Monday, Jen sent me an email, and she said, this is what I need you to do for me to feel loved this week. And it was just a to-do list. And that was the basis of our marriage. And I did the things, and by Thursday, I'm lovable. I did them all. We good? Yes. She gives me a big hug and a kiss. Yes. Great. Now, here's the thing that she and I both know. I wouldn't do it. I'd want to. I'd really be up for it. I kind of like that policy. That makes things a lot simpler, doesn't it? But that's not how relationships work. So that's not how our relationship with Jesus works. So if we're compelled to go to him, it's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's a relationship that we lean further into with him, and then we lean outward into others. And the love of Jesus is what makes those relationships possible and makes us able to love well. So I would say if we are tired and we're not loving others well, maybe it's because we haven't been fueled by Jesus in a long time, and we should again choose to go to him. Now, that sentence is hugely important for who to know who he's inviting and what he intends for us. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We go to him for relief. But this is the part where he describes himself. And what's remarkable is he describes himself as gentle and lowly. But it's important to understand Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Do you understand that? He doesn't have to do that. If we go back to the movie and think about what that character might be who comes down from on high to rectify creation, what attitude might he be carrying with him? Again, how would he have the right to describe himself? And we don't actually have to imagine this very much. There's actually an example of this movie in scripture. If we keep turning the pages of Matthew, eventually we'll get to this parable that Jesus tells. And it's a picture of the Old Testament prophets and Israel's reaction to Christ. And he says there was this owner of the vineyard, and he rented it to some workers with the agreement that they would give him an allocated amount of the profits, of the goods goods they would take, they would take some of the harvest. He would take a big portion of the harvest. And so when harvest season came, he sent some representatives, the owner of the vineyard sent some representatives to the workers, three of them. And it said, okay, it's time for us to collect the owner's share of the harvest. And the workers killed one, beat one up and st stoned the other one, and sent the two back to tell the owner, get lost. And so the owner sends some more of his representatives, and they do the same thing. And they tell him to get lost. And so then the owner says, I'm going to send my son. Surely they will respect him and give me my profits. And then when his son shows up, they kill him. Because now we can claim the inheritance for ourselves. This is a picture of the prophets that God sent to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. They rejected them and they stoned them and they beat them up. And then eventually sending Christ. But again, if you're the son going to these ungrateful workers, what would your attitude towards them be? How might you feel towards them? What might you want to say? I remember I was playing a pickup soccer game in South Africa one time. And my dad and I were playing together. And dad he dad was I think was playing in goal and somebody was coming approaching the goal we're playing indoors and they kicked the ball and they kicked it as hard as they could and it hit my dad right in the face and snapped his snapped him back and it was like point blank it's from like me to Tom and it's indoor and we're all having fun there's's no reason to kick the ball that hard. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I saw red. I like, and I, it couldn't be helped. As soon as play started again, I ran into that guy as hard as I could. And I took him out in front of all the kids and in front of the people that we took there. I was one of the leaders of the trip. He was one of the people that we were ministering to. He was one of the camp leads. I flew 10 days to minister to him out of the overflow of the goodness of my heart. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I didn't care who he was. And after I did it, I was like, well, that's probably not the best way to handle this. How might that son feel going to that vineyard to rectify those people back to his father? Angry, entitled, knowing that he could squash him like a bug if he wanted to. And yet, gentle and lowly in heart. And I don't do this often, but that Greek word heart that's used in the text means center of your person, essence of your being. It is who you are in character to your core. And our Savior, who has every right to be angry. Who has every right to chide us for our betrayal. Who has every right to squash us under his thumb. Who has every right to say, I am here and you better come to me for I am fierce and I am angry and I am powerful and you've got about three seconds to cower before I prove it. Instead, he says, I am gentle and lowly at my core. It is the essence of who I am. And that word gentle is so interesting. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Have you ever experienced the gentleness of God and how he works to turn our hearts towards him? Where there's something in your life that you know doesn't need to be there. You know it's wrong. You know that attitude or that behavior or that pattern is unacceptable to God. You know that. And yet you persist. And God has every right to crack you over the head with a two-by-four, to come running at you and knock you over in the middle of a soccer field. He has every right to just sweep your legs out from under you and force you in your humiliation to see the errors of your ways and begin to walk right. Doesn't he? But he almost never does. Gently, humbly, graciously, he massages the areas of our life as he cradles us and offers us comfort and walks us humbly into a profound submission and conviction of our sins. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Maybe you're experiencing it now, this morning, as you hear Jesus calling you back to him. And maybe it's not some big thing. Your life's not going to blow up. He's not going to hit you with a two-by-four, but maybe this morning he's gently urging you back towards him. Jesus describes himself as gentle, and I don't think that we often enough marvel at how profound and meaningful that is. Because he didn't have to. And then he said, he's lowly in heart. He's humble. And this morning, what I want us to understand is that to be lowly is to be accessible. To be lowly, the way that Jesus is talking about, is to be accessible. And now, imagine, let's go back to the movie. This deity comes down from on high to right the wrongs and to rectify us back to our creator. Do you think you're going to get a face-to-face with that person? Like, do you think you're going to get to talk to them? Who's going to talk to that person? Who's going to talk to that entity that comes down? World leaders? The Pope? Rich people? Let me tell you what I'm sure of. That person comes down tomorrow to rectify the world back to the Creator. He's not taking a meeting with any of you. Years ago, and I still kick myself to it because it was a complete waste of time. Years ago, I emailed a United States Senator. I'm not going to tell you which one, and I'm not going to tell you what about. But I emailed a Senator because there was something happening that concerned me, and I wanted to express it. And here's what I know happened. Some 23-year-old intern read it and went, this is dumb, and deleted it and never told a soul about it. I wrote an email to an unnamed intern is what I did. It was a complete waste of time. We understand accessibility. This person who comes down from heaven is not someone that is accessible to the likes of us, unless, he says, I am lowly and gentle. I am meek. I am accessible. And we learn that he is accessible through his Holy Spirit. And we learn that where two or more are gathered in his name, that Jesus is there also. Jesus' presence is with us now in this room today. He offers that to us. He makes himself accessible. So that when we pray, when I pray in a few minutes, if you pray with me, the Holy Spirit is uttering things too deep for words to God to tell him what I really mean through the heart of my prayers. And Jesus himself is sitting at the right hand of the Father as he offers us his presence and he is interjecting to the Father on our behalf. He is that accessible. So here's what I want us to do this fall. Here's what I want us to do with gentle and lowly. Let us this fall marvel together at this unexpected Savior. Let us just take these eight weeks and read through this book and learn more about who our Jesus is and let us collectively marvel together at this unexpected Savior who comes down and he says, are you tired? Then you're who I'm looking for. Are the rules hard? Let me invite you into relationship. And let me tell you about myself. I am gentle. I don't have to be. But I am gentle at my very core. I am accessible and lowly at my very core. I hold on to none of the rights and privileges that you might impugn upon me. I am the most unexpected of saviors. And so this fall, what I want us to do is marvel at him together. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for your son and how he loves us, how he shows up for us. Jesus, thank you for being gentle when so often that gentleness is not what we deserve. Thank you for being humble and lowly and accessible that we might come to you. Thank you for being an unexpected Savior. Father, thank you for sending him to us. Jesus, thank you for leaving us with your spirit. I pray that we would together marvel at you, Jesus, and who you are, and that we would be more desirous of you with each week that goes by and that for those of us who are tired that we would use this morning as a reminder to run to you and seek rest. Jesus, it's in your name that we ask these things as you advocate for us to the Father. Amen.