John 4

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace, and I have the honor this morning of being able to close out our time in our series called Powerful Prayers, where we've been looking at different prayers throughout Scripture and waning and pulling out any meaning that we can find in those for ourself and for our life and for our faith. To make a really weird transition, I had this buddy back in the day. I'm not going to say when because I don't want people reading between the lines. It's before I was here, so none of you know. But I had this buddy who was like, I think, ascribing to be an influencer before an influencer existed, like a social media influencer, do we know these? He was so precise on his social media. Like, he didn't post, like, no caption or no tweet was posted until it had lived in, like, on his notes app for, like, two weeks to make sure it was good enough. He had times, like, he literally, he had, like, days and times. I think Sunday night, like, Sunday, like, midnight was kind of his time to post because that was when most people were at home on their computer doing homework and therefore probably scrolling Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. And so there would be the most possible, like it would optimize the amount of likes and comments and all of those things that he would get on his posts. He was very, very precise with those things, even including if his posts didn't do the numbers that he wished that they would have done, if he didn't get quite as many comments or quite as many likes as he would have liked, it bummed him out to the point that he would just delete the post because he's like, well, this is a worthless post, which is a pretty silly and funny thing. But ultimately, what we found is here is this guy who his mission was to create a version of himself that was the best possible version of himself that he could show to the people around him. And his value was placed in the response from other people to that life that he had sculpted and crafted. Now, I don't imagine many of you guys are that precise in these dealings, and so you're like, yeah, cool, whatever. Nice story, Kyle. But let me give you a couple other scenarios. See if they ring a bell, or even if they don't, see if something similar maybe sparks your interest. Your mom, and as your kids are growing up, you're starting to have more days than bad days. You're a dad, and you just can't really seem to figure out why your kids always matter, why you can't control your temper, or why your family can't just be a little bit easier. Your kids can't just be a little bit easier to manage. And you're starting to feel a bit of shame for it because I'm a mom, I'm a dad, it's my identity, that's who I am. And I feel like I'm not doing a good job. And then on top of that, you jump onto Instagram and and here's this other family who their kids have their shirts tucked in. I couldn't pay my kids enough money to tuck their shirts in. And as you see it, and as you see these posts of these families and these moms and these dads who seem to be doing it a lot better than you're doing it based on these pictures or based on small group and what you hear from the other parents in your small group or whatever it might be, you start to just feel shame. You're made to feel lesser than, normally by your own self. You're kind of inflicting shame on yourself because why am I not doing better? Why am I not being better? Or maybe you're looking at the people around in your circle, in your small group, like, gosh, man, they seem to be figuring out this work-life balance way better than I am because this is really difficult for me. It's really hard to navigate marriage while I navigate career. It's really hard watching people at my work who are doing better than I am and accomplishing more than I am and much more quickly moving up the ladder than I am. And this is what I do. This is who I am. And I'm clearly not good enough or not as good as the people around me. And so once again, you just feel shame. You feel less valuable or less valued because of your performance and what you see. Maybe people around you are starting to retire and you're like, what did they do? Why are they so much smarter and w than I am, and I still have to keep working? What's the deal here? Maybe you don't want to give up work because your entire identity is found in it. Who am I if I'm not doing this thing in my life? Here's one. Maybe something in your life has been marked by some sin and some shame in your life. Maybe it's something that was public. You did something wrong. You messed up. And the people around you know it. And you start to get more worried and more worried as you roll up to small group because you know, man, everybody knows. Everybody knows that I did this thing. And I know they can't see past that I've done this thing because I know that I can't see past that I've done this thing. Maybe you start walking around your friend groups and people are looking at you and giving you that gaze that you know, gosh, that is a judgmental gaze and I do not like it. Or they say snide comments because in their minds and in their brains, if they can belittle you, then they can raise and elevate their ego and puff themselves up a bit. Or what I think I see most of all, maybe it doesn't even matter what the people around you's reaction is because you are so crippled by the shame that is inside of you because of something that you do or something that you see that you are or things that are in your heart that you know shouldn't be there. And so it doesn't matter whether anybody shows any judgment towards you or is judgmental in any way because you've already decided you're not going to give yourself any grace and you're just going to walk in shame. And so you start to pull away and you start to disconnect, especially I got to stop going to small group. I can't measure myself up to these people because I just feel shameful and less than. I can't go to church. I can't sit around these people who love the Lord and have a Lord who loves them when I know that the contents of my heart are this or that I've done this and I cannot move past it and I cannot offer myself grace to get past this. That one is exactly what we find in the story of the woman at the well in John 4. The woman at the well is a pretty, like, it's a story that probably a lot of us have heard, but I think one of the difficulties of the woman at the well, or because her shortcomings and her sin are so specific that it's hard to actually find ourselves and place ourselves inside of the story. But ultimately, what we see and how we experience and come to understand why this woman is in the place that she's in is because she was dealing with a shame that was causing her to completely disconnect and to avoid any interaction with anyone. We find her at the well drawing water in the middle and the hottest part of the day by herself. This doesn't happen. Culturally, you don't go to get water in the middle of the day. First, because basically everything that they needed to do around the house and for themselves, they need the fresh water for that day. And so to go later in the day is to not be able to do all of those things up until that point. Second, you don't go in the hottest part of the day because it's the hottest part of the day. You know, like you have to carry those water, I don't know, the water carrying devices, vases, or I don't know what they what they... I don't know. Ashlyn made our wedding registry, so hopefully she knows the name of water-carrying devices and put them on there. I don't know. But nonetheless, vases or bowls or something that you have to carry. And then, I mean, as any of you guys know, as soon as you carry something full of liquid for any amount of time, it is very difficult, especially when it is very hot in the middle of the day. So why is this lady standing here in the middle of the day by herself doing something that every other person has already done in the morning? Culturally, we realize and we find out she's kind of hiding. She's avoiding any possible contact with the people around her because the people around her know her life. They know her sins and they know her shortcomings. And she doesn't want to deal with it. We find out what those are as she begins talking to Jesus. As she goes and he asks for water and as they begin talking, at some point he says, hey, go get your husband. I'd love to meet him. Knowing what he's doing and she says, I actually don't have a husband, I'm not married. And Jesus responds, I know you're not married. You've been married four times, and now this fifth man that you're living with, you're not married to. Essentially, reading between the lines, she has lived a life of promiscuity and adultery. And that unlocks why she's there in the middle of the day. To avoid any possible interaction with somebody who would give her that knowing gaze. Walking up to somebody who might treat her as lesser than because of her sin that she has lived in and is currently living in. Or maybe, maybe it's not even as much about what other people will do, but because she cannot offer herself and all she can think about as she's around anyone is comparing herself to the other people and it's just building up shame inside of her, and so she has just decided to eliminate all possibility of coming across anyone. But there was Jesus. As they talk, and as she kind of, why are you talking to me? I'm a woman. I'm not Jewish. Why are you a Jewish man, why would you talk to me? And his response is, man, if you knew who I was, you would ask me for a drink because I can give you water where you will never thirst again. I can give you a water that will satisfy your soul for eternity. There is no division. There's no Gentile and Jew soon enough. Because soon enough, a time is coming where everyone will be completely united under God's love, being able to be in unity, worshiping God together in his love. And I think she starts to realize who he is. And she says, sir, I've heard tell that there's a Christ who's coming. There's a Messiah who's coming, who's going to make all of this known to us. He's going to tell us how we get to experience this unity, how we get to experience unity under God. And he looks at her and he says, I'm him. I'm the guy. I'm the Messiah that you're talking about. It's an absolutely incredible story. She gets to be one of the first people on the earth to know that this is the Messiah who is coming to unite all people under God by his blood. But I tell you it not just because it's a great story, but because I think it connects really well to something that we find in our prayer that we find in Psalm 139. And that comes at the end of the story. The end of the story, as I read it, I both think, hey, this is great, and I also think, this is weird, and I don't get it. As a response to her recognizing, realizing, and understanding who Jesus is and her interactions with Jesus, she goes back into town and proclaims and exclaims to them. Now, remember, this is the lady who was off by herself getting water in the middle of the day, making sure that she had zero interactions with anyone who lives in her town and in her community because she didn't want to experience the shame of getting or having to experience anybody. But she met Jesus. And so she felt like she could go and talk to these people. That makes sense to me. And half of what she says makes sense to me. She says, could this really be the Messiah? But she doesn't pose the question. She doesn't pose the question because she doesn't go, you know what, guys, I was getting water over here. This dude asked if I wanted to give him a drink. And then he's like, actually, I got a drink for you that will quench your thirst forever. I have this guy who said that through him and by his power, that we are going to be united in God, all one people just glorifying and worshiping God. She doesn't say any of that. She says, while I was getting water, I met this guy who told me everything about my life. Could this be the Messiah? In the joy of exclamation, she brings up, I met this guy who knew everything about me. How does that make sense? Why would a person who is hiding from anybody who could possibly know anything about her life, how could she make a full 180 to now go and find all of those people and exclaim to them, I have met this guy and he knows every part of me. How awesome is this? This guy might be the Messiah. It doesn't make sense to me. And it connects, I think, really well to the beginning of Psalm 139, a prayer to David that also is insane to me and absolutely terrifying. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you, Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. All right, here's the gist. David is praying and considers it fully wonderful that God knows every single part of who he is. I don't know about you guys, but I don't want anyone to know that about me. I think if any of you knew what lied on the other side of the Kyle that I present to the world, I think you would like, no one would ever want to be around me again. There is a lot of ugly and a lot of imperfect that comes from that. And not only says that God knows every one of our actions, but he knows every one of our words that has yet to come on our lips. He knows every single thought that we've ever thought. What that means is when we decide that we're going to love on somebody or serve somebody, but it's for selfish ambition, he knows it's for selfish ambition and we're doing it for ourself. He knows that while I completely judge and I do not like this person, yet on the outside I'm going to love them and serve them however best I can, he knows how I really feel about that person in my heart. How can David consider it wonderful for a God who holds our life and our eternity in his hands? How can it be wonderful for that God to know us wholly and completely? Not only that, but verses 7 through 13 basically says, there is nowhere that I can run from you. I cannot hide from you anywhere. How can David find it wonderful? And how can the woman at the well exclaim and find joy in the fact that there is this man, Jesus, and there is this God who knows every single thought, intention, and action in our life? So we press on into David's prayer. And I think we in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, God. Verses 1 through 6, you find David pray about how wonderful it is that God would fully and completely know him. In 7 through 13, you find out that there's no place to hide from him, all of which are absolutely terrifying to me. But in 13 through 18 is where you find why it is wonderful. Because God knows this completely because he created us. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. What David is saying is that as God is your child, I have been made and created on purpose. Ephesians 2.10 says we are God's handiwork. Other translations say we are God's workmanship. We are his masterpiece created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Every single one of us were created on purpose. There was intention in our creation. It wasn't random. God created you to be you. He created me to be me. He created us on purpose. He knows us completely. There's nowhere that we could go to hide. And he sent his son to experience the condemnation and the death for our sins that we deserve so that we get to experience an eternal relationship with him. All of that to say that not only as children of God, not only are we holy and completely known by God, but we are wholly and completely loved by God. To me, I see David's joy in a new light. I see complete clarity in the light of David as he declares it as wonderful to be fully known for good and for bad. I see the same in the woman at the well of why she might exclaim joyously that here is a man who knew every part of me. Tim Keller puts it this way. He says, But not be known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our biggest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved, that is what we need more than anything. That's why David was able to find peace knowing that every thought, every desire, and every action in his life, because he was a child of God, no longer, no longer shades God's view of him. Because he is fully loved and created and set apart by God, there's no longer condemnation. There's only love and there's only grace that he gets to experience. He gets to experience being fully known and being fully loved. When you look at the woman at the well. And probably for the first time in a long time, she was able to realize and experience the freedom that comes from not having to anymore be defined by or held back by her past or her present. Because all that mattered now was there's this man who not only talks of this eternity, not only talks of this unity under the Father, under God, but he is telling me, I think, that I get to be a part of it. Me, the person who has to hide from everyone because I cannot deal or bear with the amount of shame that I hold on to, this same woman who is living in utter and complete fear, completely and wholly crippled by shame, had to run down to town to the people she was avoiding, and she had to say, guys, there's this guy who knows all the things you guys know about me, and he, I think, I'm pretty sure, he is offering me the same love that he's offering all of us. Somehow, I get to be a part of this. What if us, as Christians, as children of God, lived in the freedom that she got to experience? Where we weren't always and completely crippled by the fear and anxiety and the shame that is brought on by comparing ourselves to the people around us all the time. What if we weren't defined by the accomplishments that we have or the things that we are trying to figure out? What if we weren't at all defined by anything except for people who are wholly known and wholly loved by God? Can you imagine that freedom? Can you imagine the way that you could treat people and experience life if you weren't held back by your fear and by your anxiety of how people see you or how you're presenting yourself? If you weren't consistently bringing shame upon yourself and couldn't get over the fact that you are the way that you are in certain ways, not realizing that God has forgiven that a long time ago and God created you exactly as he intended to create you? Tim Keller writes separately in a separate book, Jesus took the condemnation we deserve. He faced the trial that should be ours so that we do not have to face any more trials. So I simply need to ask God to accept me because of what the Lord Jesus has done. Jesus took on the condemnation and the trial for us. And so, in light of that, we read on. Listen. Listen. Then the only person whose opinion counts looks at me and he finds me more valuable than all the jewels in the earth. How can we worry about being snubbed now? How can we worry about being ignored now? How can we care that much about what we look like in the mirror now? To continue in my own words, why would we ever place our source of identity, value, or worth into the hands of anything outside of a perfect father's perfect love for us? Who do we think we are to not offer ourselves grace when Christ and God's eternal position in heaven, eternal posture in heaven, is to have grace and forgiveness for you? Who do we think we are that our grace should be more expensive than God's? Who do we think we are that we are not allowing ourselves and offering ourselves the grace that we have already freely been given through the blood of Christ? And when you look at the other people around you, when you look at a mom on social media, when you look at a dad who seems to really be able to just get it with their son, just really be able to play with their kids and connect and all this stuff and you're having a hard time, when you look at the accomplishments of someone else that's around you in your circle, at your work, in your small group, wherever you find yourself comparing your life to the life of another one in order to boost or deflate your ego, here's my question. What comparison can you make that compares to the knowledge that you have been fearfully and wonderfully made by a perfect creator? What comparison can you make to anyone else around you that compares to that knowledge? That you are both fully known and fully loved by the creator of the universe. And through the blood of Christ, you have been set apart for the joy of an eternal relationship with your creator, God. May we today, may we this week, strive to experience the freedom of the woman in the well, the freedom of David who prays and is thankful that a God fully knows him. Offering our self-grace, offering the people around us grace, and only looking at ourselves and the people around us in one light and one light only as people who are completely and wholly known by God and loved by God. And may that be our only distinction for ourselves. Let's pray. Lord, I don't know why it's so hard for us to give ourselves the grace and to find our identity in you, even though you've made it so accessible and so easy to do so. Lord, would you just please lighten up our hearts and allow us maybe for the first time to experience the freedom of having complete certainty in our identity, our worth, and our value in you. And look for it nowhere else. Lord, we love you so much. Amen.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace, and I have the honor this morning of being able to close out our time in our series called Powerful Prayers, where we've been looking at different prayers throughout Scripture and waning and pulling out any meaning that we can find in those for ourself and for our life and for our faith. To make a really weird transition, I had this buddy back in the day. I'm not going to say when because I don't want people reading between the lines. It's before I was here, so none of you know. But I had this buddy who was like, I think, ascribing to be an influencer before an influencer existed, like a social media influencer, do we know these? He was so precise on his social media. Like, he didn't post, like, no caption or no tweet was posted until it had lived in, like, on his notes app for, like, two weeks to make sure it was good enough. He had times, like, he literally, he had, like, days and times. I think Sunday night, like, Sunday, like, midnight was kind of his time to post because that was when most people were at home on their computer doing homework and therefore probably scrolling Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. And so there would be the most possible, like it would optimize the amount of likes and comments and all of those things that he would get on his posts. He was very, very precise with those things, even including if his posts didn't do the numbers that he wished that they would have done, if he didn't get quite as many comments or quite as many likes as he would have liked, it bummed him out to the point that he would just delete the post because he's like, well, this is a worthless post, which is a pretty silly and funny thing. But ultimately, what we found is here is this guy who his mission was to create a version of himself that was the best possible version of himself that he could show to the people around him. And his value was placed in the response from other people to that life that he had sculpted and crafted. Now, I don't imagine many of you guys are that precise in these dealings, and so you're like, yeah, cool, whatever. Nice story, Kyle. But let me give you a couple other scenarios. See if they ring a bell, or even if they don't, see if something similar maybe sparks your interest. Your mom, and as your kids are growing up, you're starting to have more days than bad days. You're a dad, and you just can't really seem to figure out why your kids always matter, why you can't control your temper, or why your family can't just be a little bit easier. Your kids can't just be a little bit easier to manage. And you're starting to feel a bit of shame for it because I'm a mom, I'm a dad, it's my identity, that's who I am. And I feel like I'm not doing a good job. And then on top of that, you jump onto Instagram and and here's this other family who their kids have their shirts tucked in. I couldn't pay my kids enough money to tuck their shirts in. And as you see it, and as you see these posts of these families and these moms and these dads who seem to be doing it a lot better than you're doing it based on these pictures or based on small group and what you hear from the other parents in your small group or whatever it might be, you start to just feel shame. You're made to feel lesser than, normally by your own self. You're kind of inflicting shame on yourself because why am I not doing better? Why am I not being better? Or maybe you're looking at the people around in your circle, in your small group, like, gosh, man, they seem to be figuring out this work-life balance way better than I am because this is really difficult for me. It's really hard to navigate marriage while I navigate career. It's really hard watching people at my work who are doing better than I am and accomplishing more than I am and much more quickly moving up the ladder than I am. And this is what I do. This is who I am. And I'm clearly not good enough or not as good as the people around me. And so once again, you just feel shame. You feel less valuable or less valued because of your performance and what you see. Maybe people around you are starting to retire and you're like, what did they do? Why are they so much smarter and w than I am, and I still have to keep working? What's the deal here? Maybe you don't want to give up work because your entire identity is found in it. Who am I if I'm not doing this thing in my life? Here's one. Maybe something in your life has been marked by some sin and some shame in your life. Maybe it's something that was public. You did something wrong. You messed up. And the people around you know it. And you start to get more worried and more worried as you roll up to small group because you know, man, everybody knows. Everybody knows that I did this thing. And I know they can't see past that I've done this thing because I know that I can't see past that I've done this thing. Maybe you start walking around your friend groups and people are looking at you and giving you that gaze that you know, gosh, that is a judgmental gaze and I do not like it. Or they say snide comments because in their minds and in their brains, if they can belittle you, then they can raise and elevate their ego and puff themselves up a bit. Or what I think I see most of all, maybe it doesn't even matter what the people around you's reaction is because you are so crippled by the shame that is inside of you because of something that you do or something that you see that you are or things that are in your heart that you know shouldn't be there. And so it doesn't matter whether anybody shows any judgment towards you or is judgmental in any way because you've already decided you're not going to give yourself any grace and you're just going to walk in shame. And so you start to pull away and you start to disconnect, especially I got to stop going to small group. I can't measure myself up to these people because I just feel shameful and less than. I can't go to church. I can't sit around these people who love the Lord and have a Lord who loves them when I know that the contents of my heart are this or that I've done this and I cannot move past it and I cannot offer myself grace to get past this. That one is exactly what we find in the story of the woman at the well in John 4. The woman at the well is a pretty, like, it's a story that probably a lot of us have heard, but I think one of the difficulties of the woman at the well, or because her shortcomings and her sin are so specific that it's hard to actually find ourselves and place ourselves inside of the story. But ultimately, what we see and how we experience and come to understand why this woman is in the place that she's in is because she was dealing with a shame that was causing her to completely disconnect and to avoid any interaction with anyone. We find her at the well drawing water in the middle and the hottest part of the day by herself. This doesn't happen. Culturally, you don't go to get water in the middle of the day. First, because basically everything that they needed to do around the house and for themselves, they need the fresh water for that day. And so to go later in the day is to not be able to do all of those things up until that point. Second, you don't go in the hottest part of the day because it's the hottest part of the day. You know, like you have to carry those water, I don't know, the water carrying devices, vases, or I don't know what they what they... I don't know. Ashlyn made our wedding registry, so hopefully she knows the name of water-carrying devices and put them on there. I don't know. But nonetheless, vases or bowls or something that you have to carry. And then, I mean, as any of you guys know, as soon as you carry something full of liquid for any amount of time, it is very difficult, especially when it is very hot in the middle of the day. So why is this lady standing here in the middle of the day by herself doing something that every other person has already done in the morning? Culturally, we realize and we find out she's kind of hiding. She's avoiding any possible contact with the people around her because the people around her know her life. They know her sins and they know her shortcomings. And she doesn't want to deal with it. We find out what those are as she begins talking to Jesus. As she goes and he asks for water and as they begin talking, at some point he says, hey, go get your husband. I'd love to meet him. Knowing what he's doing and she says, I actually don't have a husband, I'm not married. And Jesus responds, I know you're not married. You've been married four times, and now this fifth man that you're living with, you're not married to. Essentially, reading between the lines, she has lived a life of promiscuity and adultery. And that unlocks why she's there in the middle of the day. To avoid any possible interaction with somebody who would give her that knowing gaze. Walking up to somebody who might treat her as lesser than because of her sin that she has lived in and is currently living in. Or maybe, maybe it's not even as much about what other people will do, but because she cannot offer herself and all she can think about as she's around anyone is comparing herself to the other people and it's just building up shame inside of her, and so she has just decided to eliminate all possibility of coming across anyone. But there was Jesus. As they talk, and as she kind of, why are you talking to me? I'm a woman. I'm not Jewish. Why are you a Jewish man, why would you talk to me? And his response is, man, if you knew who I was, you would ask me for a drink because I can give you water where you will never thirst again. I can give you a water that will satisfy your soul for eternity. There is no division. There's no Gentile and Jew soon enough. Because soon enough, a time is coming where everyone will be completely united under God's love, being able to be in unity, worshiping God together in his love. And I think she starts to realize who he is. And she says, sir, I've heard tell that there's a Christ who's coming. There's a Messiah who's coming, who's going to make all of this known to us. He's going to tell us how we get to experience this unity, how we get to experience unity under God. And he looks at her and he says, I'm him. I'm the guy. I'm the Messiah that you're talking about. It's an absolutely incredible story. She gets to be one of the first people on the earth to know that this is the Messiah who is coming to unite all people under God by his blood. But I tell you it not just because it's a great story, but because I think it connects really well to something that we find in our prayer that we find in Psalm 139. And that comes at the end of the story. The end of the story, as I read it, I both think, hey, this is great, and I also think, this is weird, and I don't get it. As a response to her recognizing, realizing, and understanding who Jesus is and her interactions with Jesus, she goes back into town and proclaims and exclaims to them. Now, remember, this is the lady who was off by herself getting water in the middle of the day, making sure that she had zero interactions with anyone who lives in her town and in her community because she didn't want to experience the shame of getting or having to experience anybody. But she met Jesus. And so she felt like she could go and talk to these people. That makes sense to me. And half of what she says makes sense to me. She says, could this really be the Messiah? But she doesn't pose the question. She doesn't pose the question because she doesn't go, you know what, guys, I was getting water over here. This dude asked if I wanted to give him a drink. And then he's like, actually, I got a drink for you that will quench your thirst forever. I have this guy who said that through him and by his power, that we are going to be united in God, all one people just glorifying and worshiping God. She doesn't say any of that. She says, while I was getting water, I met this guy who told me everything about my life. Could this be the Messiah? In the joy of exclamation, she brings up, I met this guy who knew everything about me. How does that make sense? Why would a person who is hiding from anybody who could possibly know anything about her life, how could she make a full 180 to now go and find all of those people and exclaim to them, I have met this guy and he knows every part of me. How awesome is this? This guy might be the Messiah. It doesn't make sense to me. And it connects, I think, really well to the beginning of Psalm 139, a prayer to David that also is insane to me and absolutely terrifying. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you, Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. All right, here's the gist. David is praying and considers it fully wonderful that God knows every single part of who he is. I don't know about you guys, but I don't want anyone to know that about me. I think if any of you knew what lied on the other side of the Kyle that I present to the world, I think you would like, no one would ever want to be around me again. There is a lot of ugly and a lot of imperfect that comes from that. And not only says that God knows every one of our actions, but he knows every one of our words that has yet to come on our lips. He knows every single thought that we've ever thought. What that means is when we decide that we're going to love on somebody or serve somebody, but it's for selfish ambition, he knows it's for selfish ambition and we're doing it for ourself. He knows that while I completely judge and I do not like this person, yet on the outside I'm going to love them and serve them however best I can, he knows how I really feel about that person in my heart. How can David consider it wonderful for a God who holds our life and our eternity in his hands? How can it be wonderful for that God to know us wholly and completely? Not only that, but verses 7 through 13 basically says, there is nowhere that I can run from you. I cannot hide from you anywhere. How can David find it wonderful? And how can the woman at the well exclaim and find joy in the fact that there is this man, Jesus, and there is this God who knows every single thought, intention, and action in our life? So we press on into David's prayer. And I think we in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, God. Verses 1 through 6, you find David pray about how wonderful it is that God would fully and completely know him. In 7 through 13, you find out that there's no place to hide from him, all of which are absolutely terrifying to me. But in 13 through 18 is where you find why it is wonderful. Because God knows this completely because he created us. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. What David is saying is that as God is your child, I have been made and created on purpose. Ephesians 2.10 says we are God's handiwork. Other translations say we are God's workmanship. We are his masterpiece created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Every single one of us were created on purpose. There was intention in our creation. It wasn't random. God created you to be you. He created me to be me. He created us on purpose. He knows us completely. There's nowhere that we could go to hide. And he sent his son to experience the condemnation and the death for our sins that we deserve so that we get to experience an eternal relationship with him. All of that to say that not only as children of God, not only are we holy and completely known by God, but we are wholly and completely loved by God. To me, I see David's joy in a new light. I see complete clarity in the light of David as he declares it as wonderful to be fully known for good and for bad. I see the same in the woman at the well of why she might exclaim joyously that here is a man who knew every part of me. Tim Keller puts it this way. He says, But not be known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our biggest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved, that is what we need more than anything. That's why David was able to find peace knowing that every thought, every desire, and every action in his life, because he was a child of God, no longer, no longer shades God's view of him. Because he is fully loved and created and set apart by God, there's no longer condemnation. There's only love and there's only grace that he gets to experience. He gets to experience being fully known and being fully loved. When you look at the woman at the well. And probably for the first time in a long time, she was able to realize and experience the freedom that comes from not having to anymore be defined by or held back by her past or her present. Because all that mattered now was there's this man who not only talks of this eternity, not only talks of this unity under the Father, under God, but he is telling me, I think, that I get to be a part of it. Me, the person who has to hide from everyone because I cannot deal or bear with the amount of shame that I hold on to, this same woman who is living in utter and complete fear, completely and wholly crippled by shame, had to run down to town to the people she was avoiding, and she had to say, guys, there's this guy who knows all the things you guys know about me, and he, I think, I'm pretty sure, he is offering me the same love that he's offering all of us. Somehow, I get to be a part of this. What if us, as Christians, as children of God, lived in the freedom that she got to experience? Where we weren't always and completely crippled by the fear and anxiety and the shame that is brought on by comparing ourselves to the people around us all the time. What if we weren't defined by the accomplishments that we have or the things that we are trying to figure out? What if we weren't at all defined by anything except for people who are wholly known and wholly loved by God? Can you imagine that freedom? Can you imagine the way that you could treat people and experience life if you weren't held back by your fear and by your anxiety of how people see you or how you're presenting yourself? If you weren't consistently bringing shame upon yourself and couldn't get over the fact that you are the way that you are in certain ways, not realizing that God has forgiven that a long time ago and God created you exactly as he intended to create you? Tim Keller writes separately in a separate book, Jesus took the condemnation we deserve. He faced the trial that should be ours so that we do not have to face any more trials. So I simply need to ask God to accept me because of what the Lord Jesus has done. Jesus took on the condemnation and the trial for us. And so, in light of that, we read on. Listen. Listen. Then the only person whose opinion counts looks at me and he finds me more valuable than all the jewels in the earth. How can we worry about being snubbed now? How can we worry about being ignored now? How can we care that much about what we look like in the mirror now? To continue in my own words, why would we ever place our source of identity, value, or worth into the hands of anything outside of a perfect father's perfect love for us? Who do we think we are to not offer ourselves grace when Christ and God's eternal position in heaven, eternal posture in heaven, is to have grace and forgiveness for you? Who do we think we are that our grace should be more expensive than God's? Who do we think we are that we are not allowing ourselves and offering ourselves the grace that we have already freely been given through the blood of Christ? And when you look at the other people around you, when you look at a mom on social media, when you look at a dad who seems to really be able to just get it with their son, just really be able to play with their kids and connect and all this stuff and you're having a hard time, when you look at the accomplishments of someone else that's around you in your circle, at your work, in your small group, wherever you find yourself comparing your life to the life of another one in order to boost or deflate your ego, here's my question. What comparison can you make that compares to the knowledge that you have been fearfully and wonderfully made by a perfect creator? What comparison can you make to anyone else around you that compares to that knowledge? That you are both fully known and fully loved by the creator of the universe. And through the blood of Christ, you have been set apart for the joy of an eternal relationship with your creator, God. May we today, may we this week, strive to experience the freedom of the woman in the well, the freedom of David who prays and is thankful that a God fully knows him. Offering our self-grace, offering the people around us grace, and only looking at ourselves and the people around us in one light and one light only as people who are completely and wholly known by God and loved by God. And may that be our only distinction for ourselves. Let's pray. Lord, I don't know why it's so hard for us to give ourselves the grace and to find our identity in you, even though you've made it so accessible and so easy to do so. Lord, would you just please lighten up our hearts and allow us maybe for the first time to experience the freedom of having complete certainty in our identity, our worth, and our value in you. And look for it nowhere else. Lord, we love you so much. Amen.

We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. This morning we finish up our series called Faithful where we've been looking at stories of faithful women in the Bible and we are wrapping up with a who, she was just a bad joker, man. Like, I really, really liked getting into the story of her this week. She's a woman named Deborah, and Deborah was a judge and a prophetess. I think she is this underrated hero of the Bible. I think that her name kind of echoes down. She is one of these great women that did incredible things and that it's very much worth taking a weekend and focusing on her because her story, even though we really only see it in Judges 4 and 5, we see the story in Judges 4 and then her song in 5 that basically retells the story in poem form. But that's where we find her. So if you have a Bible and you want to turn there, you can go ahead and turn to Judges 4. If you don't have a Bible with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But that's where we're going to be today. And whenever I kind of recount a story for you guys, I like for you all to be interacting with Scripture too so you know that I'm not making this stuff up. There's something in particular that I'm excited to share with you that I'm going to just read because it's so outlandish that I want you to know that I'm not making it up. But Deborah, Deborah, she was a cool lady, man. She was a judge. And just so we're clear on this, before we kind of jump into the story, I want us to understand what a judge was in Israel, because I think that's something that we hear in church. Maybe you've even heard it referred to as the time of the judges or the period of the judges. And that's something that I think church people kind of nod along with sometimes without really knowing what that means. And so the period of the judges in Israel is the period of time between when Joshua conquered the nation of Israel and all the 12 tribes set up camp. And now they're claiming the nation of Israel as their own. And then years later, they got their first king in King Saul. And so the period between that is known as the time of the judges. And during the time of the judges, when the government was actually set up as God intended it to be set up in Israel, God was the king. He was their eternal heavenly king sitting on the throne. And eventually, the people of Israel were like middle school girls, and they wanted to have what everybody else around them had. And so they stomped their foot until their face turned blue, and they demanded a king. And And they gave him, and he gave him a king and Saul. And he said, and these bad things are going to happen when I do this. And they did. But that time before that is the period of the judges. And a judge was somebody who was a military ruler who also presided over legal matters. So what was going on in the period of the judges is the Israelites were God's chosen people. He gave them some rules that he wanted to follow, the Ten Commandments, and he wanted them to honor him. And at times they would throw off that rule. They would dishonor God. They would forget about him for a generation. And when that happened, God would allow a foreign oppressor to come in and subjugate them until they cried uncle and said, God, we're sorry. We realize we've ignored you. Please save us. We're going to follow you again. And God would say, okay. And he would appoint a judge to rise up from among them and be a military leader that would overthrow the oppressing surrounding nation. Okay. But they would also settle disputes, settle legal matters. You owe them money, they owe you money, or however it would go. So that was the role of the judge in the Old Testament. And Deborah was a judge and a prophetess. Deborah was awesome. And listen, this is just an aside, okay? You can't look at the story of Deborah in the Old Testament and see that God entrusted her to be a judge and a prophetess and lead his people and think that women are incapable of leading the local church, okay? We can't look at the story of Deborah and say, God here trusted a woman to lead all of his people, but now in 2021, we can't trust a woman to be an elder. It's just an aside. But we look at Deborah, and Deborah has a tree. She's got a tree named after her. It's the palm of Deborah, and she sits under it, and she just makes rulings all day. She's like ancient Israel's Judge Judy, okay? That's who she is. Whenever they have a dispute, they're like, well, let's go talk to Deborah about it. Like, I lent you my ox. You gave it back to me. It has a limp. It doesn't plow as quickly anymore. You owe me an ox. The heck I do. I'm not buying you an ox. All right, we're going to talk to Deb. All right, that's what they would do. So they would go and they would talk to Deborah under the tree that was named after her. So she had been doing this for a while. And it's under this tree that she summons a general named Barak. And that's kind of where we pick up the story. I want to read to you what's going on in Judges chapter 4, because we get from these two verses, I think the biggest mom energy in the Old Testament. We don't see mom energy quite like this until we get to John chapter 4 when Mary tells Jesus to turn the water into wine. When she's like, do the thing that you do when you do the miracle stuff. Like, go ahead. When Mary starts ordering around the Savior of the world, the Messiah incarnate, that's the next time we see energy on the level of what Deborah does here in this passage. Listen to what she does in Judges chapter 4, picking up in verse 6. So here's what's going on. Deborah is a judge, and judges are appointed when there's a foreign oppressor. In this case, the foreign oppressors are the Canaanites. And the general of the Canaanite army is a guy named Sisera. And we're told over and over again in the chapter that Sisera had 900 chariots of iron. I have no idea or perspective about how big of a deal that was. I don't know what that means. I just know that whoever wrote this chapter of Judges thinks it was a big enough deal to mention a bunch of times. So the Israelites are pretty scared of these 900 chariots of iron. And Deborah somehow knows that God has told Barak, the general of the Israelite armies, to gather 10,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun and go out and face Sisera and his chariots. She knows this. I don't know how she knows this. She was clearly close with God. I don't know if God gave her a message and said, hey, you know, I told Barak to go do this. He's dragging his feet. If you could kind of get after him for me, that would be great. I don't know if some messengers told her. I don't know how she knew, but she knew. And she knew that this is what Barak was supposed to do. So she summons him. And let's not miss that. She's a lady in the hill country in northern Israel. And she sent word, presumably to Jerusalem, for the general of the armies to come see her. Now listen. In the ancient world, there's no badder dude than the general. Especially in a nation without a king. He's the man. You do not tell the general what to do. But when Deborah summoned Barak, he was like, well, I guess we got to go. He went. Like, that's some big-time mom energy. She summons the general. We got it. We got it. I don't have a choice. Deborah called me to the tree of her name. I've got to go. And so he goes, and when he gets there, she moms him. And she says, didn't God tell you to get 10,000 troops and go fight Sisera? What are you doing, man? Like, didn't God tell you to do this? Why aren't you doing, why aren't you being obedient to God? He gave you clear instruction. You're not doing it. What gives? And I think that it's easy to read the Bible and see details like that and then just keep on reading without pausing to think about what's going on in this conversation. Do you realize the amount of faith that it takes from Barak to go do this? He's got to go to these tribes. He's got to look mamas and daddies in the eye, and he's got to say, I need your son. He's got to say, I need your husband. We've got to go fight Sisera, the dude with 900 chariots. Yeah, we're going to go fight him. You know that we're not strong enough to beat him, right? Yeah, I know, but God said that he was with us, so we're going to go and we're going to kill him. And it's the type of fighting that we both put sharp objects in our hands and we swing at each other until one of us dies. That's really hard fighting. But I need your son. Let's go. And then he's got to go out there and he's got to risk his own life as he leads these men into battle. So when he gets this direction from God, take these 10,000 people and go fight Sisera, it's pretty natural to be like, you sure? Maybe we should just wait. And so Deborah calls him. He's like, dude, what are you doing? God told you to go fight, go fight. And I like Barak's response and I like Deborah's response to him even better. We pick it back up in verse 8. Barak said to her, if you go with me, I'll go. But if you will not go with me, I will not go. And she said, I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman. Again, let's look at that. She calls him up to her palm tree and says, didn't God tell you to amass an army and go fight Sisera? And his response is, yeah. Easy for you to say, Deb. You're up here at your tree. You're deciding who owes who an ox, all right? You want me to go recruit young men and go watch them march to their death, potentially die while I do it. Easy for you to say, pal. So then he says, I'll tell you what, he did say that. And listen, if you come with me, I'll go. If you put your money where your mouth is, big talker, we'll go do this thing together. And I don't know this for sure, okay? There's not enough in the text to tell us positively. It's just my opinion. If I get to heaven and I find out I'm wrong about this and many other things, I'm comfortable with this error. But I think that Barak responds this way because he thinks it's going to shut her up. Because he thinks that's going to stop the conversation. Yeah, he told me to. You want to come too? You want to put your money where your mouth is, big dog, then we can go together. And I think that he thinks she's going to be like, well, no, I mean, this is for armies. I got, you know, I got, I got all these people. I got to settle these disputes here. I can't go. And instead, Deborah doubles down, right? Deborah's like, all right, where can I ride? Is that horse good? Is he taken? Let's go. I will surely go with you, she says. She didn't care. She doesn't miss a beat. All right, I'll go watch the slaughter. Let's roll. And you got to know the Barak's like, oh, shoot. Okay, well, I guess we're doing this thing. So they go, and I love that she says that you're not going to get the glory for this either, just so you know. Like, this is kind of a woman's story, so you're an auxiliary character in this Barak. And sure enough, they go, and they have the battle, and God is with the armies of Israel, and he delivers victory into their hands. They rout the army of the Canaanites, and Sisera is left fleeing. The army is in disarray, and Barak is hot on his trail. He wants to kill this guy, or capture him. He wants to get the glory. And while Sisera is running away, and I'm just telling you this part of the story just for gratuity, because I think it's great. I'm not going to make a spiritual point from this point on. I'm telling you this part of the story because it's awesome. While he's running away, there's a woman named Jael, and she's married to a guy who's friendly with his king. And somehow it seems like she knows that the army's been routed, everyone's trying to get away. So Jael goes and she sees Sisera fleeing. And she's like, Sisera, come stay in our tent. I'll hide you in here until, you know, the heat is off a little bit. And he's like, okay, thank you. And he comes into the tent and he lays down and it says that she covers him with a rug and that he was exceedingly tired. He's exhausted from battle and from fleeing, and he's just tired out of his mind, right? And so he says, will you get me some warm water? I'm thirsty. And she goes, and instead of water, she gets him warm milk because she wanted him to be good and tired. And he tells her, when Barack comes by with the armies, you tell him that I went that way. And she's like, got it. You sleeping good? And so when he goes to sleep and he's good in the sleep, this is what happens. And I'm reading you this from the Bible verbatim because it's not going to be up there. So you're just going to have to listen because I want you to know that I'm not making this up and how great it is. Verse 21, but JL, the wife of Heber took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand. Then she went softly to him. Apparently, you don't survive tent peg impalement. That's not a thing. And she didn't just get it in there. She drove the peg into the ground. She was mad for some reason. And she gets the glory. And here we are, thousands of years later, telling the story of JL. I shared that story because I've always just, I love that little detail. I love that little nuance in the Bible. I love knowing the story of Jael. And listen, these kinds of things are tucked away in all sorts of places, particularly in the Old Testament. And sometimes I want to do little more than on a Sunday, make the Bible come alive for you a little bit so that you get curious about it and you want to start finding this stuff for yourself. Go home and Google Dinah and her brothers, D-I-N-A-H and her brothers and see if you don't get a laugh out of that story. There's so many good ones in the Old Testament. Sometimes I just want to make it come alive for you a little bit so that you go home with some curiosity and read it on your own because there's really some great stuff in there. But the reason we're covering this story this morning is to talk about Deborah and what we learned from her. Because I think there's a lot of lessons that we can pull out from Deborah, but the one that I see the most, the one that I'm floored with and impressed with the most, is this. When you are certain of the Lord's direction, you can walk with confidence. When you are certain of the Lord's direction, of the clarity that he is giving you, then you can walk with absolute confidence. Deborah somehow, and I don't know how, Deborah knew with clarity that God had given that instruction to Barak. She knew it. And so she had the confidence to summon him and say, didn't God tell you to do the thing? And then when he said, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and come with me, she didn't miss a beat. She didn't hesitate. She wasn't a warrior. She didn't know how to do this. She was a judge. She was a prophetess. She didn't go out on the battlefield, but she didn't hesitate to go with Barak because she was so certain of God's direction that she was able to walk with confidence and follow that direction. She was able to walk in obedience because she was so sure of God's direction and of his providence and sovereignty to see her through that direction. And so in our lives, when we're clear about what God wants us to do, about the step of obedience that we are supposed to take, we can walk with confidence. And I think about it this way. First of all, I believe that every one of us here has the next step of obedience that God is placing in front of us. I think that's what discipleship and spiritual growth is, is simply taking the next step of obedience. Sometimes it's a relatively small one. I want you to develop a habit of a devotional life. I want you to develop a habit of getting up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. Maybe that's yours. Maybe it's a bigger one. Maybe it's beginning to tithe or give or be generous. Maybe it's to have this conversation. Maybe it's to reconcile this relationship. Maybe it's to finally shed some light on some of the dark places in your life, to bring those out into the light and share those with some trusted friends and say, I need help with these. Maybe it's time to actually get some help for some other thing. Maybe it's time to lean on other people. Maybe it's time to offer forgiveness. Maybe it's time to ask for forgiveness. Whatever it is, maybe it's time to watch your mouth and stop looking at stuff you don't need to look at. Whatever it is, I believe that God has for each of us the next step of obedience that he wants us to take. And then when we take that one, he's got another one waiting on us and it's going to be lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of our lives. So we better get used to it. And sometimes I feel like that when God asks us to take a step of obedience, that there's like a fence between us and where he wants us to be. That we're in this yard, we're in this area and there's a fence and it's a walled fence. We can't see on the other side of it. And he says, hey, I want you to jump it. And part of our hesitation is, I want to, but I don't know what's over there. I don't know if I'm going to be met with forgiveness. I don't know if I, I feel like you want me to take this job, but if I do, I don't know what's going to be in that city. I don't know what's going to be at that move. I don't know what kind of co-workers I'm going to be with. I want you to go full in on this relationship, but I don't know what's going to be in that city. I don't know what's going to be at that move. I don't know what kind of coworkers I'm going to be with. I want you to go full in on this relationship, but I don't know what's going to happen when I get there. That's the thing with obedience. There's a fence between us and the step, and we don't always get to see how it's going to go. There's a pretty big fence here for Deborah. I want you to amass an army and go defeat another army that you have no business defeating. She doesn't know how that's going to go when the swords get unsheathed. But when we know with certainty God's direction, we can jump that fence with confidence every time. Now this actually brings us to the question I want to spend time answering today. This is a question that I think every Christian ever has wondered. This is a question that as a pastor, I get asked this with a great deal of frequency. This is a question that I think Christians wonder no matter how long they've been walking with the Lord, no matter how fresh their faith is, no matter the depth of their faith, no matter the breadth of experience of their faith. I think that this is something that all Christians wonder about. And so I wanted to take the rest of our time today and do my best to answer this question, which is, okay, listen, Nate, I understand. When I have certainty of God's direction, I can go to the next thing. When I'm certain about it, I know that I can go with confidence, but how do I know when I've clearly heard from God? How do I know? How do I know with the level of confidence that Deborah had to go risk people's lives that I can jump that fence? How do I know that I know that I've actually heard from God? I think that's a really tough question to answer. And so I wanted to offer you a couple suggestions this morning as to how we can be clear that we've heard from God, that we have clarity on his direction. The first thing I would mention is actually not in your notes. It's probably the most important one. When I was making the notes up, I should have included this one. I thought it was kind of a given, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was important to mention here. God's direction will never be in opposition to his word. Okay, God's direction in prayer and in counsel is always going to be in harmony with scripture. You're never going to pray away a teaching in scripture. You're never going to pray enough to make theft okay, right? Like the Super Bowl is coming up. You're having some kids over. They're in the youth group or they're in the kids ministry. And you're having some families over from the church and you want it to go really well. And your TV is kind of cruddy. So you go to Best Buy and you buy a big, nice one. And you know that you're going to return it on Tuesday, but you were doing this for Jesus. Like I'm doing this for the church. It's for the children, right? We prayed about it. This is what God wants me to do. No, that's theft, man. You're stealing a portion of the use of that object and you're returning it at Best Buy and now they have to give you your full money back and they have to sell it as an open box item and you've stolen from them. And they're a big, huge corporation and they deserve for us to steal from them. Maybe, all right, but that's not what we're talking about. The Bible doesn't make space for those exceptions. That's theft. You're not going to pray that away. You're not going to pray away loving your neighbor as yourself. There's no situation where you can say, I really feel like I should be able to treat this person like a jerk because they're a jerk for me. So this is what I'm going to do. You can't pray that away. You can't pray yourself into an affair. You can't pray yourself into something that runs contrary to Scripture. So the first thing about hearing God's voice is when you think you've heard it, it will never run contrary to this. If it does, you need to fix your ears. Okay, the other reasons. And this, I think, is the biggest one. It's the toughest one to swallow, but it's the most important one. How do I know when I've clearly heard from God? You learn his voice over time. You learn his voice over time. Jesus says that my sheep know me and they know my voice. We recognize when the Father calls to us. We recognize when Jesus is speaking to us. And what this means is the more times I wake up in the morning and I spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer, and I've talked to you guys before about listening prayer, about prayer not just being where we spout off things to God and then we go, okay, amen, and we walk away, but where we try to sit quietly and listen with our soul. And if that sounds mysterious and weird and wispy, it is. I can't explain it to you better than that. You just need to start doing it and trying. But we listen to God. We listen to him speak to us in scripture. We listen to the spiritual leaders in our life. The people that we trust and we hear from them and we start to learn more and more what the voice of God sounds like and when the voice of God is showing up, we start to learn things. Sometimes I'm in a conversation and I'll just hear this little whisper. Lean into this. Put down your phone and listen. Be present here. And it's like, oh, oh, this is a God conversation. God's using this person to speak to me right now. I need to hear this. The more we listen for God, the better we get at hearing him. I always think of it like when I was a kid, my dad had a whistle, just a classic dad whistle. Just, hey, get over here. And I will recognize, I could be in a park and 25 dads could whistle in unison. And I would know which one was my dad's and where he was. Like, I remember being in the church parking lot. I hear the whistle. I go to the car. Like, I just know I'm out playing in the neighborhood. I hear the whistle. I know that's my dad's whistle. Oh, I heard that whistle. That was your dad's whistle. Sorry, sucker. I'm still playing. But when I heard my dad's whistle, I knew you'd go. I just heard it so many times that it just resonates with me, right? That's how the voice of God works. So often, people will come to me frustrated because they're praying about a thing and they don't feel like they have any clear direction. Or it seems like God speaks to other people, but God doesn't speak to me. And it's a hard question to ask, but it's the best one to ask, which is, well, how long have you been trying to listen? How many years have you invested in trying to learn his voice? This is the thing that over time and through dedication, we begin to learn the voice of God. We begin to learn the voice of God so much that we get stories like Elisha. I've mentioned this before, but Elisha in the Old Testament, the book of 1 and 2 Kings, he's somewhere off on a mountainside and someone comes to him and they said, hey, the son of so-and-so just died. They're calling for you. And his response is to look at God and go, this is how you're letting me find out about this? You didn't want to tell me yourself? Like, when has something happened and you've seen it on your Facebook feed and you've gone like, God, you didn't want to mention this to me? Like, who of us are that close that we hear his voice that regularly that he speaks to us with such clarity that we would turn to him and we would say, this terrible thing has happened to someone in my life and you didn't tell me. Why didn't you tell me? I would never do that because I would just assume that I missed it if you tried to tell me. The only way we get that close to God and know his voice that well is by a consistent pursuit of him. So if we're frustrated that we're not hearing the voice of God, we don't have clarity about something, I would ask you, how long have you been trying to listen? The next thing I would say is this. How do we know that we've heard clarity from God? The voices in your life will speak in stereo. The voices that God has placed in your life will speak in stereo. It's awkward for me to say this, but if you go to grace, he's given you a pastor. He's given you other things to compensate for his lack of wisdom in your life, but he's also given you a pastor. He's given you parents, kids. He's given you parents. And if you have parents who love you and love God, they have been placed, you are lucky, and they have been placed in your life for you to listen to. When they speak, we need to hear God speaking to us. And that doesn't go away when we move away. They're still our counsel. They're still placed in our life to shepherd us. Our small group leaders, our small group people, our friends, the people that we look up to, God has placed people in our life who love us and love Jesus, and they are there to be his voice when we need it. And I have always found that these voices speak in stereo. They speak together. They speak in one accord. We go around and we ask people, what do you think about this? I think God wants me to take this step. What do you think about it? What do you think about it? What do you think about it? They're going to speak together in unison. It's going to harmonize with scripture. And when all these trusted voices in our life agree that this is what we're hearing and this is what we need to do, that's a sure sign that that's a step that we can take. I think the mistake that some of us make sometimes is we have a thing that we want to do and we're praying to God and asking permission for it. I think this is what God wants me to do. And we're going around and we're asking all of our friends and all of our trusted friends say, no, that's a bad idea. Gosh, I'm not sure I would do that right now. I don't know. They seem a little bit crazy. You might not want to get into that. And then you find the one person that's like, do it, dog. Go. That's what God wants. And you're like, see, they told me. And we ignore everyone else. And we follow the one piece of advice that we wanted to hear. God's voice often speaks to us in stereo through a multiplicity of counsel. Proverbs tells us that where there is much counsel, there is much wisdom. So if we want clarity in hearing the voice of God, ask people who we know, listen. And this is important too. Maybe you have somebody that you know who prays constantly. I think of Miss Ginger, Miss Ginger Gentry. She is a prayer warrior. She prays all the time. She was our Grace Raleigh Partner of the Year last year. No big deal. We started handing out that award. That's a huge deal. That was the most weird, tepid applause. I hope you heard that, Ginger. If I really needed to know some direction, you know what I would do? I would go to Ms. Ginger, who I know is a prayer warrior, and I would say, hey, I'm thinking about this thing. Will you please pray about this and tell me how you feel God's directing you? Use those voices in your life. The people that are a little bit further down the path, the people who have listened for longer than you, who you trust to hear the voice of God, go to them and say, will you pray about this for me and tell me what you think God is directing you to do? Listen to the voices that God's given us in stereo. The last thing that I would tell you to do if you want clarity on God's direction in your life, and this isn't the best or first option, but it is often a clarifying one, is to ask for a sign. Ask for clear direction. We see this happen in the story of Gideon and the judges. Just a couple of chapters later, God says, hey, I want you to go do this crazy thing. I want you to take 300 men and go fight this big, huge army with it. And Gideon's like, are you sure? And God says, yeah. And Gideon goes, if you're really sure, I'm going to put a doormat out in front of my tent. When I wake up, I want that to be wet and the rest of the ground to be dry. And God says, all right. So Gideon wakes up and the doormat is wet and the rest of the ground is dry. And he's like, I guess I really need to do the thing. But one more time, God, this time I want to wake up tomorrow. I want the ground to be wet and my mat to be dry. And he wakes up the next day and the ground's wet, the mat's dry. And he's like, all right, I guess we're going to do the thing. It's okay to ask for signs. I've actually done this twice in my life. It was such a big decision that I just felt like, God, I need something from you so that I know I can grab onto this if things get hard. And in February of 2016, Jen and I were outside of Atlanta, and we made the decision together that it was time for me to start looking for a job as a senior pastor. That seemed like the next thing to do. And so at the onset of the search, I was outside one night. I was letting the dog out. I went outside, and whenever I go outside, I always look up at the stars. I've always loved the stars. I've always loved the sky. And so I was just looking up at the stars, and I was praying. And I remember my prayer that night was, God, I know that this is going to be tough, and I'm not going to know what to do, and I'm going to have to make a hard decision. So can you just, when I find the right place, can you just make it clear? Can you put Jen and I on the same page on this? I don't want to take her to a place where she doesn't want to go. I don't want to go to a place where I'm not supposed to go. Will you please just make this clear? This is a big choice. And as I was praying that, I looked up, and I saw a constellation that I'd never seen before. And I thought, huh, must be a message from God. I wonder what that is. So I pull out my phone, I download this constellation app and I look at it and it turns out it was a constellation of Taurus. And so I'm reading about the description of the constellation of Taurus, like it's these three systems and they're combining this one thing. Okay, three and one, God, I'll be looking for that. And I'm trying to like piece together what are the tea leaves of this constellation that I need to be paying attention for in the search? And finally, I just gave up. And I put it down. I said, all right, God, I got you loud and clear. I'll keep that in the back of my mind. That'll make sense to me when it needs to make sense to me. And then we get to looking, right? And I got to tell you, you're 36 years old with no senior pastor experience. It takes a church that is pretty dumb or desperate to be willing to give you the keys to the place. That's what I learned in that search. I interviewed a bunch of places. I finished second a lot of times. There was a lot of doubt in there. I began to wonder, is this ever really going to happen for me? I don't have any experience. Everybody says they want somebody without experience. And then they hire the guy that's been doing it for 15 years. So do they really? and is this ever really going to happen? God, do I need to start looking for different things? It was hard, but I felt like I needed to hang in there, right? And then in December of 16, I came across Grace and had my first interview on December the 8th. And then that process kind of went into the next year. And at the end of February, early March, I had come up here on a weekend visit. And when I came up here for a visit and I got to spend time with the people, and I don't know how this happened because, I mean, look at this place. I fell in love with it, okay? I don't know how. I mean, polling all, I was like, I'm all in on this place. I fell in love with it and I really felt like this is where I wanted to be. I felt like it fit. I felt like it was good, and this is where I wanted to be, and I felt like Raleigh was going to be a good place to raise a family. But I also knew after my visit that there was another guy coming up the following weekend, and he probably thought the same thing. God's probably giving him the same direction because you never quite know how that works. And then I knew that after his visit, they were going to have an elder meeting. And then in the elder meeting, they were going to decide who they were going to offer and they were going to give somebody a call. And so it came that night. It was a Tuesday night, I think. And I knew, I think, that they were going to meet at like 6 or 6.30 and that they were going to decide who they wanted to offer and then they were going to make a call. And so, you know, I'm trying to hang in there. I'm trying to not be stressed. 7 o'clock rolls around. I'm like, you know, it's just been 30 minutes. I've got to get into the process a little bit. Then it's 7.30 and I'm like, well, what in the world is taking them so long? Little did I know they had marathon elder meetings back then so they would probably all laugh at that. 8 o'clock hits, 8.30, and I'm like, oh no, this is taking too long. I'm so clearly better than the other guy. How can there be this much debate? And then nine o'clock happens, and I'm like, well, shoot. They offered it to the other dude, and now they're going to call me tomorrow and offer me condolences, or they're waiting to see if he takes it, and maybe I'll be plan B when I'm not above that. And then I just kind of start to spiral. I kind of start to just get anxious and think this isn't going to happen and I'm going back to the place of this is never going to work out. This is never going to happen. I'm going to be a small groups pastor for the rest of my life. That takes work like four a year. And then I'm just bored. I didn't want to do that. And so to try to lower my anxiety, I just went outside to pray. And I go outside to pray. And y'all, I had totally forgotten about Taurus. I hadn't thought about it. I hadn't looked for it. I hadn't read about it. It was not in my mind. And I looked up. And for the second time in my life, I saw that constellation. And I thought, okay, I hear you. We're good. And I stopped praying. And I went inside and I told Jen, everything's going to be fine. She goes, what? And I was like, yeah, I saw some stars. It's going to be good. A few minutes later, Bert called me and they offered me a job. And, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like it's been a pretty good fit. I feel like what was on the other side of that fence has been pretty good. And so sometimes we're not quite sure, but we need a little bit of assurance. It's okay to ask for a sign. It's okay to say, God, I need some clarity here. I need some direction here. But if we want to have the clarity of Deborah so that we can walk with the confidence of Deborah, we need to start learning to listen to God, start giving him opportunities to speak into our life. We need to learn to tune our spiritual ear to his voice so that when he whistles, we hear it, so that when we're in a conversation and he's speaking to us, we slow down and we engage. We need to learn that God speaks in stereo through the voices that he has placed in our life. And we need to learn that sometimes the proper spirit, if we ask for a sign, God and his goodness will give us one. And then we can walk with clarity and confidence into the step of obedience that I know he's asking all of us to take. So let's have the confidence and clarity of Deborah as we go into our week this week. Let's pray. Father, you're just so good to us. God, I pray that we would be better at hearing your voice. We know you're speaking. We know you're guiding. We know you're directing. We know that you're influencing. We know that you're there. We know that you're calling to us even now. That even now you're speaking to our hearts. Even now you're showing us the next thing. Would you please give us ears to hear? Would you please give us eyes to see? Would you please give us the clarity of Deborah? The remarkable knowledge of your voice that Elisha had. Help us to know when you're speaking. Help us to hear when your voice is in our life. Surround us with good counsel. And God, for those this morning who need a sign, I just pray that you would give it to them. Whatever step of obedience that we might be facing, Father, would you give us confidence that whatever's waiting on the other side of that fence is better than where we are now. Give us the courage to take it. It's in your son's name we ask for these things. Amen.

We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. This morning we finish up our series called Faithful where we've been looking at stories of faithful women in the Bible and we are wrapping up with a who, she was just a bad joker, man. Like, I really, really liked getting into the story of her this week. She's a woman named Deborah, and Deborah was a judge and a prophetess. I think she is this underrated hero of the Bible. I think that her name kind of echoes down. She is one of these great women that did incredible things and that it's very much worth taking a weekend and focusing on her because her story, even though we really only see it in Judges 4 and 5, we see the story in Judges 4 and then her song in 5 that basically retells the story in poem form. But that's where we find her. So if you have a Bible and you want to turn there, you can go ahead and turn to Judges 4. If you don't have a Bible with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But that's where we're going to be today. And whenever I kind of recount a story for you guys, I like for you all to be interacting with Scripture too so you know that I'm not making this stuff up. There's something in particular that I'm excited to share with you that I'm going to just read because it's so outlandish that I want you to know that I'm not making it up. But Deborah, Deborah, she was a cool lady, man. She was a judge. And just so we're clear on this, before we kind of jump into the story, I want us to understand what a judge was in Israel, because I think that's something that we hear in church. Maybe you've even heard it referred to as the time of the judges or the period of the judges. And that's something that I think church people kind of nod along with sometimes without really knowing what that means. And so the period of the judges in Israel is the period of time between when Joshua conquered the nation of Israel and all the 12 tribes set up camp. And now they're claiming the nation of Israel as their own. And then years later, they got their first king in King Saul. And so the period between that is known as the time of the judges. And during the time of the judges, when the government was actually set up as God intended it to be set up in Israel, God was the king. He was their eternal heavenly king sitting on the throne. And eventually, the people of Israel were like middle school girls, and they wanted to have what everybody else around them had. And so they stomped their foot until their face turned blue, and they demanded a king. And And they gave him, and he gave him a king and Saul. And he said, and these bad things are going to happen when I do this. And they did. But that time before that is the period of the judges. And a judge was somebody who was a military ruler who also presided over legal matters. So what was going on in the period of the judges is the Israelites were God's chosen people. He gave them some rules that he wanted to follow, the Ten Commandments, and he wanted them to honor him. And at times they would throw off that rule. They would dishonor God. They would forget about him for a generation. And when that happened, God would allow a foreign oppressor to come in and subjugate them until they cried uncle and said, God, we're sorry. We realize we've ignored you. Please save us. We're going to follow you again. And God would say, okay. And he would appoint a judge to rise up from among them and be a military leader that would overthrow the oppressing surrounding nation. Okay. But they would also settle disputes, settle legal matters. You owe them money, they owe you money, or however it would go. So that was the role of the judge in the Old Testament. And Deborah was a judge and a prophetess. Deborah was awesome. And listen, this is just an aside, okay? You can't look at the story of Deborah in the Old Testament and see that God entrusted her to be a judge and a prophetess and lead his people and think that women are incapable of leading the local church, okay? We can't look at the story of Deborah and say, God here trusted a woman to lead all of his people, but now in 2021, we can't trust a woman to be an elder. It's just an aside. But we look at Deborah, and Deborah has a tree. She's got a tree named after her. It's the palm of Deborah, and she sits under it, and she just makes rulings all day. She's like ancient Israel's Judge Judy, okay? That's who she is. Whenever they have a dispute, they're like, well, let's go talk to Deborah about it. Like, I lent you my ox. You gave it back to me. It has a limp. It doesn't plow as quickly anymore. You owe me an ox. The heck I do. I'm not buying you an ox. All right, we're going to talk to Deb. All right, that's what they would do. So they would go and they would talk to Deborah under the tree that was named after her. So she had been doing this for a while. And it's under this tree that she summons a general named Barak. And that's kind of where we pick up the story. I want to read to you what's going on in Judges chapter 4, because we get from these two verses, I think the biggest mom energy in the Old Testament. We don't see mom energy quite like this until we get to John chapter 4 when Mary tells Jesus to turn the water into wine. When she's like, do the thing that you do when you do the miracle stuff. Like, go ahead. When Mary starts ordering around the Savior of the world, the Messiah incarnate, that's the next time we see energy on the level of what Deborah does here in this passage. Listen to what she does in Judges chapter 4, picking up in verse 6. So here's what's going on. Deborah is a judge, and judges are appointed when there's a foreign oppressor. In this case, the foreign oppressors are the Canaanites. And the general of the Canaanite army is a guy named Sisera. And we're told over and over again in the chapter that Sisera had 900 chariots of iron. I have no idea or perspective about how big of a deal that was. I don't know what that means. I just know that whoever wrote this chapter of Judges thinks it was a big enough deal to mention a bunch of times. So the Israelites are pretty scared of these 900 chariots of iron. And Deborah somehow knows that God has told Barak, the general of the Israelite armies, to gather 10,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun and go out and face Sisera and his chariots. She knows this. I don't know how she knows this. She was clearly close with God. I don't know if God gave her a message and said, hey, you know, I told Barak to go do this. He's dragging his feet. If you could kind of get after him for me, that would be great. I don't know if some messengers told her. I don't know how she knew, but she knew. And she knew that this is what Barak was supposed to do. So she summons him. And let's not miss that. She's a lady in the hill country in northern Israel. And she sent word, presumably to Jerusalem, for the general of the armies to come see her. Now listen. In the ancient world, there's no badder dude than the general. Especially in a nation without a king. He's the man. You do not tell the general what to do. But when Deborah summoned Barak, he was like, well, I guess we got to go. He went. Like, that's some big-time mom energy. She summons the general. We got it. We got it. I don't have a choice. Deborah called me to the tree of her name. I've got to go. And so he goes, and when he gets there, she moms him. And she says, didn't God tell you to get 10,000 troops and go fight Sisera? What are you doing, man? Like, didn't God tell you to do this? Why aren't you doing, why aren't you being obedient to God? He gave you clear instruction. You're not doing it. What gives? And I think that it's easy to read the Bible and see details like that and then just keep on reading without pausing to think about what's going on in this conversation. Do you realize the amount of faith that it takes from Barak to go do this? He's got to go to these tribes. He's got to look mamas and daddies in the eye, and he's got to say, I need your son. He's got to say, I need your husband. We've got to go fight Sisera, the dude with 900 chariots. Yeah, we're going to go fight him. You know that we're not strong enough to beat him, right? Yeah, I know, but God said that he was with us, so we're going to go and we're going to kill him. And it's the type of fighting that we both put sharp objects in our hands and we swing at each other until one of us dies. That's really hard fighting. But I need your son. Let's go. And then he's got to go out there and he's got to risk his own life as he leads these men into battle. So when he gets this direction from God, take these 10,000 people and go fight Sisera, it's pretty natural to be like, you sure? Maybe we should just wait. And so Deborah calls him. He's like, dude, what are you doing? God told you to go fight, go fight. And I like Barak's response and I like Deborah's response to him even better. We pick it back up in verse 8. Barak said to her, if you go with me, I'll go. But if you will not go with me, I will not go. And she said, I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman. Again, let's look at that. She calls him up to her palm tree and says, didn't God tell you to amass an army and go fight Sisera? And his response is, yeah. Easy for you to say, Deb. You're up here at your tree. You're deciding who owes who an ox, all right? You want me to go recruit young men and go watch them march to their death, potentially die while I do it. Easy for you to say, pal. So then he says, I'll tell you what, he did say that. And listen, if you come with me, I'll go. If you put your money where your mouth is, big talker, we'll go do this thing together. And I don't know this for sure, okay? There's not enough in the text to tell us positively. It's just my opinion. If I get to heaven and I find out I'm wrong about this and many other things, I'm comfortable with this error. But I think that Barak responds this way because he thinks it's going to shut her up. Because he thinks that's going to stop the conversation. Yeah, he told me to. You want to come too? You want to put your money where your mouth is, big dog, then we can go together. And I think that he thinks she's going to be like, well, no, I mean, this is for armies. I got, you know, I got, I got all these people. I got to settle these disputes here. I can't go. And instead, Deborah doubles down, right? Deborah's like, all right, where can I ride? Is that horse good? Is he taken? Let's go. I will surely go with you, she says. She didn't care. She doesn't miss a beat. All right, I'll go watch the slaughter. Let's roll. And you got to know the Barak's like, oh, shoot. Okay, well, I guess we're doing this thing. So they go, and I love that she says that you're not going to get the glory for this either, just so you know. Like, this is kind of a woman's story, so you're an auxiliary character in this Barak. And sure enough, they go, and they have the battle, and God is with the armies of Israel, and he delivers victory into their hands. They rout the army of the Canaanites, and Sisera is left fleeing. The army is in disarray, and Barak is hot on his trail. He wants to kill this guy, or capture him. He wants to get the glory. And while Sisera is running away, and I'm just telling you this part of the story just for gratuity, because I think it's great. I'm not going to make a spiritual point from this point on. I'm telling you this part of the story because it's awesome. While he's running away, there's a woman named Jael, and she's married to a guy who's friendly with his king. And somehow it seems like she knows that the army's been routed, everyone's trying to get away. So Jael goes and she sees Sisera fleeing. And she's like, Sisera, come stay in our tent. I'll hide you in here until, you know, the heat is off a little bit. And he's like, okay, thank you. And he comes into the tent and he lays down and it says that she covers him with a rug and that he was exceedingly tired. He's exhausted from battle and from fleeing, and he's just tired out of his mind, right? And so he says, will you get me some warm water? I'm thirsty. And she goes, and instead of water, she gets him warm milk because she wanted him to be good and tired. And he tells her, when Barack comes by with the armies, you tell him that I went that way. And she's like, got it. You sleeping good? And so when he goes to sleep and he's good in the sleep, this is what happens. And I'm reading you this from the Bible verbatim because it's not going to be up there. So you're just going to have to listen because I want you to know that I'm not making this up and how great it is. Verse 21, but JL, the wife of Heber took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand. Then she went softly to him. Apparently, you don't survive tent peg impalement. That's not a thing. And she didn't just get it in there. She drove the peg into the ground. She was mad for some reason. And she gets the glory. And here we are, thousands of years later, telling the story of JL. I shared that story because I've always just, I love that little detail. I love that little nuance in the Bible. I love knowing the story of Jael. And listen, these kinds of things are tucked away in all sorts of places, particularly in the Old Testament. And sometimes I want to do little more than on a Sunday, make the Bible come alive for you a little bit so that you get curious about it and you want to start finding this stuff for yourself. Go home and Google Dinah and her brothers, D-I-N-A-H and her brothers and see if you don't get a laugh out of that story. There's so many good ones in the Old Testament. Sometimes I just want to make it come alive for you a little bit so that you go home with some curiosity and read it on your own because there's really some great stuff in there. But the reason we're covering this story this morning is to talk about Deborah and what we learned from her. Because I think there's a lot of lessons that we can pull out from Deborah, but the one that I see the most, the one that I'm floored with and impressed with the most, is this. When you are certain of the Lord's direction, you can walk with confidence. When you are certain of the Lord's direction, of the clarity that he is giving you, then you can walk with absolute confidence. Deborah somehow, and I don't know how, Deborah knew with clarity that God had given that instruction to Barak. She knew it. And so she had the confidence to summon him and say, didn't God tell you to do the thing? And then when he said, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and come with me, she didn't miss a beat. She didn't hesitate. She wasn't a warrior. She didn't know how to do this. She was a judge. She was a prophetess. She didn't go out on the battlefield, but she didn't hesitate to go with Barak because she was so certain of God's direction that she was able to walk with confidence and follow that direction. She was able to walk in obedience because she was so sure of God's direction and of his providence and sovereignty to see her through that direction. And so in our lives, when we're clear about what God wants us to do, about the step of obedience that we are supposed to take, we can walk with confidence. And I think about it this way. First of all, I believe that every one of us here has the next step of obedience that God is placing in front of us. I think that's what discipleship and spiritual growth is, is simply taking the next step of obedience. Sometimes it's a relatively small one. I want you to develop a habit of a devotional life. I want you to develop a habit of getting up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. Maybe that's yours. Maybe it's a bigger one. Maybe it's beginning to tithe or give or be generous. Maybe it's to have this conversation. Maybe it's to reconcile this relationship. Maybe it's to finally shed some light on some of the dark places in your life, to bring those out into the light and share those with some trusted friends and say, I need help with these. Maybe it's time to actually get some help for some other thing. Maybe it's time to lean on other people. Maybe it's time to offer forgiveness. Maybe it's time to ask for forgiveness. Whatever it is, maybe it's time to watch your mouth and stop looking at stuff you don't need to look at. Whatever it is, I believe that God has for each of us the next step of obedience that he wants us to take. And then when we take that one, he's got another one waiting on us and it's going to be lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of our lives. So we better get used to it. And sometimes I feel like that when God asks us to take a step of obedience, that there's like a fence between us and where he wants us to be. That we're in this yard, we're in this area and there's a fence and it's a walled fence. We can't see on the other side of it. And he says, hey, I want you to jump it. And part of our hesitation is, I want to, but I don't know what's over there. I don't know if I'm going to be met with forgiveness. I don't know if I, I feel like you want me to take this job, but if I do, I don't know what's going to be in that city. I don't know what's going to be at that move. I don't know what kind of co-workers I'm going to be with. I want you to go full in on this relationship, but I don't know what's going to be in that city. I don't know what's going to be at that move. I don't know what kind of coworkers I'm going to be with. I want you to go full in on this relationship, but I don't know what's going to happen when I get there. That's the thing with obedience. There's a fence between us and the step, and we don't always get to see how it's going to go. There's a pretty big fence here for Deborah. I want you to amass an army and go defeat another army that you have no business defeating. She doesn't know how that's going to go when the swords get unsheathed. But when we know with certainty God's direction, we can jump that fence with confidence every time. Now this actually brings us to the question I want to spend time answering today. This is a question that I think every Christian ever has wondered. This is a question that as a pastor, I get asked this with a great deal of frequency. This is a question that I think Christians wonder no matter how long they've been walking with the Lord, no matter how fresh their faith is, no matter the depth of their faith, no matter the breadth of experience of their faith. I think that this is something that all Christians wonder about. And so I wanted to take the rest of our time today and do my best to answer this question, which is, okay, listen, Nate, I understand. When I have certainty of God's direction, I can go to the next thing. When I'm certain about it, I know that I can go with confidence, but how do I know when I've clearly heard from God? How do I know? How do I know with the level of confidence that Deborah had to go risk people's lives that I can jump that fence? How do I know that I know that I've actually heard from God? I think that's a really tough question to answer. And so I wanted to offer you a couple suggestions this morning as to how we can be clear that we've heard from God, that we have clarity on his direction. The first thing I would mention is actually not in your notes. It's probably the most important one. When I was making the notes up, I should have included this one. I thought it was kind of a given, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was important to mention here. God's direction will never be in opposition to his word. Okay, God's direction in prayer and in counsel is always going to be in harmony with scripture. You're never going to pray away a teaching in scripture. You're never going to pray enough to make theft okay, right? Like the Super Bowl is coming up. You're having some kids over. They're in the youth group or they're in the kids ministry. And you're having some families over from the church and you want it to go really well. And your TV is kind of cruddy. So you go to Best Buy and you buy a big, nice one. And you know that you're going to return it on Tuesday, but you were doing this for Jesus. Like I'm doing this for the church. It's for the children, right? We prayed about it. This is what God wants me to do. No, that's theft, man. You're stealing a portion of the use of that object and you're returning it at Best Buy and now they have to give you your full money back and they have to sell it as an open box item and you've stolen from them. And they're a big, huge corporation and they deserve for us to steal from them. Maybe, all right, but that's not what we're talking about. The Bible doesn't make space for those exceptions. That's theft. You're not going to pray that away. You're not going to pray away loving your neighbor as yourself. There's no situation where you can say, I really feel like I should be able to treat this person like a jerk because they're a jerk for me. So this is what I'm going to do. You can't pray that away. You can't pray yourself into an affair. You can't pray yourself into something that runs contrary to Scripture. So the first thing about hearing God's voice is when you think you've heard it, it will never run contrary to this. If it does, you need to fix your ears. Okay, the other reasons. And this, I think, is the biggest one. It's the toughest one to swallow, but it's the most important one. How do I know when I've clearly heard from God? You learn his voice over time. You learn his voice over time. Jesus says that my sheep know me and they know my voice. We recognize when the Father calls to us. We recognize when Jesus is speaking to us. And what this means is the more times I wake up in the morning and I spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer, and I've talked to you guys before about listening prayer, about prayer not just being where we spout off things to God and then we go, okay, amen, and we walk away, but where we try to sit quietly and listen with our soul. And if that sounds mysterious and weird and wispy, it is. I can't explain it to you better than that. You just need to start doing it and trying. But we listen to God. We listen to him speak to us in scripture. We listen to the spiritual leaders in our life. The people that we trust and we hear from them and we start to learn more and more what the voice of God sounds like and when the voice of God is showing up, we start to learn things. Sometimes I'm in a conversation and I'll just hear this little whisper. Lean into this. Put down your phone and listen. Be present here. And it's like, oh, oh, this is a God conversation. God's using this person to speak to me right now. I need to hear this. The more we listen for God, the better we get at hearing him. I always think of it like when I was a kid, my dad had a whistle, just a classic dad whistle. Just, hey, get over here. And I will recognize, I could be in a park and 25 dads could whistle in unison. And I would know which one was my dad's and where he was. Like, I remember being in the church parking lot. I hear the whistle. I go to the car. Like, I just know I'm out playing in the neighborhood. I hear the whistle. I know that's my dad's whistle. Oh, I heard that whistle. That was your dad's whistle. Sorry, sucker. I'm still playing. But when I heard my dad's whistle, I knew you'd go. I just heard it so many times that it just resonates with me, right? That's how the voice of God works. So often, people will come to me frustrated because they're praying about a thing and they don't feel like they have any clear direction. Or it seems like God speaks to other people, but God doesn't speak to me. And it's a hard question to ask, but it's the best one to ask, which is, well, how long have you been trying to listen? How many years have you invested in trying to learn his voice? This is the thing that over time and through dedication, we begin to learn the voice of God. We begin to learn the voice of God so much that we get stories like Elisha. I've mentioned this before, but Elisha in the Old Testament, the book of 1 and 2 Kings, he's somewhere off on a mountainside and someone comes to him and they said, hey, the son of so-and-so just died. They're calling for you. And his response is to look at God and go, this is how you're letting me find out about this? You didn't want to tell me yourself? Like, when has something happened and you've seen it on your Facebook feed and you've gone like, God, you didn't want to mention this to me? Like, who of us are that close that we hear his voice that regularly that he speaks to us with such clarity that we would turn to him and we would say, this terrible thing has happened to someone in my life and you didn't tell me. Why didn't you tell me? I would never do that because I would just assume that I missed it if you tried to tell me. The only way we get that close to God and know his voice that well is by a consistent pursuit of him. So if we're frustrated that we're not hearing the voice of God, we don't have clarity about something, I would ask you, how long have you been trying to listen? The next thing I would say is this. How do we know that we've heard clarity from God? The voices in your life will speak in stereo. The voices that God has placed in your life will speak in stereo. It's awkward for me to say this, but if you go to grace, he's given you a pastor. He's given you other things to compensate for his lack of wisdom in your life, but he's also given you a pastor. He's given you parents, kids. He's given you parents. And if you have parents who love you and love God, they have been placed, you are lucky, and they have been placed in your life for you to listen to. When they speak, we need to hear God speaking to us. And that doesn't go away when we move away. They're still our counsel. They're still placed in our life to shepherd us. Our small group leaders, our small group people, our friends, the people that we look up to, God has placed people in our life who love us and love Jesus, and they are there to be his voice when we need it. And I have always found that these voices speak in stereo. They speak together. They speak in one accord. We go around and we ask people, what do you think about this? I think God wants me to take this step. What do you think about it? What do you think about it? What do you think about it? They're going to speak together in unison. It's going to harmonize with scripture. And when all these trusted voices in our life agree that this is what we're hearing and this is what we need to do, that's a sure sign that that's a step that we can take. I think the mistake that some of us make sometimes is we have a thing that we want to do and we're praying to God and asking permission for it. I think this is what God wants me to do. And we're going around and we're asking all of our friends and all of our trusted friends say, no, that's a bad idea. Gosh, I'm not sure I would do that right now. I don't know. They seem a little bit crazy. You might not want to get into that. And then you find the one person that's like, do it, dog. Go. That's what God wants. And you're like, see, they told me. And we ignore everyone else. And we follow the one piece of advice that we wanted to hear. God's voice often speaks to us in stereo through a multiplicity of counsel. Proverbs tells us that where there is much counsel, there is much wisdom. So if we want clarity in hearing the voice of God, ask people who we know, listen. And this is important too. Maybe you have somebody that you know who prays constantly. I think of Miss Ginger, Miss Ginger Gentry. She is a prayer warrior. She prays all the time. She was our Grace Raleigh Partner of the Year last year. No big deal. We started handing out that award. That's a huge deal. That was the most weird, tepid applause. I hope you heard that, Ginger. If I really needed to know some direction, you know what I would do? I would go to Ms. Ginger, who I know is a prayer warrior, and I would say, hey, I'm thinking about this thing. Will you please pray about this and tell me how you feel God's directing you? Use those voices in your life. The people that are a little bit further down the path, the people who have listened for longer than you, who you trust to hear the voice of God, go to them and say, will you pray about this for me and tell me what you think God is directing you to do? Listen to the voices that God's given us in stereo. The last thing that I would tell you to do if you want clarity on God's direction in your life, and this isn't the best or first option, but it is often a clarifying one, is to ask for a sign. Ask for clear direction. We see this happen in the story of Gideon and the judges. Just a couple of chapters later, God says, hey, I want you to go do this crazy thing. I want you to take 300 men and go fight this big, huge army with it. And Gideon's like, are you sure? And God says, yeah. And Gideon goes, if you're really sure, I'm going to put a doormat out in front of my tent. When I wake up, I want that to be wet and the rest of the ground to be dry. And God says, all right. So Gideon wakes up and the doormat is wet and the rest of the ground is dry. And he's like, I guess I really need to do the thing. But one more time, God, this time I want to wake up tomorrow. I want the ground to be wet and my mat to be dry. And he wakes up the next day and the ground's wet, the mat's dry. And he's like, all right, I guess we're going to do the thing. It's okay to ask for signs. I've actually done this twice in my life. It was such a big decision that I just felt like, God, I need something from you so that I know I can grab onto this if things get hard. And in February of 2016, Jen and I were outside of Atlanta, and we made the decision together that it was time for me to start looking for a job as a senior pastor. That seemed like the next thing to do. And so at the onset of the search, I was outside one night. I was letting the dog out. I went outside, and whenever I go outside, I always look up at the stars. I've always loved the stars. I've always loved the sky. And so I was just looking up at the stars, and I was praying. And I remember my prayer that night was, God, I know that this is going to be tough, and I'm not going to know what to do, and I'm going to have to make a hard decision. So can you just, when I find the right place, can you just make it clear? Can you put Jen and I on the same page on this? I don't want to take her to a place where she doesn't want to go. I don't want to go to a place where I'm not supposed to go. Will you please just make this clear? This is a big choice. And as I was praying that, I looked up, and I saw a constellation that I'd never seen before. And I thought, huh, must be a message from God. I wonder what that is. So I pull out my phone, I download this constellation app and I look at it and it turns out it was a constellation of Taurus. And so I'm reading about the description of the constellation of Taurus, like it's these three systems and they're combining this one thing. Okay, three and one, God, I'll be looking for that. And I'm trying to like piece together what are the tea leaves of this constellation that I need to be paying attention for in the search? And finally, I just gave up. And I put it down. I said, all right, God, I got you loud and clear. I'll keep that in the back of my mind. That'll make sense to me when it needs to make sense to me. And then we get to looking, right? And I got to tell you, you're 36 years old with no senior pastor experience. It takes a church that is pretty dumb or desperate to be willing to give you the keys to the place. That's what I learned in that search. I interviewed a bunch of places. I finished second a lot of times. There was a lot of doubt in there. I began to wonder, is this ever really going to happen for me? I don't have any experience. Everybody says they want somebody without experience. And then they hire the guy that's been doing it for 15 years. So do they really? and is this ever really going to happen? God, do I need to start looking for different things? It was hard, but I felt like I needed to hang in there, right? And then in December of 16, I came across Grace and had my first interview on December the 8th. And then that process kind of went into the next year. And at the end of February, early March, I had come up here on a weekend visit. And when I came up here for a visit and I got to spend time with the people, and I don't know how this happened because, I mean, look at this place. I fell in love with it, okay? I don't know how. I mean, polling all, I was like, I'm all in on this place. I fell in love with it and I really felt like this is where I wanted to be. I felt like it fit. I felt like it was good, and this is where I wanted to be, and I felt like Raleigh was going to be a good place to raise a family. But I also knew after my visit that there was another guy coming up the following weekend, and he probably thought the same thing. God's probably giving him the same direction because you never quite know how that works. And then I knew that after his visit, they were going to have an elder meeting. And then in the elder meeting, they were going to decide who they were going to offer and they were going to give somebody a call. And so it came that night. It was a Tuesday night, I think. And I knew, I think, that they were going to meet at like 6 or 6.30 and that they were going to decide who they wanted to offer and then they were going to make a call. And so, you know, I'm trying to hang in there. I'm trying to not be stressed. 7 o'clock rolls around. I'm like, you know, it's just been 30 minutes. I've got to get into the process a little bit. Then it's 7.30 and I'm like, well, what in the world is taking them so long? Little did I know they had marathon elder meetings back then so they would probably all laugh at that. 8 o'clock hits, 8.30, and I'm like, oh no, this is taking too long. I'm so clearly better than the other guy. How can there be this much debate? And then nine o'clock happens, and I'm like, well, shoot. They offered it to the other dude, and now they're going to call me tomorrow and offer me condolences, or they're waiting to see if he takes it, and maybe I'll be plan B when I'm not above that. And then I just kind of start to spiral. I kind of start to just get anxious and think this isn't going to happen and I'm going back to the place of this is never going to work out. This is never going to happen. I'm going to be a small groups pastor for the rest of my life. That takes work like four a year. And then I'm just bored. I didn't want to do that. And so to try to lower my anxiety, I just went outside to pray. And I go outside to pray. And y'all, I had totally forgotten about Taurus. I hadn't thought about it. I hadn't looked for it. I hadn't read about it. It was not in my mind. And I looked up. And for the second time in my life, I saw that constellation. And I thought, okay, I hear you. We're good. And I stopped praying. And I went inside and I told Jen, everything's going to be fine. She goes, what? And I was like, yeah, I saw some stars. It's going to be good. A few minutes later, Bert called me and they offered me a job. And, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like it's been a pretty good fit. I feel like what was on the other side of that fence has been pretty good. And so sometimes we're not quite sure, but we need a little bit of assurance. It's okay to ask for a sign. It's okay to say, God, I need some clarity here. I need some direction here. But if we want to have the clarity of Deborah so that we can walk with the confidence of Deborah, we need to start learning to listen to God, start giving him opportunities to speak into our life. We need to learn to tune our spiritual ear to his voice so that when he whistles, we hear it, so that when we're in a conversation and he's speaking to us, we slow down and we engage. We need to learn that God speaks in stereo through the voices that he has placed in our life. And we need to learn that sometimes the proper spirit, if we ask for a sign, God and his goodness will give us one. And then we can walk with clarity and confidence into the step of obedience that I know he's asking all of us to take. So let's have the confidence and clarity of Deborah as we go into our week this week. Let's pray. Father, you're just so good to us. God, I pray that we would be better at hearing your voice. We know you're speaking. We know you're guiding. We know you're directing. We know that you're influencing. We know that you're there. We know that you're calling to us even now. That even now you're speaking to our hearts. Even now you're showing us the next thing. Would you please give us ears to hear? Would you please give us eyes to see? Would you please give us the clarity of Deborah? The remarkable knowledge of your voice that Elisha had. Help us to know when you're speaking. Help us to hear when your voice is in our life. Surround us with good counsel. And God, for those this morning who need a sign, I just pray that you would give it to them. Whatever step of obedience that we might be facing, Father, would you give us confidence that whatever's waiting on the other side of that fence is better than where we are now. Give us the courage to take it. It's in your son's name we ask for these things. Amen.

All right, sweet. Good morning, everyone. Everyone doing well? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Woo! Yeah, baby! All right. Sweet. Hey, I'm always for being applauded. I've already lost my notes. This is how this is going to go this morning. I'm all for getting applauded before I even have to do anything. So thank you guys so much for that. But as Nate said, I'm Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace. I'm so excited to get to speak to you guys this morning. I'm especially excited, honestly, because I have actually, probably about a month after we decided to do the book of John, I actually did a passage out of John with our students. We did John 4 and our students, and I had read it and kind of studied it a little bit, and something hit me in a different way than I'd ever been hit by this story before. And this is a story I think that many of us know. I know I've heard it tons of times, and it's incredible in itself, but I had realized something a little bit different that I said, you know what? After getting to know our students, I think this would really go well with them. And so I went through it, and it went well. I think that they really enjoyed it, and I really felt like the Lord had placed on my heart, Kyle, I have a bigger audience for you to tell this to as well. And as I realized, I was like, hey, we're doing a John series. I guess this is my moment. And so, you know, it's a pretty big story, and I was like, well, I don't know if Nate's going to let me do something that's that good, you know. But I went to Nate. I was like, Nate, what do you think about this? And he was like, well, you know, let's look at our times. Let's look at the schedule, blah, blah, blah. I didn't know. I didn't know what the schedule was looking like. I kind of had forgotten. I mean, I knew it was first weekend of March, but you know, I didn't know. And so we looked, and wouldn't you know that on the fourth week of John, I'd be able to talk about John 4. And I think that's incredible. And I think that there's something to be said about that. And I don't say that to say, get ready for me to knock your socks off. Get ready for the best sermon you've ever heard. I mean, are those things true? Yeah. No, they're not true. And if you're expecting that, then I'm sorry that it's going to be kind of a bummer. But what I will tell you is that clearly, that the Lord has clearly ordained the ability for me to be able to speak this to you this morning. And so for that, I would say, maybe he has something for you this morning. And so I would ask that you'd open up your ears and open up your hearts to maybe what the Lord has for you this morning. And I'm going to do my best to get out of his way and just let him take over. So anyways, let's jump on in. We're going to be in John 4. I'm going to kind of, we'll talk about it some. I'll read a little bit, you know, the classic one too. And so we're going to be in John 4, and basically at this time, Jesus and his disciples, they've been traveling. They're going from Judea to Galilee, and they stop in this town called Sakaar that's within Samaria. They stop there basically, you know, because they've been walking a long way. Like, I don't like to walk from here to Chipotle with Steve, and that's like right down the road, and I have shoes. So I don't even imagine where they were at, so I'd be stopping a lot. But anyways, they're stopped here, and the disciples go off to try to find some food for them as Jesus goes to the well to get some water. So as he goes, this woman comes up. It says around noontime or the sixth hour, both mean the same thing, that this woman comes and he says, woman, could you give me a drink? And that's where I want to pick up. I want to read her response real quick. Her response in verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? And I think to stop real quick, I want, I think it's very important to understand why she's asking that question. The reason in the cultural background and the cultural significance of that is the fact that Jews and Samaritan did not mix. They didn't mingle. They hated each other. It was an NC State fan and an UNC fan talking to each other. It just didn't happen. There was no love lost between the two people. And so this was a big deal that Jesus had crossed that cultural boundary to talk to this woman. In the same token, as she says, a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman, that not only that, but we know that in this time and in this culture, there was this hierarchy between men and women, that men were considered better, they were considered greater. And in the same respects, in this culture, men and women just didn't randomly, a guy would not go up and just talk to a girl in public, especially one that he didn't know. It just was not considered right. And in the same token, as we go a little bit more in depth into something that we know here, is that when it says that this was at noon when this woman approached, that what this is saying and what in this culture, as they would know and as Jesus would know, that the reason why this woman is coming at noon in the middle of the day when it's completely hot and she's completely alone and by herself, what we know about that, and we know that to mean that probably even within Sychar, even within her own people and in her own community, she was in exile. That she was an outcast. That she was somebody who was probably shamed and looked down on, that she was less than or considered unclean. And we realize, and as we get into this, that this is the truth and that she had basically these public sins. And so because of that, instead of going with the rest of the women early in the morning where it wasn't too hot, where they could get their water and come back and start working and doing their chores, doing the stuff that they had to do for the day, that this woman had to wait until everyone else was gone because she was so shamed. And so, hey, you cannot be here with the rest of the people. You have to come by yourself. You have to go in the heat of the day where, I mean, just to be real, probably not great. It was probably the worst. And not only that, but even just to consider the fact that she had to walk there every day by those people who had shamed her and who hated her. And so we know those three things. And the reason why I think those are important is because Jesus is about to talk about some incredible things. Jesus could give the message he gives this woman in a sermon, and it would do incredibly well. It's awesome. There's so much truth in this. There's so much awesome, great stuff in the love of Christ that he shares in this passage. But instead, he goes up to one woman. He walks past every boundary that has been placed culturally for her. And he says, you know what? I'm talking to you. I'm expressing my love to you because you need to hear it. And I think that that's incredible. And what I think that that shows us is that Jesus' love is boundless, and it's for everyone. It's not just for people who are Jews. It's not just for people who are men or who work in the church, who are in the church. It's for everyone. And I think that that's incredible. And so I want to pick back up, and we're going to start back in 10. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you holy water or living water. Sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. I would have given you living water. And she doesn't know who he is. She wasn't able to read the first three books of John before having this conversation. She didn't get to hear these great messages that Nate has posted online from the last three weeks. She doesn't know who this is. So she's like, okay, that sounds great, but you don't have anything to get the water, and the well is deep, my man. And so I just think that's funny, and I think that you should too. But in 11, it says, sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Ah, we've already read that. Sorry. We're going into, yeah what this living water is, it's this well that will spring up into eternal life, that it's this eternal well, this eternal spring where you never have to go back to the well again because you're forever satisfied, your soul is satisfied. And we understand what he means is God's love and the grace that's shown through Christ to us on this earth. We understand that he is pointing to, I'm going to die in a couple years and I'm going to for you, and then I'm going to be raised to life. And in the same way, if you'll come to me, you can experience this as well. This is incredible. It's awesome stuff. It's him saying, dude, look at this grace. This is offered to you, but she still doesn't get it. Instead, her reply, she said, the woman said to him, sir, give me this water that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. And I love that. She doesn't get it, but what she does get is I don't want to have to come back to this well and come back to the memory every day of the fact that I am completely isolated and completely alone. I don't have to walk past people trying my best to not make eye contact because I know they're looking down their noses at me. And this is not the main point of my message, but grace, may we never be that person. May we never be a place that people do not want to come back to because they're afraid of what people will think of them for a mistake that they've made, for a past that they have, for somebody who's sitting next to you right now that undoubtedly may mess up in their life. That we're always a place where you can come and you can experience the love of Christ with open arms coming in, and I don't care what you did yesterday because you're here today and I love you for that. May we be that type of church. Let's keep going. He told her, go, call your husband and come back. I have no husband, she replied. Jesus said to her, you are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you have five husbands and you've had five husbands and the man you are now with is not your husband. What you have said is quite true. Now, remember this moment because it seems random. It seems weird. It's always been weird for me. I've never really fully understood it, but I just said, you know what? This is a great passage, but this is what we're going to come back to. This is the meat of the passage, but I want to continue because I think it's imperative that we fully understand what Jesus is saying and who he is in this passage, and then we'll come back and see what that means. So let's just keep reading. I don't know if you have. Bibles need bigger print. You know what I'm saying? All right. Sir, the woman said, I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. And so basically what she's trying to deflect, trying to get, you know, like, okay, let's talk about worship for a bit. I can tell that you're a prophet. And so Jesus responds, and it's a little wordy, it's a little hard to understand, but basically what Jesus says is, let me tell you, first of all, the God that us Jews, the God that we worship is the one true God that Jews worship in truth because this God is the God. He is the only one true rightful God. But let me also tell you that a time is coming and a time has now come where not only is this the God of the Jews, but this is the God of all people, that this God created every person and loves every person. So a time is coming that not only will the Jews be able to worship in truth, but all people, Jew or Samaritan, will be able to worship in spirit and in truth. That when I die for you, that you have the ability to have the Holy Spirit inside of you, the same well that we've talked about that continues to come in, that you never have to go back. You're always forever satisfied. You have this eternal value and this eternal soul satisfaction. He says, this is going to be for all people, not just for Jews, but for Samaritans, for you as well. And so she responds and she says, basically she says, sir, I know that a Messiah is coming. I've heard that a Messiah named Christ is coming and that he's going to explain all of this to us. And Jesus says, I, the one you are speaking to, am he. This Messiah that you've heard about, that is coming to save all people, it's me. And I'm here to tell you that you're definitely right. And that I, as the Messiah, am here to love you. Not just to love people, but to love you. And how incredible is that? And how incredible is that truth? And if we just ended it there, it's like, oh my gosh, this is phenomenal. And like, how awesome is it that God is a God who loves everyone? And as I've read this in the past, I'm like, it's so great that not only does God love me, but God loves people who've sinned in drastic ways, people who are completely isolated, somebody who's dealt with adultery and seems like to continue to fall under adultery and probably other sins as well, as this passage alludes to. And I love that until I think, why was it in this passage? Why did he, she just asked for holy water, and then he changes the subject and says, come bring your husband. And so it's like, why, that's random, and that's weird. Why did you say that? And then the next question is, okay, so you did know that she didn't have a husband. You did know that she's had five husbands and that she's with her sixth man. You did know all of this. So then it just seems like she's putting the, that he's putting this lady on blast. Like he's just straight up calling this lady out and being kind of rude. And I hear that and I see that. And it also just doesn't make sense. Why are you doing it? But then as I, as I realized is there's no reason why this would be in here if it didn't completely connect with the rest of it. And what I think is that instead of him simply talking about her sin is that he is trying to get to the heart behind her sin. And when you get to the heart behind sin and when you start to think about it that way, it gets a little bit scarier for us. Because we, I don't, most people in this room have not been married five times and are on their sixth lover or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what the word is for that. Sorry, I said lover. But what I do think is that we all have hearts that are seeking out other things besides God. And what I do know is that what that means is we have sinful hearts. And so what I think is he's pointing at this and he's saying, you have been searching for value and worth and identity in men instead of in me. And so because of that, you're continuing to have to go back to this well, because it's never going to be enough. And so like I said, I know that we don't always have these stories. Like for me, like to give you a little background behind me, since I know I don't know all of you quite as well, and I haven't known all of you guys for such a long time, I think the best way to give you a little background behind me is to tell you a little bit about high school Kyle. High school Kyle was killing it with the braces game, aka had braces, like all of high school, which is great. Like, that's the time you want to have braces is high school. Like, you know, let the least amount of judgmental people around, you know, obviously. But no, I think the easiest way to really tell you is to kind of tell you what senior superlative I got. And yeah, I know, I know. Hold your plot. Like, I know I got a senior superlative. You guys are like, wow, this is a girl. I know, I get it. But chill, you know, I'm just a normal person just like you guys. But I, the senior superlative, so like, for those of you who don't know, or maybe you like forgot for whatever reason, but there's like, you know, most athletic, and there's like, most likely to succeed, most likely to be president, smartest. Like, I'm sure like if at Connor's school was like biggest sweetheart, he would, he had that unlocked, because he is the sweetest of hearts. Shout out to Connor. Everyone go meet him because he's great. But I didn't get any of those ones that were mentioned. I got most involved. And most of you know, it's like, oh, cool. That's great. That's whatever. Like, when you think about what most involved is, it's basically a participation medal of the superlative game. Like, literally, it's the participation trophy of superlative. It's like, Kyle, we know you worked so hard in school, and you did really well, but there's just people who did better. And we know you worked so hard in sports, and you played a lot of sports, but there were just people who were more athletic. And we know that you were, like, vice president of your class, you were in a lot of leadership roles or whatever, but, like, you're not going to be, you're not most likely to be president in this scenario. Like, you know, like, but you tried so hard, and so we have to give you something, and so here's this. And so it's really sweet, and I don't know, maybe my mom asked them if they would make that just to be sweet to me because she felt bad. But that's what I got, and we laugh and we joke about it, but at the same time, like, I did wear that with a lot of pride. I think it adequately described who I was and who I am, that I'm somebody who is very focused on succeeding. And I want to work as hard as I can to do the very best that I can in every scenario. You know, I wanted to make 100 on every single test. And it's funny how it goes. If I made 100, then I'd be, like, nervous about the next test. I'd be excited for a second and be like, oh, my gosh, now I have to make 100 on the single test. And it's funny how it goes. If I made 100, then I'd be nervous about the next test. I'd be excited for a second and be like, oh my gosh, now I have to make 100 on the next one. But then if I didn't make 100, if I made a 98 on the test, I was devastated and it was the end of my day. And I think some of us can relate to that. Some of us can relate to the fact that we so seek out success and the success is where we're driven. It's where our worth and our value comes from, and we don't quite reach it, then we feel like we've completely failed. And it takes, it like just messes with our hearts in the same way I wanted to be the guy who was known as somebody who worked really hard. I wanted coaches to be able to talk about, man, that guy's work ethic is incredible. Or to tell the players, if you had the work ethic, that if everyone had the work ethic that Kyle had, then we'd be a better team. Or I wanted parents and I wanted teachers to say, this is a great kid. This is a kid who loves the Lord. This is a leader. This is someone who I want my son or my daughter to grow up to have a faith like Kyle. And I say these things to say that these are not bad things. And I think so many things in our life are not bad things. But when I recognize where he's calling this woman out, it was the same with me. I sought so heavily to find my value and to find my worth and to even rest my identity into things outside of Christ, into being seen as a good person, into being lifted up. I can remember at Greystone, the last church I was at, I would be so excited to preach God's word. I would be so excited to get to talk to our students and I had something for them. I knew that the Lord was ready to speak through me to do that and I'd get done and I'd I'd feel great about it, and I'd leave, and I'd be super bummed out at home because not enough people said it was good. I didn't realize, and what I finally realized is this tweet by my man Timothy Keller. He's an older man. He's actually not a pastor anymore because he's retired. Incredible preacher, incredible writer, incredible tweeter. So the big three as far as I'm concerned for being a pastor. But he actually tweeted this week, and I was like, how incredible that he did this, and this is perfect. He said, sin is not simply doing bad things. It is also putting good things in the place of God. I realized, and it hit me pretty hard, that there are so many things in my life that I seek after. There's so many things that I try to find worth and value in, and it never is enough. I love the way that David Foster Wallace puts it. He's got a two-part last name, so you know he's smart. I may start doing my middle and my last name. So Kyle Jordan Talbert said this. So if you quote me, say that, because then people will listen to you. beauty and sexual allure, you will always feel guilty. If you worship power, you will always feel weak and afraid. Worship your intellect, and you will always view yourself as stupid and a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And let me tell you guys that anything you worship outside of God will end up eating you alive. And what is the issue with these things? What is the problem? Why is it? Why can't I find value in these? Because they're earned. Because you have to work as hard as you can to earn them. And anything that you earn, you are always on the verge of also being able to lose them. And there's always someone else. There's always somebody else who doesn't like you. There's always someone who doesn't laugh at your joke. There's always someone who doesn't approve. There's always someone better. There's always someone more successful. There's always more money to be made. When we focus on our success, when we focus on anything else besides God, then we're left coming up short. One scholar says, and I love this, he says, we seek to find our identities horizontally on earth when we have been hardwired to find them vertically in God's love. We've been created to be able to, we've been created to have a relationship with God, our Father. And that is where true eternal value and significance and satisfaction come from. We need to, we need something to change what our heart loves and what it rests in and what it fixes itself on the most. Jesus says he's the only object of worship that won't abuse you because you don't earn his love, his grace, and his favor unlike every other object of worship. And because the point of the gospel and the point of Christ's sacrifice is that the love and the grace that is given to us is given to us as a gift, as free. And so therefore, it is ours. We can't lose it. It's a perfect love and it is a perfect sacrifice that we only receive. And therefore, we're not at risk of losing it. I love, I wrote this one, so whatever. Maybe it's not good. I just kind like, I'm no longer those things. I'm no longer Carl and Suzanne's son. I'm no longer Jay's brother. I'm no longer Connor's coolest friend. I'm Kyle, child of God. And that's in your thing, but I don't want you to write Kyle. You can if you want. That's nice. I want you to write your name because I want you to realize that that is who you are. That's your identity. That's how Christ sees you. That's how the Lord sees you. It's his child. When the creator of the universe would send his son simply for a chance to have a relationship with you, there's not much more value and there's not much more worth you could ever feel than that. And it's a love that keeps coming and it keeps welling up all the way to eternal life. So what does that look like? What does that look like practically? Because it's a cool point. It's an awesome thing. But as my students know, I don't care at all that you understood my message. Like, if you understood my message and you talked about it and then you don't apply it, then who cares? It didn't mean anything. So what does it look like? And I think a very awesome, very cool example is Trevor Lawrence, who was the freshman quarterback at Clemson who won the national championship this year for football. He said he was in a press conference and they basically asked him about his nerves during the game. Ask Asked him like, you know, like, I don't know the exact question, but his response, I love his response. He says, no matter how big the situation is, I know it's not going to define me. It doesn't matter what other people think or say about me because I know what Christ says about me. My identity is in Christ. My value and my worth comes from what Christ says about me. And that was written in stone a long time ago. And so I don't have to spend all of my time worrying about what other people are going to say about me or what other people are thinking or if I am a great quarterback or if I choked or if I'm the best. I'm not worried about that because that's secure. And so does it mean that the Lord took away football because he gave up football in his heart to God? No. The dude won a national championship this year. But can you imagine how much more fun it was for him to play the game that he loves on the biggest stage, not worried about what everyone else thought of him, not trying to find his worth and his value based on the way that he played in that football game? What if that was the way you guys were at work? What if that's the way that we were in our relationships, in our family? What if we weren't solely concerned with having to find our value and having to find our worth by what people thought of us? And instead, we could simply just enjoy it. Enjoy life. Go through life with joy. Going through life knowing that our value and our worth and our souls are completely satisfied. I think it goes even further, honestly. I mean, like, the way that this passage ends, I absolutely love. Like, this woman who was completely isolated from her society and probably was shown, like, a true picture of love, maybe for the first time in her life. I bet her life was a pretty rough one. And so what happens when she finally realizes this? What happens when she finally understands who this man is and the love that he's offering her? She sprints down to Sicar and she starts yelling, you guys have to hear about this person. I think it could be the Messiah. I think it could be this person that we've heard about. He literally told me everything I had done in my life. You have to come find, you have to come see this person, hear from this person yourself. When Christ changes our hearts, when our value is in him, we care far less about what the culture would have us do, what our culture would have us do. We care a lot less about how other people see success. We care a lot less about how other people think we should parent, how other people think we should be as a friend, about what we should be concerned about, what we couldn't. This woman was completely isolated. She wasn't allowed to interact with any of these people. But when you realize and when you fully allow your heart to understand, realize, and be overwhelmed by the love of Christ, there's no way that it doesn't change the way that you live, the things that you talk about. And can I tell you that in such a cynical and fallen world, someone who's completely joyful, you can tell it on them. Someone who has a worth and has value that doesn't go away based on their current circumstance, people see it. And so they heard that and they saw this woman. I think they probably cared less about the words that she said and more just the fact that something incredible just happened to this woman who I probably haven't made eye contact with in years because she's been trying to avoid it because she doesn't want to be seen with shame. I think they cared less about what she said. I think they cared more about the fact that she was so changed in her heart that she would go out in total love and look like a completely different person in her everyday life. May we be those people. May we experience this living water. May we experience having value that is eternal, complete soul satisfaction. And may it change who we are. May it change what we look like. And may it be like the end of this passage where these people, when they saw this woman, they had to go see for themselves. Jesus made a pit stop into a three-day stop because these people wanted to hear what he had to say because they saw what he had done for this girl. May we have people in our lives who have to come see what's going on here, have to go see what's going on in this person's heart, because man, there's just something different about it. Let's pray. God, thank you for your love. God, thank you for your son, for his sacrifice. God, thank you for the fact that you literally show and offer your love to every single one of us, regardless of our past, regardless of our present, that God, if we would come to you, you offer love. And God, allow us to realize that this love is the only thing in this life that we need. And so instead of worrying so much about our current lives and what's going on in our future and what our past was, God, that we're simply able to rest in the peace of your love and the assurance that that brings us. Man, God, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sending your son to die for me for some reason. Thank you that you see me as a child of God, as a child of you. And God, I do just want to take a second to say thank you for whoever wrote this next song because man, they did a good job. We love you. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We find ourselves at the end of a series called Known For where we're examining this idea of reputation. What are we known for as individuals? What are our families known for? Last week we talked about what our church is known for, and this week we want to talk about what our faith is known for. And this is a sermon for me that really means a whole lot to me. It's really very important. This is a message that when we set up this series and when I started writing the sermons each week, in the back of my head I wasn't really writing the other sermons. I was thinking about this one and what I felt compelled to say and what I felt needed to be said. When I go to write a sermon, I write down, I just sit down and I just write all of my thoughts that I have until there's one that seems good and then I go with that one, which sometimes doesn't take very much time at all. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but I wrote down more stuff for this sermon than I've ever written down for almost any of them, because the reputation of God's church matters very much to me. I love the church. I love this outpost of an eternal kingdom that we get to participate in with our lives. We are, we're told, the ambassadors of Christ to a lost and watching world. And so it is our job to carry that flag well. It is our job to be highly regarded in our culture and in the public square. And how God's children are perceived and how his kingdom on earth, the church, is perceived ought to matter very much to a believer. And so for me as a pastor who's dedicated his life to the church, who loves the church very much, it matters very much how we are perceived. And if we were to ask ourselves, how is Christianity in the American church perceived by our culture, the answer is not great. The answer is that for my lifetime, and for most of your lifetimes, we have been on a slow decline. Where the percentage of people over 60 who attend church and claim a faith has gotten lower and lower, and that's the highest percentage of our population that attends and prioritizes churches until you get down to people under 25 years old, and it's as low as 18% of people that claim of faith and attend church on any sort of regular basis. We are on a slow slide towards a post-Christian culture where the church has lost its position of prominence in our country. And the hard part is it's our fault. It's not them. People leaving church, rejecting church, are people who grew up in it. So what are we doing to make a bad name for our Savior? It's really the question that faces us, and it's an important one. To answer it, if you'll humor me, I would like to do a brief overview of all of Christian history. Also, I'm not kidding. So in the new church, after Jesus died, I almost wore, I used to teach Christian high school, and to make myself feel like more of a teacher, Jen remembers this, I bought a houndstooth blazer, and I wanted to wear it for you, but that thing don't fit, man. That would have been flapping open all day. That would have been bad news. So I couldn't do it, so I went with coral. Some people have called it salmon. I don't know which it is. But here we go. Humor me on this. I will try to move as quickly as possible. And I promise you, I'm getting to a point with this. And another reason I'm sharing this with you is because I'm assuming that most of us in this room are Christians, but that the vast majority of us didn't go to seminary and probably haven't taken a personal interest in exhaustive church history. And a lot of this might be new information for you, and I think it can be very helpful information to you. So the church began, obviously, in Jerusalem at the death of Christ. And then we see Pentecost and Acts. The disciples are the leaders of the church. Saul is converted to Paul and commissioned to plant churches throughout Asia Minor. He does this over four missionary journeys. And we see Christianity begin to flourish in the ancient world under the umbrella of the Roman Empire. Because Christianity claimed that there was a Lord who wasn't the emperor, it was reviled as a rebellious and revolutionary religion. And it was persecuted and attempted to be stamped out at every turn, sometimes really bad under Nero, sometimes a little lighter, but it was consistently persecuted in the early centuries of the church. Incidentally, the church always, always flourishes when it's persecuted and always messes things up when it's in power. We'll see that. So the church begins to flourish and grow and grow in prominence and God is blessing it. And in the midst of this flourishing in 313 AD, an emperor named Constantine decided to legalize Christianity. Many of you probably know that. What you may not know is that he did not legalize Christianity because he was a convert and was favorable towards it. All the evidence points to him continuing in the pagan faith that he claimed before he legalized Christianity. He simply legalized it to ingratiate himself to elements of his empire and political leaders and figures that were close to him whose power he needed so that it would be easier to be the emperor. He married the Christian faith for political expediency while feigning a faith that he didn't really have for the sake of his own political career and efficacy. And I would just like to say that I'm very grateful that only happened in 313 and definitely does not happen in the United States for any reason. So Christianity moves into this place of cultural power and primacy. And in the midst of this, eventually, while Christianity, and it's the Catholic Church, but I'm not picking on the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church was the only church until about 1050 when we had the Great Schism and that born Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. So in that time, what we see is the crumble and the fall of the Roman Empire. And all of Europe is basically made up of Frankish and Germanic clans and tribes and nation states. The only transnational power in this time is the Catholic Church. And so the Pope, most pointed, Pope Gregory, becomes kingmaker. He decides who's going to be king of what tribe. He decides who's going to get promoted. And the Catholic Church decides what all these tribes have to believe and what they're going to think favorably of and what they're not. And so this is really historically the very height of power for the Christian church is the pope as kingmaker, as the most powerful force on the planet, single most powerful person on the planet. And out of this place of great power comes our worst and most egregious sins in history. Comes the Spanish Inquisition, where inquisitors are commissioned to go to towns and suss out the heretics and kill people who claim a Christian faith, they just don't articulate it like all the nuanced ways the Catholic Church insisted that they should, and so they kill them. This is when we started indulgences. Indulgences are some of the greatest evil to me in the history of the church. The church had this doctrine of purgatory, where you were taught that even if you're saved, even if you're going to heaven when you die, that since you've sinned here on earth to differing degrees, you have to pay penance in purgatory. Basically, we got to burn all the bad stuff off of you in purgatory before you can go to heaven. That was the idea. But there was this great system that they invented that's called indulgences. And what they said is you're probably going to burn for that for a little while in between this life and the next. But the more money you give to the church, God actually deposits that to your spiritual account, and you burn less. So this is just keep giving. And then they would tell you we're very sad that your mother just died died and we know you're grieving, but also she's on fire. So the more money you give, the quicker you can put out that flame. And there's this phrase, I'll never forget it. There was a guy who was the right hand of the Pope. I forget what his name was, but he used to go through small towns in Europe to collect money for indulgences. And he would ring the metal coffer and and he would say, for every coin in the coffer rings a soul from purgatory springs. And it is an egregious evil on a poor, illiterate populace. But it also paid for the Vatican City, so... And then the worst of our sins, the Crusades. Raping and pillaging our way across Europe for a holy war in the name of Jesus to try to conquer Jerusalem from the Muslims for what reasons I do not understand. Telling these young men who are again illiterate and uneducated that if they die in this holy war that they will go straight to heaven and skip purgatory altogether. At our time of greatest power, we committed our greatest sins. In the midst of these sins, towards the end of the 1400s, there was a guy named Ulrich Zwingli. He started to ask some questions. He was followed by John Calvin and then ultimately by a guy named Martin Luther, who we probably know, and you may have heard the 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Church door, where he says, hey, this church seems corrupt. I've got some questions. And out of their questions and in the corruption that they saw began the Great Reformation. And so that's when the Protestant church sprung off of the Catholic church. And in that Reformation, that was very necessary. And in asking those questions that did need to be asked, and in holding the powerful accountable, we see a spiritual flourishing again, where we have the Scottish Reformation and the English Reformation and the Swedish Reformation. And all of this was born out of Germany. So there's large reform going on in the German church. And so across Christendom, things start to get better, and churches start to be filled with more grace, and things get less corrupt. And so we kind of start to pick ourselves up again. Except what happens in the midst of this flourishing and this spiritual awakening? Well, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin decide that what they need to do is establish a Christian nation state in Geneva where it's going to be this perfect society where all we do is follow God's laws. And if you don't follow God's laws, you're not allowed to live there. And what they do, they killed heretics. John Calvin had one of his closest friends burned alive. He pleaded with the authorities that it could be just beheaded, so it would be a quicker death. But they said, no, we've got to burn him alive for his heresies. He was a believer. John Calvin killed other Christians. Martin Luther was anti-Semitic and was responsible for the death of thousands of Jews, and he would go around commissioning people to kill Baptists. If you would baptize somebody, Martin Luther didn't agree with that, and so he'd just have you killed for your heresy. So at the height of their power, what did they do? They used it to try to get people to behave the way they thought they should behave, and they tanked it. And so Europe, in response to the Reformation and the behavior of the Christians of the Reformation, in response to the behaviors of the Christians from the Catholic Church, wholeheartedly began to reject religion and move away from it. And the church in Europe goes into atrophy. About this time, some people seeking religious freedom from the oppression of Europe come to Jamestown, and they start the American experiment. The American experiment, we found this country on Christian principles, and the church occupies this place of importance in our country. And then the 1700s, we have figures like Jonathan Edwards who led the Great Awakening. And Christianity begins to flourish again in good and wonderful ways, in ways that led to missionary journeys across the world, that led to the church in China and many churches in South Africa or in South America and Central America. There was a good movement of the Spirit that poured out of this great awakening. And then eventually, the church and Christianity moved into this place again of cultural prominence and primacy for all of our lives who are in this room. Christianity has occupied this position of cultural primacy and power where we have a lot of sway in the country in which we live. And I want us to see these historic ebbs and flows because I want us to understand that in the scope of history, and this is very important, that for Christians, cultural primacy always produces corruption, hypocrisy, and abuse. Always. Without fail. In the span of history. And you can take cultural primacy and you can just make that power to make it a little easier. In the span of history, when you put Christians in power as a group over a country or a people, that power always, without fail, produces hypocrisy and corruption and abuse. Always. Now, why is that the case? Well, I think it's largely because when we achieve that power, we start to take our eye off the ball. And we forget the kingdom and we forget what got us there and we just start to focus on maintaining power. Very, very often, almost without fail, what Christians do with that power is we try to make people who don't believe like us behave like us. And when they won't, we punish them. And when it's real bad, we kill them. And I just wonder if in your experience in our American culture, if you could pick out some examples of where Christianity in its place of power in our country produced hypocrisy and corruption and abuse. I'm not going to list any because I'm pretty close to the line already, but I'm pretty sure you can think of them. Those instances of corruption and abuse of power where we leverage everything we can to try to make people who don't believe like us behave like us. How do they make us look in the public square? How do those advance the kingdom we live for? So, if that historic cycle is accurate, how do we make sure we're not a part of it? How can grace make sure that we are not participants in this terrible historical cycle of being persecuted, rising to power in a position of prominence, using that power in ways that are inappropriate, that produce corruption and abuse and hypocrisy, and then watching Christianity fall from prominence. Because let's be honest about where we sit in history. We are on the downside. We have existed in prominence in this country, and now we are on the downside, where based on the statistics I told you at the beginning, where the younger you get in this country, the less likely you are to go to church. We are on the tail end of our cultural dominance. So in this moment in history, as we sit as a church, as you sit as Christians, what do we do? How do we act? How do we respond? What do we admit to and own? And how do we try to chart a path moving forward as Christians within a culture that is beginning to reject us because of the way that we have behaved? Not because of them. What do we do? Well, this will be the least controversial thing I say this morning. We focus on Jesus. And we ask how Jesus engaged with culture. What did he do when he came? Because he entered into a time and place that had its moral bankruptcy, that was rife with oppression, that saw more tragedy than we see, that saw more blatant corruption than what we see. He entered into a world with myriad cultural ills. And when he entered into that world, what did he do about the damaged culture that he saw? Well, how did Jesus interact with culture? He ignored it. He ignored it. He just almost acted as if it weren't there and it didn't matter. I've got some examples of this that I will share with you. The first is in Luke chapter 5, verses 29 through 32. This is when he's calling the disciples at the beginning of his ministry. There's a disciple named Levi that we also know as Matthew. And Levi was a tax collector. And tax collectors in ancient Israel were persona non grata. They were no good because a tax collector is someone who had turned tail on his own people and now worked for the oppressive Roman government and took your money and then a cut of that and then gave the other money to the Roman government. So he was by accounts, a traitor. This was a job that you took and you said, I'm going to be morally bankrupt, but I'm doing it for the money and it's going to be fine. He was that guy. And Jesus, not caring about any of that, calls him to be a disciple. And this is Levi's response to that call. And Levi made him a great feast in his house. And there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples saying, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answered them, those who are well have no You can't be, we don't do that. Our type, we are religiously proper. We don't interact with their type. We don't go to their house and have feasts where there's food and beverages. And Jesus says, yeah, but I do because that's who I came for. I actually came to spend time with them. I'm not really that concerned with your cultural norms. I'm going to go love on them because they're the ones who need my love the most. So I'll see you later. Another instance, in the book of John at the beginning, we see Jesus talking to the woman at the well, and maybe we forget sometimes that the woman at the well was a Samaritan. And the Samaritans to the Hebrew were an ethnic cultural mutt. They were unacceptable. And there was wildly accepted and agreed upon racism amongst the Hebrew people that the Samaritans are the worst. It is right and good to hate them. They have intermingled with other countries and other religions. They are not like us. We are better than them. We should disdain them. It is okay. It is rampant, agreed upon racism by God's people, a lot like the late 1860s in the United States. And Jesus, supposed to avoid Samaria, just walks right through it, goes to the well in the middle of the day, encounters a woman who's basically known for her life of what we would think of as sin and impropriety, and has a conversation with her. Part of the conversation goes like this, John chapter 4, verse 9, the Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? The Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. And Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. So he goes to the Samaritan, and she says, Why are you talking to me? You're not supposed to be talking to me. Culturally, this is not allowed. And Jesus says, yeah, I don't care. I'm actually here for you. You're who I came for. I love you. And if you'll ask me the right question, I'll love you forever. I'll offer you living water. Touched by his love, the Samaritan goes back to her village, tells everyone who she's met, brings them all back out to Jesus, and they all convert. And he reaches a Samaritan village that would have culturally never been reached by a Jewish person because of the norms that he was expected to uphold. Another interesting time we see the Samaritans show up in Scripture is when this rich young guy comes up to Jesus in the public square, and he says, I know that the Bible says that I'm supposed to love my neighbor, but can you tell me who is my neighbor? And Jesus tells them a parable of a priest and then a Levite who walks past a dying man on a road to Jericho, And then he says there was a Samaritan that came up. And the Samaritan healed him. Or paid for him and cared for him. Covered his bills at the hotel. Made sure he was squared away. And then he looks at the rich young guy and he says, and who was his neighbor? That is not dissimilar at all from Jesus showing up in Birmingham, Alabama in 1958 and talking with a group of white churchgoers and them asking him, who is our neighbor? And Jesus tells a parable where a black man is the hero and the moral exemplar over the pastor and the doctor that's respected in town. It's noteworthy to me that though this rampant racism was present in his culture, he did not seek a large audience to decry it, nor did he tacitly approve of it. He just called it out in instances where it made sense. Not really caring who was around and what they thought and what the culture expected of him at the time. We see Jesus greatly concerned with the behavior of others, but first he was concerned with loving others. The adulterous woman that's brought to his feet. Caught in the act of adultery. Asked in front of Pharisees if she should be stoned. And Jesus says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And then I am convinced began to write the names of ladies in the sand. And all those guys went, oh, okay, see you later. And so he shows her great grace, but does he in that grace approve of the behavior? No. He looks at her and he says, your sins are forgiven. Now go and sin no more. There's another example that I have here that we'll just go through really quickly. Luke 5, 12, there is a leper that came to him. While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, I will be clean. I will be clean. And immediately the leprosy left him. This is a big deal because if you've got leprosy in the ancient world, it was because of a sin that you or your family committed and you deserved it and you deserved the death that you were going to die. So they isolated them into communes where no one of any righteous standing would go. Because it was culturally incorrect to do so. And Jesus didn't care. He went and he healed the lepers. When I look at Jesus' life and I understand that he existed in a culture that had its ills, and I think about what he came to accomplish. Listen, if Jesus wanted to, have you ever thought about this? If Jesus wanted to, he could have come and established a nation state. He had the horses to do it. He could have overthrown the Roman Empire. He could have sat on the throne of David. He could have made Israel the moral exemplar for the whole world. He could have established a nation state and made people behave the right way within that nation state if that's what he really wanted to do. He could have done what Zwingli and Calvin and Luther tried to do. He could have done what the Catholic Church tried to do. He could have done what we in America sometimes tried to do, but he doesn't do that. He establishes a church, an eternal outpost of an eternal kingdom and a temporal world. And he didn't get all caught up in the culture wars of his day. Because Jesus fought kingdom wars, not culture wars. Jesus came to fight for a kingdom, not win over a culture. And he died on the cross to lay the cornerstone, to lay the foundation of that kingdom. And in a little bit, we're going to have communion and we're going to celebrate the establishment of this kingdom in which we get to participate. But if we want to encounter our culture like Jesus does, and if we want to care about the reputation of our faith within our culture, then I would contend very simply that we need to love as Jesus did. And that we need to concern ourselves with the things that concern Jesus. And that we ought not think that it is our job to fight culture wars to try to convince people who don't believe what we believe to behave how we behave. But instead, we build God's kingdom. And we build it the way that Jesus did. He fought for his kingdom one opportunity, conversation, and person at a time. That's what he did. When I say opportunity, sometimes Jesus had ministry opportunities or opportunities to love where he fed 5,000 or he gave a sermon, like the Sermon on the Mount, to thousands of people. And so not every interaction that Jesus had was isolated to the individual, but what my point is, we all have opportunities to minister. We all have opportunities to love. God gives us all a chance to show his love to our neighbor and to people within our culture. And when he does, we should seize it. And so Jesus fought for his kingdom, one opportunity, one conversation, and one person at a time. Very simply, Jesus loved. He didn't seek a bully pulpit in the Sanhedrin and try to convince all the Pharisees that they needed to go to Samaria and do ministry. He just went to Samaria and he did ministry. He didn't argue for time in the synagogue and try to convince them that they should care deeply about the lepers. He just went and loved on the lepers. He didn't enter into a debate in the public square about the validity of racism against the Samaritans. He just set them up as a hero and a parable to make a very clear point to the few people who were around him. It's not as though Jesus doesn't care about bad behavior. He just knows that the right behavior is never going to follow the wrong beliefs. And so as Christians, the most important thing we can do is fight for God's kingdom, which as we defined it in the fall, was to strengthen and add to the souls who are following Jesus. So what can grace do in our culture to make sure that we are not a part of the terrible historical cycle of abusing power and producing corruption and abuse and hypocrisy. I think that we can examine long and hard the culture wars that we feel like we need to fight as Christians. And start wondering what it might look like to fight kingdom wars like Jesus did instead. To fight for individuals and their souls, not principles. We can carefully and prayerfully consider the value of trying to get people who don't believe like us to behave like us. And we can ask, when we do find ourselves in a situation where we can legislate them to behave like we do, does that push them closer to or further away from our Savior? And if it's further away from our Jesus, did we really win anything? Or have we just perpetuated the historical cycle? So Grace, let's be a church that fights for God's kingdom. Let's fight for it one person at a time, one conversation at a time, one opportunity at a time. And if we do that, you know what I think we'll see? In this little outpost of God's eternal kingdom? Revival. Revival in our hearts. Revival in our neighbors. Revival in our friends. Let's pray for that. Father, we love you. We are sorry for making your good name look bad. We are sorry for the times that we, as individuals, have carried your banner poorly. We are sorry for the times that we have been a part of churches that have carried your banner poorly. God, we know that grace has not always displayed you perfectly in our communities, and we know that we will fail you again, but God that we would see it and that we would care and that we would try and that we would be like your son and try to win people to your kingdom one person at a time. God let us see and be very afraid of the potential damage that can be done when we are put in positions of power. Let us hold it well and honorably. Let us honor you in our interactions. And let our biggest priority, God, for everyone that we encounter be that they would know you, that they would love you, and in turn, eventually, they would begin to love others as you love them. Be with us in our small groups this week as we discuss this. Be with us as we drive and we think and we pray and we reflect. And God, for what it's worth, we really want this church to be a place that you're proud of. Would you give us the courage to be that? In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We find ourselves at the end of a series called Known For where we're examining this idea of reputation. What are we known for as individuals? What are our families known for? Last week we talked about what our church is known for, and this week we want to talk about what our faith is known for. And this is a sermon for me that really means a whole lot to me. It's really very important. This is a message that when we set up this series and when I started writing the sermons each week, in the back of my head I wasn't really writing the other sermons. I was thinking about this one and what I felt compelled to say and what I felt needed to be said. When I go to write a sermon, I write down, I just sit down and I just write all of my thoughts that I have until there's one that seems good and then I go with that one, which sometimes doesn't take very much time at all. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but I wrote down more stuff for this sermon than I've ever written down for almost any of them, because the reputation of God's church matters very much to me. I love the church. I love this outpost of an eternal kingdom that we get to participate in with our lives. We are, we're told, the ambassadors of Christ to a lost and watching world. And so it is our job to carry that flag well. It is our job to be highly regarded in our culture and in the public square. And how God's children are perceived and how his kingdom on earth, the church, is perceived ought to matter very much to a believer. And so for me as a pastor who's dedicated his life to the church, who loves the church very much, it matters very much how we are perceived. And if we were to ask ourselves, how is Christianity in the American church perceived by our culture, the answer is not great. The answer is that for my lifetime, and for most of your lifetimes, we have been on a slow decline. Where the percentage of people over 60 who attend church and claim a faith has gotten lower and lower, and that's the highest percentage of our population that attends and prioritizes churches until you get down to people under 25 years old, and it's as low as 18% of people that claim of faith and attend church on any sort of regular basis. We are on a slow slide towards a post-Christian culture where the church has lost its position of prominence in our country. And the hard part is it's our fault. It's not them. People leaving church, rejecting church, are people who grew up in it. So what are we doing to make a bad name for our Savior? It's really the question that faces us, and it's an important one. To answer it, if you'll humor me, I would like to do a brief overview of all of Christian history. Also, I'm not kidding. So in the new church, after Jesus died, I almost wore, I used to teach Christian high school, and to make myself feel like more of a teacher, Jen remembers this, I bought a houndstooth blazer, and I wanted to wear it for you, but that thing don't fit, man. That would have been flapping open all day. That would have been bad news. So I couldn't do it, so I went with coral. Some people have called it salmon. I don't know which it is. But here we go. Humor me on this. I will try to move as quickly as possible. And I promise you, I'm getting to a point with this. And another reason I'm sharing this with you is because I'm assuming that most of us in this room are Christians, but that the vast majority of us didn't go to seminary and probably haven't taken a personal interest in exhaustive church history. And a lot of this might be new information for you, and I think it can be very helpful information to you. So the church began, obviously, in Jerusalem at the death of Christ. And then we see Pentecost and Acts. The disciples are the leaders of the church. Saul is converted to Paul and commissioned to plant churches throughout Asia Minor. He does this over four missionary journeys. And we see Christianity begin to flourish in the ancient world under the umbrella of the Roman Empire. Because Christianity claimed that there was a Lord who wasn't the emperor, it was reviled as a rebellious and revolutionary religion. And it was persecuted and attempted to be stamped out at every turn, sometimes really bad under Nero, sometimes a little lighter, but it was consistently persecuted in the early centuries of the church. Incidentally, the church always, always flourishes when it's persecuted and always messes things up when it's in power. We'll see that. So the church begins to flourish and grow and grow in prominence and God is blessing it. And in the midst of this flourishing in 313 AD, an emperor named Constantine decided to legalize Christianity. Many of you probably know that. What you may not know is that he did not legalize Christianity because he was a convert and was favorable towards it. All the evidence points to him continuing in the pagan faith that he claimed before he legalized Christianity. He simply legalized it to ingratiate himself to elements of his empire and political leaders and figures that were close to him whose power he needed so that it would be easier to be the emperor. He married the Christian faith for political expediency while feigning a faith that he didn't really have for the sake of his own political career and efficacy. And I would just like to say that I'm very grateful that only happened in 313 and definitely does not happen in the United States for any reason. So Christianity moves into this place of cultural power and primacy. And in the midst of this, eventually, while Christianity, and it's the Catholic Church, but I'm not picking on the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church was the only church until about 1050 when we had the Great Schism and that born Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. So in that time, what we see is the crumble and the fall of the Roman Empire. And all of Europe is basically made up of Frankish and Germanic clans and tribes and nation states. The only transnational power in this time is the Catholic Church. And so the Pope, most pointed, Pope Gregory, becomes kingmaker. He decides who's going to be king of what tribe. He decides who's going to get promoted. And the Catholic Church decides what all these tribes have to believe and what they're going to think favorably of and what they're not. And so this is really historically the very height of power for the Christian church is the pope as kingmaker, as the most powerful force on the planet, single most powerful person on the planet. And out of this place of great power comes our worst and most egregious sins in history. Comes the Spanish Inquisition, where inquisitors are commissioned to go to towns and suss out the heretics and kill people who claim a Christian faith, they just don't articulate it like all the nuanced ways the Catholic Church insisted that they should, and so they kill them. This is when we started indulgences. Indulgences are some of the greatest evil to me in the history of the church. The church had this doctrine of purgatory, where you were taught that even if you're saved, even if you're going to heaven when you die, that since you've sinned here on earth to differing degrees, you have to pay penance in purgatory. Basically, we got to burn all the bad stuff off of you in purgatory before you can go to heaven. That was the idea. But there was this great system that they invented that's called indulgences. And what they said is you're probably going to burn for that for a little while in between this life and the next. But the more money you give to the church, God actually deposits that to your spiritual account, and you burn less. So this is just keep giving. And then they would tell you we're very sad that your mother just died died and we know you're grieving, but also she's on fire. So the more money you give, the quicker you can put out that flame. And there's this phrase, I'll never forget it. There was a guy who was the right hand of the Pope. I forget what his name was, but he used to go through small towns in Europe to collect money for indulgences. And he would ring the metal coffer and and he would say, for every coin in the coffer rings a soul from purgatory springs. And it is an egregious evil on a poor, illiterate populace. But it also paid for the Vatican City, so... And then the worst of our sins, the Crusades. Raping and pillaging our way across Europe for a holy war in the name of Jesus to try to conquer Jerusalem from the Muslims for what reasons I do not understand. Telling these young men who are again illiterate and uneducated that if they die in this holy war that they will go straight to heaven and skip purgatory altogether. At our time of greatest power, we committed our greatest sins. In the midst of these sins, towards the end of the 1400s, there was a guy named Ulrich Zwingli. He started to ask some questions. He was followed by John Calvin and then ultimately by a guy named Martin Luther, who we probably know, and you may have heard the 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Church door, where he says, hey, this church seems corrupt. I've got some questions. And out of their questions and in the corruption that they saw began the Great Reformation. And so that's when the Protestant church sprung off of the Catholic church. And in that Reformation, that was very necessary. And in asking those questions that did need to be asked, and in holding the powerful accountable, we see a spiritual flourishing again, where we have the Scottish Reformation and the English Reformation and the Swedish Reformation. And all of this was born out of Germany. So there's large reform going on in the German church. And so across Christendom, things start to get better, and churches start to be filled with more grace, and things get less corrupt. And so we kind of start to pick ourselves up again. Except what happens in the midst of this flourishing and this spiritual awakening? Well, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin decide that what they need to do is establish a Christian nation state in Geneva where it's going to be this perfect society where all we do is follow God's laws. And if you don't follow God's laws, you're not allowed to live there. And what they do, they killed heretics. John Calvin had one of his closest friends burned alive. He pleaded with the authorities that it could be just beheaded, so it would be a quicker death. But they said, no, we've got to burn him alive for his heresies. He was a believer. John Calvin killed other Christians. Martin Luther was anti-Semitic and was responsible for the death of thousands of Jews, and he would go around commissioning people to kill Baptists. If you would baptize somebody, Martin Luther didn't agree with that, and so he'd just have you killed for your heresy. So at the height of their power, what did they do? They used it to try to get people to behave the way they thought they should behave, and they tanked it. And so Europe, in response to the Reformation and the behavior of the Christians of the Reformation, in response to the behaviors of the Christians from the Catholic Church, wholeheartedly began to reject religion and move away from it. And the church in Europe goes into atrophy. About this time, some people seeking religious freedom from the oppression of Europe come to Jamestown, and they start the American experiment. The American experiment, we found this country on Christian principles, and the church occupies this place of importance in our country. And then the 1700s, we have figures like Jonathan Edwards who led the Great Awakening. And Christianity begins to flourish again in good and wonderful ways, in ways that led to missionary journeys across the world, that led to the church in China and many churches in South Africa or in South America and Central America. There was a good movement of the Spirit that poured out of this great awakening. And then eventually, the church and Christianity moved into this place again of cultural prominence and primacy for all of our lives who are in this room. Christianity has occupied this position of cultural primacy and power where we have a lot of sway in the country in which we live. And I want us to see these historic ebbs and flows because I want us to understand that in the scope of history, and this is very important, that for Christians, cultural primacy always produces corruption, hypocrisy, and abuse. Always. Without fail. In the span of history. And you can take cultural primacy and you can just make that power to make it a little easier. In the span of history, when you put Christians in power as a group over a country or a people, that power always, without fail, produces hypocrisy and corruption and abuse. Always. Now, why is that the case? Well, I think it's largely because when we achieve that power, we start to take our eye off the ball. And we forget the kingdom and we forget what got us there and we just start to focus on maintaining power. Very, very often, almost without fail, what Christians do with that power is we try to make people who don't believe like us behave like us. And when they won't, we punish them. And when it's real bad, we kill them. And I just wonder if in your experience in our American culture, if you could pick out some examples of where Christianity in its place of power in our country produced hypocrisy and corruption and abuse. I'm not going to list any because I'm pretty close to the line already, but I'm pretty sure you can think of them. Those instances of corruption and abuse of power where we leverage everything we can to try to make people who don't believe like us behave like us. How do they make us look in the public square? How do those advance the kingdom we live for? So, if that historic cycle is accurate, how do we make sure we're not a part of it? How can grace make sure that we are not participants in this terrible historical cycle of being persecuted, rising to power in a position of prominence, using that power in ways that are inappropriate, that produce corruption and abuse and hypocrisy, and then watching Christianity fall from prominence. Because let's be honest about where we sit in history. We are on the downside. We have existed in prominence in this country, and now we are on the downside, where based on the statistics I told you at the beginning, where the younger you get in this country, the less likely you are to go to church. We are on the tail end of our cultural dominance. So in this moment in history, as we sit as a church, as you sit as Christians, what do we do? How do we act? How do we respond? What do we admit to and own? And how do we try to chart a path moving forward as Christians within a culture that is beginning to reject us because of the way that we have behaved? Not because of them. What do we do? Well, this will be the least controversial thing I say this morning. We focus on Jesus. And we ask how Jesus engaged with culture. What did he do when he came? Because he entered into a time and place that had its moral bankruptcy, that was rife with oppression, that saw more tragedy than we see, that saw more blatant corruption than what we see. He entered into a world with myriad cultural ills. And when he entered into that world, what did he do about the damaged culture that he saw? Well, how did Jesus interact with culture? He ignored it. He ignored it. He just almost acted as if it weren't there and it didn't matter. I've got some examples of this that I will share with you. The first is in Luke chapter 5, verses 29 through 32. This is when he's calling the disciples at the beginning of his ministry. There's a disciple named Levi that we also know as Matthew. And Levi was a tax collector. And tax collectors in ancient Israel were persona non grata. They were no good because a tax collector is someone who had turned tail on his own people and now worked for the oppressive Roman government and took your money and then a cut of that and then gave the other money to the Roman government. So he was by accounts, a traitor. This was a job that you took and you said, I'm going to be morally bankrupt, but I'm doing it for the money and it's going to be fine. He was that guy. And Jesus, not caring about any of that, calls him to be a disciple. And this is Levi's response to that call. And Levi made him a great feast in his house. And there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples saying, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answered them, those who are well have no You can't be, we don't do that. Our type, we are religiously proper. We don't interact with their type. We don't go to their house and have feasts where there's food and beverages. And Jesus says, yeah, but I do because that's who I came for. I actually came to spend time with them. I'm not really that concerned with your cultural norms. I'm going to go love on them because they're the ones who need my love the most. So I'll see you later. Another instance, in the book of John at the beginning, we see Jesus talking to the woman at the well, and maybe we forget sometimes that the woman at the well was a Samaritan. And the Samaritans to the Hebrew were an ethnic cultural mutt. They were unacceptable. And there was wildly accepted and agreed upon racism amongst the Hebrew people that the Samaritans are the worst. It is right and good to hate them. They have intermingled with other countries and other religions. They are not like us. We are better than them. We should disdain them. It is okay. It is rampant, agreed upon racism by God's people, a lot like the late 1860s in the United States. And Jesus, supposed to avoid Samaria, just walks right through it, goes to the well in the middle of the day, encounters a woman who's basically known for her life of what we would think of as sin and impropriety, and has a conversation with her. Part of the conversation goes like this, John chapter 4, verse 9, the Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? The Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. And Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. So he goes to the Samaritan, and she says, Why are you talking to me? You're not supposed to be talking to me. Culturally, this is not allowed. And Jesus says, yeah, I don't care. I'm actually here for you. You're who I came for. I love you. And if you'll ask me the right question, I'll love you forever. I'll offer you living water. Touched by his love, the Samaritan goes back to her village, tells everyone who she's met, brings them all back out to Jesus, and they all convert. And he reaches a Samaritan village that would have culturally never been reached by a Jewish person because of the norms that he was expected to uphold. Another interesting time we see the Samaritans show up in Scripture is when this rich young guy comes up to Jesus in the public square, and he says, I know that the Bible says that I'm supposed to love my neighbor, but can you tell me who is my neighbor? And Jesus tells them a parable of a priest and then a Levite who walks past a dying man on a road to Jericho, And then he says there was a Samaritan that came up. And the Samaritan healed him. Or paid for him and cared for him. Covered his bills at the hotel. Made sure he was squared away. And then he looks at the rich young guy and he says, and who was his neighbor? That is not dissimilar at all from Jesus showing up in Birmingham, Alabama in 1958 and talking with a group of white churchgoers and them asking him, who is our neighbor? And Jesus tells a parable where a black man is the hero and the moral exemplar over the pastor and the doctor that's respected in town. It's noteworthy to me that though this rampant racism was present in his culture, he did not seek a large audience to decry it, nor did he tacitly approve of it. He just called it out in instances where it made sense. Not really caring who was around and what they thought and what the culture expected of him at the time. We see Jesus greatly concerned with the behavior of others, but first he was concerned with loving others. The adulterous woman that's brought to his feet. Caught in the act of adultery. Asked in front of Pharisees if she should be stoned. And Jesus says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And then I am convinced began to write the names of ladies in the sand. And all those guys went, oh, okay, see you later. And so he shows her great grace, but does he in that grace approve of the behavior? No. He looks at her and he says, your sins are forgiven. Now go and sin no more. There's another example that I have here that we'll just go through really quickly. Luke 5, 12, there is a leper that came to him. While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, I will be clean. I will be clean. And immediately the leprosy left him. This is a big deal because if you've got leprosy in the ancient world, it was because of a sin that you or your family committed and you deserved it and you deserved the death that you were going to die. So they isolated them into communes where no one of any righteous standing would go. Because it was culturally incorrect to do so. And Jesus didn't care. He went and he healed the lepers. When I look at Jesus' life and I understand that he existed in a culture that had its ills, and I think about what he came to accomplish. Listen, if Jesus wanted to, have you ever thought about this? If Jesus wanted to, he could have come and established a nation state. He had the horses to do it. He could have overthrown the Roman Empire. He could have sat on the throne of David. He could have made Israel the moral exemplar for the whole world. He could have established a nation state and made people behave the right way within that nation state if that's what he really wanted to do. He could have done what Zwingli and Calvin and Luther tried to do. He could have done what the Catholic Church tried to do. He could have done what we in America sometimes tried to do, but he doesn't do that. He establishes a church, an eternal outpost of an eternal kingdom and a temporal world. And he didn't get all caught up in the culture wars of his day. Because Jesus fought kingdom wars, not culture wars. Jesus came to fight for a kingdom, not win over a culture. And he died on the cross to lay the cornerstone, to lay the foundation of that kingdom. And in a little bit, we're going to have communion and we're going to celebrate the establishment of this kingdom in which we get to participate. But if we want to encounter our culture like Jesus does, and if we want to care about the reputation of our faith within our culture, then I would contend very simply that we need to love as Jesus did. And that we need to concern ourselves with the things that concern Jesus. And that we ought not think that it is our job to fight culture wars to try to convince people who don't believe what we believe to behave how we behave. But instead, we build God's kingdom. And we build it the way that Jesus did. He fought for his kingdom one opportunity, conversation, and person at a time. That's what he did. When I say opportunity, sometimes Jesus had ministry opportunities or opportunities to love where he fed 5,000 or he gave a sermon, like the Sermon on the Mount, to thousands of people. And so not every interaction that Jesus had was isolated to the individual, but what my point is, we all have opportunities to minister. We all have opportunities to love. God gives us all a chance to show his love to our neighbor and to people within our culture. And when he does, we should seize it. And so Jesus fought for his kingdom, one opportunity, one conversation, and one person at a time. Very simply, Jesus loved. He didn't seek a bully pulpit in the Sanhedrin and try to convince all the Pharisees that they needed to go to Samaria and do ministry. He just went to Samaria and he did ministry. He didn't argue for time in the synagogue and try to convince them that they should care deeply about the lepers. He just went and loved on the lepers. He didn't enter into a debate in the public square about the validity of racism against the Samaritans. He just set them up as a hero and a parable to make a very clear point to the few people who were around him. It's not as though Jesus doesn't care about bad behavior. He just knows that the right behavior is never going to follow the wrong beliefs. And so as Christians, the most important thing we can do is fight for God's kingdom, which as we defined it in the fall, was to strengthen and add to the souls who are following Jesus. So what can grace do in our culture to make sure that we are not a part of the terrible historical cycle of abusing power and producing corruption and abuse and hypocrisy. I think that we can examine long and hard the culture wars that we feel like we need to fight as Christians. And start wondering what it might look like to fight kingdom wars like Jesus did instead. To fight for individuals and their souls, not principles. We can carefully and prayerfully consider the value of trying to get people who don't believe like us to behave like us. And we can ask, when we do find ourselves in a situation where we can legislate them to behave like we do, does that push them closer to or further away from our Savior? And if it's further away from our Jesus, did we really win anything? Or have we just perpetuated the historical cycle? So Grace, let's be a church that fights for God's kingdom. Let's fight for it one person at a time, one conversation at a time, one opportunity at a time. And if we do that, you know what I think we'll see? In this little outpost of God's eternal kingdom? Revival. Revival in our hearts. Revival in our neighbors. Revival in our friends. Let's pray for that. Father, we love you. We are sorry for making your good name look bad. We are sorry for the times that we, as individuals, have carried your banner poorly. We are sorry for the times that we have been a part of churches that have carried your banner poorly. God, we know that grace has not always displayed you perfectly in our communities, and we know that we will fail you again, but God that we would see it and that we would care and that we would try and that we would be like your son and try to win people to your kingdom one person at a time. God let us see and be very afraid of the potential damage that can be done when we are put in positions of power. Let us hold it well and honorably. Let us honor you in our interactions. And let our biggest priority, God, for everyone that we encounter be that they would know you, that they would love you, and in turn, eventually, they would begin to love others as you love them. Be with us in our small groups this week as we discuss this. Be with us as we drive and we think and we pray and we reflect. And God, for what it's worth, we really want this church to be a place that you're proud of. Would you give us the courage to be that? In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Grace, I would just like to point out that I'm the guy who fixed the sound. Let's pray and go home. I think we can leave on that one. Actually, and I fixed it by doing absolutely nothing. That's what happens a lot of times, right? Like you go try to fix somebody, somebody asks a question, and you just act like you do something. It's like, thanks, man. You know so much about everything. Hey, I'm so glad that you are here and you decided to join us this morning if you're new. My name is Aaron. Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there. Thank you for choosing to come to church instead of asking your wife if you could stay home and watch the U.S. Open. Jesus does love you more for that. I'm just kidding. He doesn't. I know some of you. Hey, we are in the third week of a series called Idols. And just to kind of set us up, kind of get us moving in the direction we're heading this morning. So you've got like the US Open, right? Very prestigious event, great golfers and all that. Then there's another event that's really close to it. It's the Grace Raleigh Golf Tournament. It's same prestige, same level of competition, same caliber of players and we had it back April, but nobody signed up. So what we did instead, we actually, there was like 16 people who signed up to be a part of it. So we quickly veered away from like tournament and we said, okay, so what we're going to do instead is just give whoever wants to play a reason to take Monday off and go play golf and hang out with one another, right? And so I just want to be very open and honest. I am, I'm not a good golfer, okay? And because of that, like, I don't typically sign up to be a part of stuff like that because I don't need you to see and remind me that I'm not a good golfer. Like, I'm learning. I love to play. I play often. I'm just not playing well. So I typically avoid stuff like that. But I look through the list. I look through the roster, and I was like, okay, I may not be the worst one there. I was. I was the worst one there. Absolutely. And I can tell you, there's proof that I was the worst one there. So what happens is as soon as you pull up, we were at Zebulon Country Club. If you've ever played there, you'll know what I'm talking about. You pull into the parking lot, and immediately atop of a conversation is the ninth hole, right? Because as you go to park, like some people will remind you and like warn you, hey, listen, you see that? There's a tee box right there. Like it's really close. The green is really close to the parking lot. It's really close to the clubhouse. And you don't want to park there because some idiot's going to hit the ball too far. It hit a car. You don't let it be your car, right? And so immediately what happens is you, okay, yeah, let me move. Like I'm going to go somewhere else. then we went. We played the eight holes, and I played terribly. Like there's all this added pressure, which is dumb. I'm not a good golfer. Everyone knows I'm not a good golfer. Why do I feel like I have to play like a good golfer? That's another reason. If you play golf and not well, why do you get so mad that you're not playing? What do you expect to happen? So we go through the entire eight holes or we go through eight holes. Then we get up to nine and then you start thinking about the parking lot again. Right? Well, I start thinking about the parking lot again. When I went up to the tee box, what was going through my mind was not, hey, there's a sand trap just in front of the green. Make sure, play the left side. I don't think, hey, you know what? I want to hit this in the back of the green and make it spin. I don't even know how to make the ball spin. I don't know if it does spin when I hit it. I have no clue. So that's not what going through my mind is. I line up to hit the ball. What I start thinking about is, don't be the idiot who hits a car. Like, don't be that guy. And I take my backswing, and I come through, and man, y'all, I blade it. Like, it's just, I hit it, and it just rockets towards the parking lot. Not just towards the parking lot, towards the Mercedes flipping bins, okay? Now, was anybody here? Did anybody go? Dude, either of you drive a Mercedes. Because if you do, this was going to have a very different ending. Like, it went past the Mercedes. There was this banged-up truck. I hit that thing. But no, so as you can figure out by now, like it went straight. I'm telling you, like everything got real. It was movie type slow motion. You know what I mean? Like I could see which way the blades of grass were going. There was a groundskeeper. He was in the sand. He just watched it. Uh-oh. It just looked. And then I'm telling y'all, like it was the loudest bang I've ever heard in my life. It sounded like this dude's ex-wife was really, really mad, found a sledgehammer in his car, and went to work. It was so loud, and everything in me just sank. I was like, oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. For one, the first thought was, my wife is never going to let me play golf again. I just played an $80,000 round of golf at a mediocre golf course. What kind of, I'm the idiot that everyone's thinking about. And then my second thought was, I have people with me. Like they all saw that I'm the idiot who hit the car on the other side of the green at Zebulon Country Club, right? And so I turn around, I'm like, well, maybe,, there's this idea of, okay, I'm one of their pastors. Which I am, by the way, if you didn't know that up to this point. But I'm one of their pastors. Maybe I'll turn around and there'll be some grace and some kindness. Here's what I. That's what the heck I turned around to. That was just that exact noise. No, I'm telling you. There's a guy. I'm not going to. We share the same first name, Carly Buchanan. It's his husband. You don't need to know the rest of it. But I turn around, and here's what I see. Like, he's laughing so flipping hard. Like, he can't even control his shoulders. I'm like, are you, you're a jerk face. And then I said, okay, well, there's still two others. And I look and there's another guy swinging a golf club. Just, oh, let me act like I don't see anything. But still there's a single shoulder. He's not as big. I'm like, are you kidding? There's one other guy. And I look over to him and his face is like this because I'm on his team. And he's like, we can't use that ball. I gotta, I gotta show up now and do something really good. Right. And I'm like,, my, this is the worst day ever. Okay, so immediately I start going into damage control. How do I make sure nobody else finds out? And about that time, the little golf club swinging guy, he yells out to people on another hole. He hit the Mercedes. I'm like, are you kidding me? Listen, I'm not joking about this. Two weeks later, two weeks later, we were at the AJ event. I think it was two weeks. Anyway, it was a couple weeks later. Somebody came up to me who wasn't even at the golf course and said, hey, I heard about the ninth hole. Dude didn't even go to our church. I'm like, are you kidding me? And the entire time I'm thinking, everybody knows I'm the idiot who hit the car. Not just a car. It was a Mercedes. And, like, everything that was the reason that I don't go get involved in stuff like this. Now, we did go. We went and we really looked over the car pretty well, make sure there was no dings or anything like that. And there was at some point the guys that were there with me, they tried to start consoling, except for the one jerk face whose shoulders are going like that. Like everybody was like, hey, don't, Aaron, it's all right, buddy. Like it happens. They certainly have to take a little bit of accountability. Like when you park there, like you knew there was going to be an idiot. You didn't know you were going to be the idiot, but like you knew there was a possibility. So they started to give some comfort, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, like there was just this overwhelming overwhelming sense of not good enough, and everybody knows it now. Like, there was this overwhelming sense of everyone sees that I don't belong here. I don't belong at this tournament. I don't belong being here. Like, there's nothing about it. And fortunately, these guys came, they consoled, and then I do just want to say, like, I piped the next drive, right? Like, it looked really, really, so much so that the greenskeeper who watched it go like this, he was like, that wasn't the same guy who hit the bins, was it? I was like, shut up, dude. So, but there was this sense and this need, this overwhelming awareness where I was different. I didn't belong in that place. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt the not good enoughness? Have you ever felt like your weakness, your insecurity, all the things that you're worried about? Everybody kind of sees. And maybe it's just not a weakness, but maybe it's just a difference that someone else doesn't approve of. Maybe you feel it when mom-in-law or dad-in-law or mom or dad come to the house, and suddenly they start looking at everything, and you know there's going to be some criticisms. You know where they're going to say, hey, you should really do this different. You know they're going to say, you're not raising your kids right. I didn't let you do that. You've got to do this differently. Maybe it's in co-working world, right, or with your boss, or maybe it's whenever you go with a group of moms, and all the moms seem like they have houses that kids don't live in, right? Like it just, there's this overwhelming sense and awareness of different. Don't belong. Not good enough. And there's this pressure that in order for you to accept me and to like me, to approve of me, I have to become who it is that you want me to be. Not good enough. It's a powerful motivator. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. I have. And that's what we're talking about today. We started a couple weeks ago a new series, as Aaron was saying a little earlier, called Idols. And essentially what an idol is, an idol is anything that we elevate to a position of authority in our life. It could be anything at all. But I love what St. Augustine says about it. He says that the matter, the challenge, the problem, the difficulty with living the holy lives that we want to live is a matter of disordered love. It's loving things out of their appropriate order. That's not just a Christian thing. That's a human thing, right? Well, whatever's at the top of your list, whether it's a person, whether it's a thing, that's what's going to call the shots in your life. That's idolatry. Whatever is at the top of the list is going to determine the steps that you take because we shape our lives around pleasing that person or attaining that thing. And Nate talked with us last week. I don't know why I pointed over there. He's not over there. Nate talked with us last week about power and how when power becomes something that becomes the ultimate thing, it just rattles everything and how it destroys relationships. If you missed it, you can check it out online. Go and listen to that. Today, we're talking about approval. And I know the thought, I know the argument. You may have even had someone who leaned over to you and said, I really don't care what people think about me. Yes, you do. Because you wouldn't have said that if you didn't want us to think you were cool for saying it, right? Approval is not a bad thing. And approval, I wouldn't even say is a desire so much as it is a need. A need for approval comes from an awareness of self. A need for approval comes from this awareness of that I'm not perfect. And so what we need in these moments is if you are a Christian, you became a Christian because you were aware that you fell short and you needed Jesus. The sense of approval. It's not a desire, it's a need, but maybe you are a person who generally walks through life with an understanding that none of us are perfect. None of us have everything together. Like we all have things that we're working on. And so the opinion and ideas of others generally don't bother you. Here's what I would ask you to consider. and here's what I would argue. There is someone in your world whose voice influences the things that you do. There is someone in your world that what they think about the decisions that you make influences the decisions that you make. Approval's not a bad thing. It just makes a crummy God. Because here's what happens. The danger with approval, the idol of approval creates a fear of rejection that places our identity and worth in the people around us. The idol of approval, when approval gets to the top of the list, when it becomes the ultimate thing that we have to have, we have to have it from the people around us, we have to have it from the person, whatever it may be, it shapes who you become. And what we avoid is this fear of rejection. All of the idols are connected to your identity. All the idols that we'll talk about in this series, they determine who you become. Approval is the only idol that places your identity in the hands of the people you seek to be approved by. You know this. In order to be approved by someone, you have to either become or show them something they would approve. And what happens is when approval becomes ultimate, your sense of value and worth is determined by the acceptance of the people around you. And it creates this internal tug of war. You see an example of this in John. Jesus is pretty far into his ministry at this point. He's at kind of rock star status. Like everyone who knows who he is. Some people like him, some people don't. There's some people who do believe in him. There's some people who don't believe in our life. It creates this internal tug of war. This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I want to do. In order for people to accept, approve, like, love, respect, I have to do this. And when approval's at the top of the list, it's always going to win. Your value, your worth, your identity is going to be in the hands of the people around you. And let's think about that for a second. What version of right and wrong do you choose today? We live in a world full of opinions. Everyone has an idea about the way you should or should not raise your kids. Everyone has an idea about what is right and what is wrong. And it's also people don't see the action that you do in light of who you are. They determine who you are based off of the action that you do. We see it with political affiliations, political views, religious views. You don't believe this. You are this. You see it with, again, like the way you raise your kids, the way you discipline your kids. You see it with whether you shop at Target or Walmart. I get that one a little bit. Like, don't go to Walmart. Like, there's nothing good that happens at that place. But like, we see these things in our life and people determine who we are based off of who we do. And when approval becomes our idol, it creates this exhausting desire to please. It creates this exhausting pursuit of a fragile approval that can be taken away at a moment's notice. Because when you gain someone's approval, in order to be approved by one is to be disapproved by the other. It's a dangerous place to be. It's a dangerous thing. And so the thing that we really need to take away from when we idolize approval, we ask people to fill a need that only God can satisfy. And so this exhausting race, this pull back and forth, this constant trying to, okay, I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this to this over here. Like we, it's exhausting. And you're always going to be left feeling less than because it highlights the differences and typically what we would assume as weaknesses where we've dropped the ball. It brings those to the surface. Because people, and again, let me reiterate, I want to make sure that you're not hearing the wrong thing in this. Approval, it's not bad. It just can never serve you the way that we're asking it to. Because we start looking at broken people to fill this need that we were designed to have filled by God. And so approval from people just creates this fragile pursuit of never good enoughness, never quite arrived yet. The best person that I've seen, the best story throughout scripture that I've seen to kind of illustrate the difference of a life defined by the fear of rejection and a life defined and transformed by the approval of Jesus is with the Samaritan woman. Let me read for you just a second, then we'll talk about it a little bit. This is in John chapter 4. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. We're going to put it on the big digital Bible in the sky, too, so you're more than welcome to read that one. But in John 4, starting in verse, I'm going to start in 4, but it from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into town to buy food. Verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews did not associate with Samaritans. If you've been in or around church very much, you've probably heard this story. Even if you haven't been around, you may have heard reference to it. But in case you aren't familiar with some of the implications of the details that John gave, right? So the fact that it says she went to the well at noon says a lot about the life that this lady was living and the life that she was avoiding. So going to gather water was a common practice from the women in that day, but they would typically go one to two times a day, but it would always be in the morning or just before sunset because it's a cooler portion of the day, right? So, but not just was it practically better to go at those times, but it was also a time and an opportunity for community. Like there was a lot of ridiculous restrictions on women in that day and the way that they could function in public and especially around men and things of that sort. So whenever they would gather at the well, it was an opportunity for them to just be. Like they could hang out. They could hang out in their community. They could have conversations. They could talk about whatever it is they needed to talk about. They were just free to be there. And the fact that this lady, when at noon, shows us she was intentionally trying to avoid the people from her own town. Like she went at a time when she wasn't expecting anyone else to be there. And not only that, there's a lot of scholars and a lot of theologians point to that there was a lot of springs of water, a lot of wells closer to her village that she could have went to. So not only did she go at a time when she was expecting not to see someone, just in case, I'm going to go to a place further off. Like we don't know if, we don't know for certain if it was an idol of approval that she was dealing with. But what we do have a very good indicator of is she was avoiding rejection. She was avoiding the fingers. She was avoiding the conversations. Because what we find out a little later in the story is the life that she's living, some of the mistakes that she's made, some of the things that she's done would have been frowned upon by her community. And so what we can see in her life is that she is being shaped by an avoidance of rejection, which is a good indicator that there's a lack of approval in her world. I struggle with this. I struggle with the idol of approval much more than I'm proud of. Like, it rears its head up often. Like, I just need people to like me, partially because I'm so awesome, but also because the, like, no, there's just this, it's just something that pops up. Like, all of the idols do. I think they were all susceptible at different times. But this is the one that seems to pop up with me more often than not. And I was having a conversation with a couple of, actually three different people. So y'all are the fourth person I've ever told. Don't tell anybody else. An analogy that I used is with every interaction, every person, there's a brick wall. There's an imaginary brick wall. And the less bricks that are on that wall is an opportunity for me to come over. It's you accepting me, you bringing me in, you respecting me, you thinking whatever it is that I need you to think of me. It's I need you to love me, I need you to welcome me, I need you to do whatever. The less bricks that are there, the closer that I get to being fully brought in by someone. But the more bricks that are there is just the opposite, right? The more bricks that are there, it's more of a reason for you to not accept me. It's more of a reason for you not to like me. And so what I had told these people in this analogy was it feels like at times every conversation, every interaction, it doesn't matter if it's at like a rehearsal, it doesn't matter if we're hanging out and passing and going to grab lunch, if I'm passing you and barely talking to you in Walmart, in certain seasons of my life, it feels like every conversation I'm carrying a brick. I'm either putting a brick onto the wall and giving you a reason to not take me, to not like me, to not love me, to not accept me, or I'm taking a brick off of the wall. It's an exhausting pursuit. You're constantly carrying this weight of being whatever people need you to be, whatever people want you to be, oftentimes at the sacrifice of your own personal convictions, your own personal beliefs, your own ideas of who you want to be. We've all stood on the other side of a decision of regret. Like, why did I do that? For me, in my life, most of those decisions have been on the other side of, I've got to either remove a brick or I've got to put one up. That's an indicator for me. I didn't realize it until like I was writing this sermon this week, that whenever I feel that weight, whenever these moments start to happen in my life, when I feel like I'm either removing or putting a brick on, it's an indicator that approval is being elevated in my life. Not just simply because there's a need for it, but I'm looking to people for validation. I'm looking to people to affirm that I'm someone. I'm looking for people to help me realize that I am who I need to be and that I'm okay being who I am. I'm looking for people. That's an indicator. I don't know what it would be for you. Maybe that resonates with you. But some other indicators that approval has gotten really high on our list, is moving up the list in terms of desires, is when the one criticism speaks so much louder than 100 compliments. Like, you've got something, you've done something, you believe something, something happened, and there's so many people who are telling you, love that, you killed it, but there's one person, and that voice keeps you awake at night. When the idea of one person not liking you, being disappointed in you, thinking you messed up or that you let down, like it just rattles you to the core. Another indicator would be a lack of confidence, not just in you, but a lack of confidence in decisions that you have made or are making. And so what happens is we seek constant reassurance. I need validation. I need you to affirm that I'm doing the right thing. And honestly, in those seasons when approval is way up there, you can't make a decision without getting input from other people. These are indicators that we're seeking approval from a broken people. We're seeking approval from people who can never feel that need. This is what's happening in the world of the Samaritan woman. She's living a life avoiding the whispers, avoiding the reminders that she's not good enough, avoiding the reminders of the mistakes that she's made, and then she talks to Jesus. And this conversation changes everything in her world. Now, so something to understand, you saw that she was surprised that Jesus even approached her and talked to her. So remember, she's trying to avoid people. She's trying to avoid the people of her town. So she's going even further than what she needed to. And as she approaches Jesus, she's certainly thinking, okay, today's not the day that I'm gonna get a break from it. Because in this conversation, in this man, like with the man and woman, there was so many reasons why she would feel rejected by him. As she approached and as she got closer, as she saw that not just is he a man, but he's a Jew, as she got closer, she realized, oh man, there's religious tensions here that go back thousands of years. There's racial tensions there. There's cultural tensions that say men are not allowed to talk to women in public. Most husbands didn't even talk to their wives in public, much less a single man talking to a single woman in public. It just didn't happen. And as she got closer and closer and closer to the well, what had to start resonating with her a little bit more is, okay, today is going to be another day, just like the rest. But that's not what happened. Jesus talked to her. He broke cultural and religious norms, and he treated her like a person. Treated her not like she just had something, that he wanted something from her, but she had value in her world. And then there's a funny part of the conversation where they're talking about the water, and he's like, Jesus tells her, hey, so the water I've got, like, you won't ever be thirsty again. She's like, you ain't even got a bucket, man. Like, you asked me for water. How you got water? Like, what are you talking about? And then this happens in verse 14. Maybe not 14, 15. Actually, I'm going to go to 13. Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. Whoever drinks the water that I give them will never thirst. This is quite true. So she goes and approaches and has this conversation, and then comes the question, right? Jesus brings up this very thing that has shaped her life. Jesus brings up what is likely the very thing that is causing her to feel rejected by the people in her town and need to be approved. It's the very thing that's made her feel not good enough. And Jesus, you had to bring that up? Like, you can't really, like, Jesus knows everything everything. He knows everything. Like he just told her. So you have to kind of ask this question. Like Jesus, why did you have to bring this up? I really don't think it was because he wanted to remind her. See, you're not quite perfect, are you? See, here's this thing in your life. You got to get this worked out. You got to fix it. She didn't need reminding of that. I think that Jesus brought up the question because he wanted to let her know, you don't have to do that here. You don't have to pretend with me. You don't have to feel the weight of your failures. You don't have to feel like you are the sum total of your mistakes. You don't have to feel like you have to be someone else in order to be accepted, approved, and loved by me. For the first time in probably a very long time. This lady who has been rejected time and time again comes to a conversation with someone who knows everything and welcomes her in. And suddenly there's a rest. I don't have to chase. I don't have to be. I can just be. I don't have to conform to what your idea of good and bad is. I can just rest in the approval of Jesus. And it changes her life forever. You can come on up here. It changes her life forever. What's incredible is you read throughout the rest of the story, there's a boldness and confidence after finding this approval that she runs back to the town. She runs, she leaves her water jug. She runs back to town, back to the place where she has faced rejection over and over again, back to the place where she's reminded you're not good enough, back to the place that people have told her and made her feel like you don't belong here. You're not one of us. You aren't good enough. We'll never approve of you until you fix everything. She's a boldness and a confidence that takes her back to that place and resting in the approval of Jesus, she becomes the person these people need in their life. She has influence on her community. She has influence in the people's lives around her. Resting. Listen to me. This is just an aside. I said I wasn't going to say it, but I want to. And so here we are. The people in your life that you feel like you have to measure up for, the people in your life who rely on you and depend on you, the people in your life who need something from you, what they need from you is to be the person that Jesus is asking you to be. Jesus is not going to lead you to be a poor wife, a poor husband. This lady, this, the first evangelist, I think she, she was, she was the first person to hear, hey, wait, you're the Messiah? And she went back to her, and she had influence in the lives of people who wanted nothing to do with her. When the voice of Jesus became the voice that she rested in, when the voice of Jesus became the voice that she found her approval, she found her identity, she found her life in, it changed her world. She realized that she didn't have to be all things to all people. There were certainly still people there, still people in her community that didn't respect, that didn't like. They may have still whispered. There were certainly people in her community who still didn't listen to what she had to say. But the beautiful part about it is after she found rest in the approval of Jesus, she didn't need them to anymore. They were no longer shaping who she became. Whose voice are you listening to? In certain seasons of your life, whose voice are you listening to? Do you know what Jesus thinks about you? Like, do you know what God thinks about you right now, knowing you fully? Ephesians 2.10 is one of my favorite verses. It's the Apostle Paul. He says that you are God's masterpiece chosen in Christ Jesus to do the good works that he prepared for you ahead of time. He says you are God's masterpiece. There's some versions that say worksmanship, craftsmanship, but the Greek word that Paul used there is poe. Let me look at it. I want to make sure I say it right. Well, I'm going to read it. Those are the right letters. I'm going to say it wrong. Poema. He says, you are God's poema. It's where we get our word poem from. Do you know what God thinks about you? You are his poetry. You are God's poem. His work of art that before time began, he loved. You do all of the things that you do, but do it from an awareness that you have of God who looks at you as his work of art. Let's pray. God, thank you so much. Thank you for the love, the life, the grace that you offer. God, there's going to be seasons, some of us more often than others, when the need and desire for approval begins to become our focus, when image management becomes the thing that we work on the most because we need people to let us in. God, what I ask you to do is just with the softness and gentleness of your Holy Spirit, remind us. Remind us who we are in you. Remind us of the life, the freedom, and the rest that we found in you as our Savior. And let us live our life, God, from a position of approval from God instead of seeking the approval of man. We trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Grace, I would just like to point out that I'm the guy who fixed the sound. Let's pray and go home. I think we can leave on that one. Actually, and I fixed it by doing absolutely nothing. That's what happens a lot of times, right? Like you go try to fix somebody, somebody asks a question, and you just act like you do something. It's like, thanks, man. You know so much about everything. Hey, I'm so glad that you are here and you decided to join us this morning if you're new. My name is Aaron. Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there. Thank you for choosing to come to church instead of asking your wife if you could stay home and watch the U.S. Open. Jesus does love you more for that. I'm just kidding. He doesn't. I know some of you. Hey, we are in the third week of a series called Idols. And just to kind of set us up, kind of get us moving in the direction we're heading this morning. So you've got like the US Open, right? Very prestigious event, great golfers and all that. Then there's another event that's really close to it. It's the Grace Raleigh Golf Tournament. It's same prestige, same level of competition, same caliber of players and we had it back April, but nobody signed up. So what we did instead, we actually, there was like 16 people who signed up to be a part of it. So we quickly veered away from like tournament and we said, okay, so what we're going to do instead is just give whoever wants to play a reason to take Monday off and go play golf and hang out with one another, right? And so I just want to be very open and honest. I am, I'm not a good golfer, okay? And because of that, like, I don't typically sign up to be a part of stuff like that because I don't need you to see and remind me that I'm not a good golfer. Like, I'm learning. I love to play. I play often. I'm just not playing well. So I typically avoid stuff like that. But I look through the list. I look through the roster, and I was like, okay, I may not be the worst one there. I was. I was the worst one there. Absolutely. And I can tell you, there's proof that I was the worst one there. So what happens is as soon as you pull up, we were at Zebulon Country Club. If you've ever played there, you'll know what I'm talking about. You pull into the parking lot, and immediately atop of a conversation is the ninth hole, right? Because as you go to park, like some people will remind you and like warn you, hey, listen, you see that? There's a tee box right there. Like it's really close. The green is really close to the parking lot. It's really close to the clubhouse. And you don't want to park there because some idiot's going to hit the ball too far. It hit a car. You don't let it be your car, right? And so immediately what happens is you, okay, yeah, let me move. Like I'm going to go somewhere else. then we went. We played the eight holes, and I played terribly. Like there's all this added pressure, which is dumb. I'm not a good golfer. Everyone knows I'm not a good golfer. Why do I feel like I have to play like a good golfer? That's another reason. If you play golf and not well, why do you get so mad that you're not playing? What do you expect to happen? So we go through the entire eight holes or we go through eight holes. Then we get up to nine and then you start thinking about the parking lot again. Right? Well, I start thinking about the parking lot again. When I went up to the tee box, what was going through my mind was not, hey, there's a sand trap just in front of the green. Make sure, play the left side. I don't think, hey, you know what? I want to hit this in the back of the green and make it spin. I don't even know how to make the ball spin. I don't know if it does spin when I hit it. I have no clue. So that's not what going through my mind is. I line up to hit the ball. What I start thinking about is, don't be the idiot who hits a car. Like, don't be that guy. And I take my backswing, and I come through, and man, y'all, I blade it. Like, it's just, I hit it, and it just rockets towards the parking lot. Not just towards the parking lot, towards the Mercedes flipping bins, okay? Now, was anybody here? Did anybody go? Dude, either of you drive a Mercedes. Because if you do, this was going to have a very different ending. Like, it went past the Mercedes. There was this banged-up truck. I hit that thing. But no, so as you can figure out by now, like it went straight. I'm telling you, like everything got real. It was movie type slow motion. You know what I mean? Like I could see which way the blades of grass were going. There was a groundskeeper. He was in the sand. He just watched it. Uh-oh. It just looked. And then I'm telling y'all, like it was the loudest bang I've ever heard in my life. It sounded like this dude's ex-wife was really, really mad, found a sledgehammer in his car, and went to work. It was so loud, and everything in me just sank. I was like, oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. For one, the first thought was, my wife is never going to let me play golf again. I just played an $80,000 round of golf at a mediocre golf course. What kind of, I'm the idiot that everyone's thinking about. And then my second thought was, I have people with me. Like they all saw that I'm the idiot who hit the car on the other side of the green at Zebulon Country Club, right? And so I turn around, I'm like, well, maybe,, there's this idea of, okay, I'm one of their pastors. Which I am, by the way, if you didn't know that up to this point. But I'm one of their pastors. Maybe I'll turn around and there'll be some grace and some kindness. Here's what I. That's what the heck I turned around to. That was just that exact noise. No, I'm telling you. There's a guy. I'm not going to. We share the same first name, Carly Buchanan. It's his husband. You don't need to know the rest of it. But I turn around, and here's what I see. Like, he's laughing so flipping hard. Like, he can't even control his shoulders. I'm like, are you, you're a jerk face. And then I said, okay, well, there's still two others. And I look and there's another guy swinging a golf club. Just, oh, let me act like I don't see anything. But still there's a single shoulder. He's not as big. I'm like, are you kidding? There's one other guy. And I look over to him and his face is like this because I'm on his team. And he's like, we can't use that ball. I gotta, I gotta show up now and do something really good. Right. And I'm like,, my, this is the worst day ever. Okay, so immediately I start going into damage control. How do I make sure nobody else finds out? And about that time, the little golf club swinging guy, he yells out to people on another hole. He hit the Mercedes. I'm like, are you kidding me? Listen, I'm not joking about this. Two weeks later, two weeks later, we were at the AJ event. I think it was two weeks. Anyway, it was a couple weeks later. Somebody came up to me who wasn't even at the golf course and said, hey, I heard about the ninth hole. Dude didn't even go to our church. I'm like, are you kidding me? And the entire time I'm thinking, everybody knows I'm the idiot who hit the car. Not just a car. It was a Mercedes. And, like, everything that was the reason that I don't go get involved in stuff like this. Now, we did go. We went and we really looked over the car pretty well, make sure there was no dings or anything like that. And there was at some point the guys that were there with me, they tried to start consoling, except for the one jerk face whose shoulders are going like that. Like everybody was like, hey, don't, Aaron, it's all right, buddy. Like it happens. They certainly have to take a little bit of accountability. Like when you park there, like you knew there was going to be an idiot. You didn't know you were going to be the idiot, but like you knew there was a possibility. So they started to give some comfort, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, like there was just this overwhelming overwhelming sense of not good enough, and everybody knows it now. Like, there was this overwhelming sense of everyone sees that I don't belong here. I don't belong at this tournament. I don't belong being here. Like, there's nothing about it. And fortunately, these guys came, they consoled, and then I do just want to say, like, I piped the next drive, right? Like, it looked really, really, so much so that the greenskeeper who watched it go like this, he was like, that wasn't the same guy who hit the bins, was it? I was like, shut up, dude. So, but there was this sense and this need, this overwhelming awareness where I was different. I didn't belong in that place. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt the not good enoughness? Have you ever felt like your weakness, your insecurity, all the things that you're worried about? Everybody kind of sees. And maybe it's just not a weakness, but maybe it's just a difference that someone else doesn't approve of. Maybe you feel it when mom-in-law or dad-in-law or mom or dad come to the house, and suddenly they start looking at everything, and you know there's going to be some criticisms. You know where they're going to say, hey, you should really do this different. You know they're going to say, you're not raising your kids right. I didn't let you do that. You've got to do this differently. Maybe it's in co-working world, right, or with your boss, or maybe it's whenever you go with a group of moms, and all the moms seem like they have houses that kids don't live in, right? Like it just, there's this overwhelming sense and awareness of different. Don't belong. Not good enough. And there's this pressure that in order for you to accept me and to like me, to approve of me, I have to become who it is that you want me to be. Not good enough. It's a powerful motivator. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. I have. And that's what we're talking about today. We started a couple weeks ago a new series, as Aaron was saying a little earlier, called Idols. And essentially what an idol is, an idol is anything that we elevate to a position of authority in our life. It could be anything at all. But I love what St. Augustine says about it. He says that the matter, the challenge, the problem, the difficulty with living the holy lives that we want to live is a matter of disordered love. It's loving things out of their appropriate order. That's not just a Christian thing. That's a human thing, right? Well, whatever's at the top of your list, whether it's a person, whether it's a thing, that's what's going to call the shots in your life. That's idolatry. Whatever is at the top of the list is going to determine the steps that you take because we shape our lives around pleasing that person or attaining that thing. And Nate talked with us last week. I don't know why I pointed over there. He's not over there. Nate talked with us last week about power and how when power becomes something that becomes the ultimate thing, it just rattles everything and how it destroys relationships. If you missed it, you can check it out online. Go and listen to that. Today, we're talking about approval. And I know the thought, I know the argument. You may have even had someone who leaned over to you and said, I really don't care what people think about me. Yes, you do. Because you wouldn't have said that if you didn't want us to think you were cool for saying it, right? Approval is not a bad thing. And approval, I wouldn't even say is a desire so much as it is a need. A need for approval comes from an awareness of self. A need for approval comes from this awareness of that I'm not perfect. And so what we need in these moments is if you are a Christian, you became a Christian because you were aware that you fell short and you needed Jesus. The sense of approval. It's not a desire, it's a need, but maybe you are a person who generally walks through life with an understanding that none of us are perfect. None of us have everything together. Like we all have things that we're working on. And so the opinion and ideas of others generally don't bother you. Here's what I would ask you to consider. and here's what I would argue. There is someone in your world whose voice influences the things that you do. There is someone in your world that what they think about the decisions that you make influences the decisions that you make. Approval's not a bad thing. It just makes a crummy God. Because here's what happens. The danger with approval, the idol of approval creates a fear of rejection that places our identity and worth in the people around us. The idol of approval, when approval gets to the top of the list, when it becomes the ultimate thing that we have to have, we have to have it from the people around us, we have to have it from the person, whatever it may be, it shapes who you become. And what we avoid is this fear of rejection. All of the idols are connected to your identity. All the idols that we'll talk about in this series, they determine who you become. Approval is the only idol that places your identity in the hands of the people you seek to be approved by. You know this. In order to be approved by someone, you have to either become or show them something they would approve. And what happens is when approval becomes ultimate, your sense of value and worth is determined by the acceptance of the people around you. And it creates this internal tug of war. You see an example of this in John. Jesus is pretty far into his ministry at this point. He's at kind of rock star status. Like everyone who knows who he is. Some people like him, some people don't. There's some people who do believe in him. There's some people who don't believe in our life. It creates this internal tug of war. This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I want to do. In order for people to accept, approve, like, love, respect, I have to do this. And when approval's at the top of the list, it's always going to win. Your value, your worth, your identity is going to be in the hands of the people around you. And let's think about that for a second. What version of right and wrong do you choose today? We live in a world full of opinions. Everyone has an idea about the way you should or should not raise your kids. Everyone has an idea about what is right and what is wrong. And it's also people don't see the action that you do in light of who you are. They determine who you are based off of the action that you do. We see it with political affiliations, political views, religious views. You don't believe this. You are this. You see it with, again, like the way you raise your kids, the way you discipline your kids. You see it with whether you shop at Target or Walmart. I get that one a little bit. Like, don't go to Walmart. Like, there's nothing good that happens at that place. But like, we see these things in our life and people determine who we are based off of who we do. And when approval becomes our idol, it creates this exhausting desire to please. It creates this exhausting pursuit of a fragile approval that can be taken away at a moment's notice. Because when you gain someone's approval, in order to be approved by one is to be disapproved by the other. It's a dangerous place to be. It's a dangerous thing. And so the thing that we really need to take away from when we idolize approval, we ask people to fill a need that only God can satisfy. And so this exhausting race, this pull back and forth, this constant trying to, okay, I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this to this over here. Like we, it's exhausting. And you're always going to be left feeling less than because it highlights the differences and typically what we would assume as weaknesses where we've dropped the ball. It brings those to the surface. Because people, and again, let me reiterate, I want to make sure that you're not hearing the wrong thing in this. Approval, it's not bad. It just can never serve you the way that we're asking it to. Because we start looking at broken people to fill this need that we were designed to have filled by God. And so approval from people just creates this fragile pursuit of never good enoughness, never quite arrived yet. The best person that I've seen, the best story throughout scripture that I've seen to kind of illustrate the difference of a life defined by the fear of rejection and a life defined and transformed by the approval of Jesus is with the Samaritan woman. Let me read for you just a second, then we'll talk about it a little bit. This is in John chapter 4. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. We're going to put it on the big digital Bible in the sky, too, so you're more than welcome to read that one. But in John 4, starting in verse, I'm going to start in 4, but it from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into town to buy food. Verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews did not associate with Samaritans. If you've been in or around church very much, you've probably heard this story. Even if you haven't been around, you may have heard reference to it. But in case you aren't familiar with some of the implications of the details that John gave, right? So the fact that it says she went to the well at noon says a lot about the life that this lady was living and the life that she was avoiding. So going to gather water was a common practice from the women in that day, but they would typically go one to two times a day, but it would always be in the morning or just before sunset because it's a cooler portion of the day, right? So, but not just was it practically better to go at those times, but it was also a time and an opportunity for community. Like there was a lot of ridiculous restrictions on women in that day and the way that they could function in public and especially around men and things of that sort. So whenever they would gather at the well, it was an opportunity for them to just be. Like they could hang out. They could hang out in their community. They could have conversations. They could talk about whatever it is they needed to talk about. They were just free to be there. And the fact that this lady, when at noon, shows us she was intentionally trying to avoid the people from her own town. Like she went at a time when she wasn't expecting anyone else to be there. And not only that, there's a lot of scholars and a lot of theologians point to that there was a lot of springs of water, a lot of wells closer to her village that she could have went to. So not only did she go at a time when she was expecting not to see someone, just in case, I'm going to go to a place further off. Like we don't know if, we don't know for certain if it was an idol of approval that she was dealing with. But what we do have a very good indicator of is she was avoiding rejection. She was avoiding the fingers. She was avoiding the conversations. Because what we find out a little later in the story is the life that she's living, some of the mistakes that she's made, some of the things that she's done would have been frowned upon by her community. And so what we can see in her life is that she is being shaped by an avoidance of rejection, which is a good indicator that there's a lack of approval in her world. I struggle with this. I struggle with the idol of approval much more than I'm proud of. Like, it rears its head up often. Like, I just need people to like me, partially because I'm so awesome, but also because the, like, no, there's just this, it's just something that pops up. Like, all of the idols do. I think they were all susceptible at different times. But this is the one that seems to pop up with me more often than not. And I was having a conversation with a couple of, actually three different people. So y'all are the fourth person I've ever told. Don't tell anybody else. An analogy that I used is with every interaction, every person, there's a brick wall. There's an imaginary brick wall. And the less bricks that are on that wall is an opportunity for me to come over. It's you accepting me, you bringing me in, you respecting me, you thinking whatever it is that I need you to think of me. It's I need you to love me, I need you to welcome me, I need you to do whatever. The less bricks that are there, the closer that I get to being fully brought in by someone. But the more bricks that are there is just the opposite, right? The more bricks that are there, it's more of a reason for you to not accept me. It's more of a reason for you not to like me. And so what I had told these people in this analogy was it feels like at times every conversation, every interaction, it doesn't matter if it's at like a rehearsal, it doesn't matter if we're hanging out and passing and going to grab lunch, if I'm passing you and barely talking to you in Walmart, in certain seasons of my life, it feels like every conversation I'm carrying a brick. I'm either putting a brick onto the wall and giving you a reason to not take me, to not like me, to not love me, to not accept me, or I'm taking a brick off of the wall. It's an exhausting pursuit. You're constantly carrying this weight of being whatever people need you to be, whatever people want you to be, oftentimes at the sacrifice of your own personal convictions, your own personal beliefs, your own ideas of who you want to be. We've all stood on the other side of a decision of regret. Like, why did I do that? For me, in my life, most of those decisions have been on the other side of, I've got to either remove a brick or I've got to put one up. That's an indicator for me. I didn't realize it until like I was writing this sermon this week, that whenever I feel that weight, whenever these moments start to happen in my life, when I feel like I'm either removing or putting a brick on, it's an indicator that approval is being elevated in my life. Not just simply because there's a need for it, but I'm looking to people for validation. I'm looking to people to affirm that I'm someone. I'm looking for people to help me realize that I am who I need to be and that I'm okay being who I am. I'm looking for people. That's an indicator. I don't know what it would be for you. Maybe that resonates with you. But some other indicators that approval has gotten really high on our list, is moving up the list in terms of desires, is when the one criticism speaks so much louder than 100 compliments. Like, you've got something, you've done something, you believe something, something happened, and there's so many people who are telling you, love that, you killed it, but there's one person, and that voice keeps you awake at night. When the idea of one person not liking you, being disappointed in you, thinking you messed up or that you let down, like it just rattles you to the core. Another indicator would be a lack of confidence, not just in you, but a lack of confidence in decisions that you have made or are making. And so what happens is we seek constant reassurance. I need validation. I need you to affirm that I'm doing the right thing. And honestly, in those seasons when approval is way up there, you can't make a decision without getting input from other people. These are indicators that we're seeking approval from a broken people. We're seeking approval from people who can never feel that need. This is what's happening in the world of the Samaritan woman. She's living a life avoiding the whispers, avoiding the reminders that she's not good enough, avoiding the reminders of the mistakes that she's made, and then she talks to Jesus. And this conversation changes everything in her world. Now, so something to understand, you saw that she was surprised that Jesus even approached her and talked to her. So remember, she's trying to avoid people. She's trying to avoid the people of her town. So she's going even further than what she needed to. And as she approaches Jesus, she's certainly thinking, okay, today's not the day that I'm gonna get a break from it. Because in this conversation, in this man, like with the man and woman, there was so many reasons why she would feel rejected by him. As she approached and as she got closer, as she saw that not just is he a man, but he's a Jew, as she got closer, she realized, oh man, there's religious tensions here that go back thousands of years. There's racial tensions there. There's cultural tensions that say men are not allowed to talk to women in public. Most husbands didn't even talk to their wives in public, much less a single man talking to a single woman in public. It just didn't happen. And as she got closer and closer and closer to the well, what had to start resonating with her a little bit more is, okay, today is going to be another day, just like the rest. But that's not what happened. Jesus talked to her. He broke cultural and religious norms, and he treated her like a person. Treated her not like she just had something, that he wanted something from her, but she had value in her world. And then there's a funny part of the conversation where they're talking about the water, and he's like, Jesus tells her, hey, so the water I've got, like, you won't ever be thirsty again. She's like, you ain't even got a bucket, man. Like, you asked me for water. How you got water? Like, what are you talking about? And then this happens in verse 14. Maybe not 14, 15. Actually, I'm going to go to 13. Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. Whoever drinks the water that I give them will never thirst. This is quite true. So she goes and approaches and has this conversation, and then comes the question, right? Jesus brings up this very thing that has shaped her life. Jesus brings up what is likely the very thing that is causing her to feel rejected by the people in her town and need to be approved. It's the very thing that's made her feel not good enough. And Jesus, you had to bring that up? Like, you can't really, like, Jesus knows everything everything. He knows everything. Like he just told her. So you have to kind of ask this question. Like Jesus, why did you have to bring this up? I really don't think it was because he wanted to remind her. See, you're not quite perfect, are you? See, here's this thing in your life. You got to get this worked out. You got to fix it. She didn't need reminding of that. I think that Jesus brought up the question because he wanted to let her know, you don't have to do that here. You don't have to pretend with me. You don't have to feel the weight of your failures. You don't have to feel like you are the sum total of your mistakes. You don't have to feel like you have to be someone else in order to be accepted, approved, and loved by me. For the first time in probably a very long time. This lady who has been rejected time and time again comes to a conversation with someone who knows everything and welcomes her in. And suddenly there's a rest. I don't have to chase. I don't have to be. I can just be. I don't have to conform to what your idea of good and bad is. I can just rest in the approval of Jesus. And it changes her life forever. You can come on up here. It changes her life forever. What's incredible is you read throughout the rest of the story, there's a boldness and confidence after finding this approval that she runs back to the town. She runs, she leaves her water jug. She runs back to town, back to the place where she has faced rejection over and over again, back to the place where she's reminded you're not good enough, back to the place that people have told her and made her feel like you don't belong here. You're not one of us. You aren't good enough. We'll never approve of you until you fix everything. She's a boldness and a confidence that takes her back to that place and resting in the approval of Jesus, she becomes the person these people need in their life. She has influence on her community. She has influence in the people's lives around her. Resting. Listen to me. This is just an aside. I said I wasn't going to say it, but I want to. And so here we are. The people in your life that you feel like you have to measure up for, the people in your life who rely on you and depend on you, the people in your life who need something from you, what they need from you is to be the person that Jesus is asking you to be. Jesus is not going to lead you to be a poor wife, a poor husband. This lady, this, the first evangelist, I think she, she was, she was the first person to hear, hey, wait, you're the Messiah? And she went back to her, and she had influence in the lives of people who wanted nothing to do with her. When the voice of Jesus became the voice that she rested in, when the voice of Jesus became the voice that she found her approval, she found her identity, she found her life in, it changed her world. She realized that she didn't have to be all things to all people. There were certainly still people there, still people in her community that didn't respect, that didn't like. They may have still whispered. There were certainly people in her community who still didn't listen to what she had to say. But the beautiful part about it is after she found rest in the approval of Jesus, she didn't need them to anymore. They were no longer shaping who she became. Whose voice are you listening to? In certain seasons of your life, whose voice are you listening to? Do you know what Jesus thinks about you? Like, do you know what God thinks about you right now, knowing you fully? Ephesians 2.10 is one of my favorite verses. It's the Apostle Paul. He says that you are God's masterpiece chosen in Christ Jesus to do the good works that he prepared for you ahead of time. He says you are God's masterpiece. There's some versions that say worksmanship, craftsmanship, but the Greek word that Paul used there is poe. Let me look at it. I want to make sure I say it right. Well, I'm going to read it. Those are the right letters. I'm going to say it wrong. Poema. He says, you are God's poema. It's where we get our word poem from. Do you know what God thinks about you? You are his poetry. You are God's poem. His work of art that before time began, he loved. You do all of the things that you do, but do it from an awareness that you have of God who looks at you as his work of art. Let's pray. God, thank you so much. Thank you for the love, the life, the grace that you offer. God, there's going to be seasons, some of us more often than others, when the need and desire for approval begins to become our focus, when image management becomes the thing that we work on the most because we need people to let us in. God, what I ask you to do is just with the softness and gentleness of your Holy Spirit, remind us. Remind us who we are in you. Remind us of the life, the freedom, and the rest that we found in you as our Savior. And let us live our life, God, from a position of approval from God instead of seeking the approval of man. We trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Grace, I would just like to point out that I'm the guy who fixed the sound. Let's pray and go home. I think we can leave on that one. Actually, and I fixed it by doing absolutely nothing. That's what happens a lot of times, right? Like you go try to fix somebody, somebody asks a question, and you just act like you do something. It's like, thanks, man. You know so much about everything. Hey, I'm so glad that you are here and you decided to join us this morning if you're new. My name is Aaron. Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there. Thank you for choosing to come to church instead of asking your wife if you could stay home and watch the U.S. Open. Jesus does love you more for that. I'm just kidding. He doesn't. I know some of you. Hey, we are in the third week of a series called Idols. And just to kind of set us up, kind of get us moving in the direction we're heading this morning. So you've got like the US Open, right? Very prestigious event, great golfers and all that. Then there's another event that's really close to it. It's the Grace Raleigh Golf Tournament. It's same prestige, same level of competition, same caliber of players and we had it back April, but nobody signed up. So what we did instead, we actually, there was like 16 people who signed up to be a part of it. So we quickly veered away from like tournament and we said, okay, so what we're going to do instead is just give whoever wants to play a reason to take Monday off and go play golf and hang out with one another, right? And so I just want to be very open and honest. I am, I'm not a good golfer, okay? And because of that, like, I don't typically sign up to be a part of stuff like that because I don't need you to see and remind me that I'm not a good golfer. Like, I'm learning. I love to play. I play often. I'm just not playing well. So I typically avoid stuff like that. But I look through the list. I look through the roster, and I was like, okay, I may not be the worst one there. I was. I was the worst one there. Absolutely. And I can tell you, there's proof that I was the worst one there. So what happens is as soon as you pull up, we were at Zebulon Country Club. If you've ever played there, you'll know what I'm talking about. You pull into the parking lot, and immediately atop of a conversation is the ninth hole, right? Because as you go to park, like some people will remind you and like warn you, hey, listen, you see that? There's a tee box right there. Like it's really close. The green is really close to the parking lot. It's really close to the clubhouse. And you don't want to park there because some idiot's going to hit the ball too far. It hit a car. You don't let it be your car, right? And so immediately what happens is you, okay, yeah, let me move. Like I'm going to go somewhere else. then we went. We played the eight holes, and I played terribly. Like there's all this added pressure, which is dumb. I'm not a good golfer. Everyone knows I'm not a good golfer. Why do I feel like I have to play like a good golfer? That's another reason. If you play golf and not well, why do you get so mad that you're not playing? What do you expect to happen? So we go through the entire eight holes or we go through eight holes. Then we get up to nine and then you start thinking about the parking lot again. Right? Well, I start thinking about the parking lot again. When I went up to the tee box, what was going through my mind was not, hey, there's a sand trap just in front of the green. Make sure, play the left side. I don't think, hey, you know what? I want to hit this in the back of the green and make it spin. I don't even know how to make the ball spin. I don't know if it does spin when I hit it. I have no clue. So that's not what going through my mind is. I line up to hit the ball. What I start thinking about is, don't be the idiot who hits a car. Like, don't be that guy. And I take my backswing, and I come through, and man, y'all, I blade it. Like, it's just, I hit it, and it just rockets towards the parking lot. Not just towards the parking lot, towards the Mercedes flipping bins, okay? Now, was anybody here? Did anybody go? Dude, either of you drive a Mercedes. Because if you do, this was going to have a very different ending. Like, it went past the Mercedes. There was this banged-up truck. I hit that thing. But no, so as you can figure out by now, like it went straight. I'm telling you, like everything got real. It was movie type slow motion. You know what I mean? Like I could see which way the blades of grass were going. There was a groundskeeper. He was in the sand. He just watched it. Uh-oh. It just looked. And then I'm telling y'all, like it was the loudest bang I've ever heard in my life. It sounded like this dude's ex-wife was really, really mad, found a sledgehammer in his car, and went to work. It was so loud, and everything in me just sank. I was like, oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. For one, the first thought was, my wife is never going to let me play golf again. I just played an $80,000 round of golf at a mediocre golf course. What kind of, I'm the idiot that everyone's thinking about. And then my second thought was, I have people with me. Like they all saw that I'm the idiot who hit the car on the other side of the green at Zebulon Country Club, right? And so I turn around, I'm like, well, maybe,, there's this idea of, okay, I'm one of their pastors. Which I am, by the way, if you didn't know that up to this point. But I'm one of their pastors. Maybe I'll turn around and there'll be some grace and some kindness. Here's what I. That's what the heck I turned around to. That was just that exact noise. No, I'm telling you. There's a guy. I'm not going to. We share the same first name, Carly Buchanan. It's his husband. You don't need to know the rest of it. But I turn around, and here's what I see. Like, he's laughing so flipping hard. Like, he can't even control his shoulders. I'm like, are you, you're a jerk face. And then I said, okay, well, there's still two others. And I look and there's another guy swinging a golf club. Just, oh, let me act like I don't see anything. But still there's a single shoulder. He's not as big. I'm like, are you kidding? There's one other guy. And I look over to him and his face is like this because I'm on his team. And he's like, we can't use that ball. I gotta, I gotta show up now and do something really good. Right. And I'm like,, my, this is the worst day ever. Okay, so immediately I start going into damage control. How do I make sure nobody else finds out? And about that time, the little golf club swinging guy, he yells out to people on another hole. He hit the Mercedes. I'm like, are you kidding me? Listen, I'm not joking about this. Two weeks later, two weeks later, we were at the AJ event. I think it was two weeks. Anyway, it was a couple weeks later. Somebody came up to me who wasn't even at the golf course and said, hey, I heard about the ninth hole. Dude didn't even go to our church. I'm like, are you kidding me? And the entire time I'm thinking, everybody knows I'm the idiot who hit the car. Not just a car. It was a Mercedes. And, like, everything that was the reason that I don't go get involved in stuff like this. Now, we did go. We went and we really looked over the car pretty well, make sure there was no dings or anything like that. And there was at some point the guys that were there with me, they tried to start consoling, except for the one jerk face whose shoulders are going like that. Like everybody was like, hey, don't, Aaron, it's all right, buddy. Like it happens. They certainly have to take a little bit of accountability. Like when you park there, like you knew there was going to be an idiot. You didn't know you were going to be the idiot, but like you knew there was a possibility. So they started to give some comfort, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, like there was just this overwhelming overwhelming sense of not good enough, and everybody knows it now. Like, there was this overwhelming sense of everyone sees that I don't belong here. I don't belong at this tournament. I don't belong being here. Like, there's nothing about it. And fortunately, these guys came, they consoled, and then I do just want to say, like, I piped the next drive, right? Like, it looked really, really, so much so that the greenskeeper who watched it go like this, he was like, that wasn't the same guy who hit the bins, was it? I was like, shut up, dude. So, but there was this sense and this need, this overwhelming awareness where I was different. I didn't belong in that place. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt the not good enoughness? Have you ever felt like your weakness, your insecurity, all the things that you're worried about? Everybody kind of sees. And maybe it's just not a weakness, but maybe it's just a difference that someone else doesn't approve of. Maybe you feel it when mom-in-law or dad-in-law or mom or dad come to the house, and suddenly they start looking at everything, and you know there's going to be some criticisms. You know where they're going to say, hey, you should really do this different. You know they're going to say, you're not raising your kids right. I didn't let you do that. You've got to do this differently. Maybe it's in co-working world, right, or with your boss, or maybe it's whenever you go with a group of moms, and all the moms seem like they have houses that kids don't live in, right? Like it just, there's this overwhelming sense and awareness of different. Don't belong. Not good enough. And there's this pressure that in order for you to accept me and to like me, to approve of me, I have to become who it is that you want me to be. Not good enough. It's a powerful motivator. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. I have. And that's what we're talking about today. We started a couple weeks ago a new series, as Aaron was saying a little earlier, called Idols. And essentially what an idol is, an idol is anything that we elevate to a position of authority in our life. It could be anything at all. But I love what St. Augustine says about it. He says that the matter, the challenge, the problem, the difficulty with living the holy lives that we want to live is a matter of disordered love. It's loving things out of their appropriate order. That's not just a Christian thing. That's a human thing, right? Well, whatever's at the top of your list, whether it's a person, whether it's a thing, that's what's going to call the shots in your life. That's idolatry. Whatever is at the top of the list is going to determine the steps that you take because we shape our lives around pleasing that person or attaining that thing. And Nate talked with us last week. I don't know why I pointed over there. He's not over there. Nate talked with us last week about power and how when power becomes something that becomes the ultimate thing, it just rattles everything and how it destroys relationships. If you missed it, you can check it out online. Go and listen to that. Today, we're talking about approval. And I know the thought, I know the argument. You may have even had someone who leaned over to you and said, I really don't care what people think about me. Yes, you do. Because you wouldn't have said that if you didn't want us to think you were cool for saying it, right? Approval is not a bad thing. And approval, I wouldn't even say is a desire so much as it is a need. A need for approval comes from an awareness of self. A need for approval comes from this awareness of that I'm not perfect. And so what we need in these moments is if you are a Christian, you became a Christian because you were aware that you fell short and you needed Jesus. The sense of approval. It's not a desire, it's a need, but maybe you are a person who generally walks through life with an understanding that none of us are perfect. None of us have everything together. Like we all have things that we're working on. And so the opinion and ideas of others generally don't bother you. Here's what I would ask you to consider. and here's what I would argue. There is someone in your world whose voice influences the things that you do. There is someone in your world that what they think about the decisions that you make influences the decisions that you make. Approval's not a bad thing. It just makes a crummy God. Because here's what happens. The danger with approval, the idol of approval creates a fear of rejection that places our identity and worth in the people around us. The idol of approval, when approval gets to the top of the list, when it becomes the ultimate thing that we have to have, we have to have it from the people around us, we have to have it from the person, whatever it may be, it shapes who you become. And what we avoid is this fear of rejection. All of the idols are connected to your identity. All the idols that we'll talk about in this series, they determine who you become. Approval is the only idol that places your identity in the hands of the people you seek to be approved by. You know this. In order to be approved by someone, you have to either become or show them something they would approve. And what happens is when approval becomes ultimate, your sense of value and worth is determined by the acceptance of the people around you. And it creates this internal tug of war. You see an example of this in John. Jesus is pretty far into his ministry at this point. He's at kind of rock star status. Like everyone who knows who he is. Some people like him, some people don't. There's some people who do believe in him. There's some people who don't believe in our life. It creates this internal tug of war. This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I want to do. In order for people to accept, approve, like, love, respect, I have to do this. And when approval's at the top of the list, it's always going to win. Your value, your worth, your identity is going to be in the hands of the people around you. And let's think about that for a second. What version of right and wrong do you choose today? We live in a world full of opinions. Everyone has an idea about the way you should or should not raise your kids. Everyone has an idea about what is right and what is wrong. And it's also people don't see the action that you do in light of who you are. They determine who you are based off of the action that you do. We see it with political affiliations, political views, religious views. You don't believe this. You are this. You see it with, again, like the way you raise your kids, the way you discipline your kids. You see it with whether you shop at Target or Walmart. I get that one a little bit. Like, don't go to Walmart. Like, there's nothing good that happens at that place. But like, we see these things in our life and people determine who we are based off of who we do. And when approval becomes our idol, it creates this exhausting desire to please. It creates this exhausting pursuit of a fragile approval that can be taken away at a moment's notice. Because when you gain someone's approval, in order to be approved by one is to be disapproved by the other. It's a dangerous place to be. It's a dangerous thing. And so the thing that we really need to take away from when we idolize approval, we ask people to fill a need that only God can satisfy. And so this exhausting race, this pull back and forth, this constant trying to, okay, I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this to this over here. Like we, it's exhausting. And you're always going to be left feeling less than because it highlights the differences and typically what we would assume as weaknesses where we've dropped the ball. It brings those to the surface. Because people, and again, let me reiterate, I want to make sure that you're not hearing the wrong thing in this. Approval, it's not bad. It just can never serve you the way that we're asking it to. Because we start looking at broken people to fill this need that we were designed to have filled by God. And so approval from people just creates this fragile pursuit of never good enoughness, never quite arrived yet. The best person that I've seen, the best story throughout scripture that I've seen to kind of illustrate the difference of a life defined by the fear of rejection and a life defined and transformed by the approval of Jesus is with the Samaritan woman. Let me read for you just a second, then we'll talk about it a little bit. This is in John chapter 4. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. We're going to put it on the big digital Bible in the sky, too, so you're more than welcome to read that one. But in John 4, starting in verse, I'm going to start in 4, but it from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into town to buy food. Verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews did not associate with Samaritans. If you've been in or around church very much, you've probably heard this story. Even if you haven't been around, you may have heard reference to it. But in case you aren't familiar with some of the implications of the details that John gave, right? So the fact that it says she went to the well at noon says a lot about the life that this lady was living and the life that she was avoiding. So going to gather water was a common practice from the women in that day, but they would typically go one to two times a day, but it would always be in the morning or just before sunset because it's a cooler portion of the day, right? So, but not just was it practically better to go at those times, but it was also a time and an opportunity for community. Like there was a lot of ridiculous restrictions on women in that day and the way that they could function in public and especially around men and things of that sort. So whenever they would gather at the well, it was an opportunity for them to just be. Like they could hang out. They could hang out in their community. They could have conversations. They could talk about whatever it is they needed to talk about. They were just free to be there. And the fact that this lady, when at noon, shows us she was intentionally trying to avoid the people from her own town. Like she went at a time when she wasn't expecting anyone else to be there. And not only that, there's a lot of scholars and a lot of theologians point to that there was a lot of springs of water, a lot of wells closer to her village that she could have went to. So not only did she go at a time when she was expecting not to see someone, just in case, I'm going to go to a place further off. Like we don't know if, we don't know for certain if it was an idol of approval that she was dealing with. But what we do have a very good indicator of is she was avoiding rejection. She was avoiding the fingers. She was avoiding the conversations. Because what we find out a little later in the story is the life that she's living, some of the mistakes that she's made, some of the things that she's done would have been frowned upon by her community. And so what we can see in her life is that she is being shaped by an avoidance of rejection, which is a good indicator that there's a lack of approval in her world. I struggle with this. I struggle with the idol of approval much more than I'm proud of. Like, it rears its head up often. Like, I just need people to like me, partially because I'm so awesome, but also because the, like, no, there's just this, it's just something that pops up. Like, all of the idols do. I think they were all susceptible at different times. But this is the one that seems to pop up with me more often than not. And I was having a conversation with a couple of, actually three different people. So y'all are the fourth person I've ever told. Don't tell anybody else. An analogy that I used is with every interaction, every person, there's a brick wall. There's an imaginary brick wall. And the less bricks that are on that wall is an opportunity for me to come over. It's you accepting me, you bringing me in, you respecting me, you thinking whatever it is that I need you to think of me. It's I need you to love me, I need you to welcome me, I need you to do whatever. The less bricks that are there, the closer that I get to being fully brought in by someone. But the more bricks that are there is just the opposite, right? The more bricks that are there, it's more of a reason for you to not accept me. It's more of a reason for you not to like me. And so what I had told these people in this analogy was it feels like at times every conversation, every interaction, it doesn't matter if it's at like a rehearsal, it doesn't matter if we're hanging out and passing and going to grab lunch, if I'm passing you and barely talking to you in Walmart, in certain seasons of my life, it feels like every conversation I'm carrying a brick. I'm either putting a brick onto the wall and giving you a reason to not take me, to not like me, to not love me, to not accept me, or I'm taking a brick off of the wall. It's an exhausting pursuit. You're constantly carrying this weight of being whatever people need you to be, whatever people want you to be, oftentimes at the sacrifice of your own personal convictions, your own personal beliefs, your own ideas of who you want to be. We've all stood on the other side of a decision of regret. Like, why did I do that? For me, in my life, most of those decisions have been on the other side of, I've got to either remove a brick or I've got to put one up. That's an indicator for me. I didn't realize it until like I was writing this sermon this week, that whenever I feel that weight, whenever these moments start to happen in my life, when I feel like I'm either removing or putting a brick on, it's an indicator that approval is being elevated in my life. Not just simply because there's a need for it, but I'm looking to people for validation. I'm looking to people to affirm that I'm someone. I'm looking for people to help me realize that I am who I need to be and that I'm okay being who I am. I'm looking for people. That's an indicator. I don't know what it would be for you. Maybe that resonates with you. But some other indicators that approval has gotten really high on our list, is moving up the list in terms of desires, is when the one criticism speaks so much louder than 100 compliments. Like, you've got something, you've done something, you believe something, something happened, and there's so many people who are telling you, love that, you killed it, but there's one person, and that voice keeps you awake at night. When the idea of one person not liking you, being disappointed in you, thinking you messed up or that you let down, like it just rattles you to the core. Another indicator would be a lack of confidence, not just in you, but a lack of confidence in decisions that you have made or are making. And so what happens is we seek constant reassurance. I need validation. I need you to affirm that I'm doing the right thing. And honestly, in those seasons when approval is way up there, you can't make a decision without getting input from other people. These are indicators that we're seeking approval from a broken people. We're seeking approval from people who can never feel that need. This is what's happening in the world of the Samaritan woman. She's living a life avoiding the whispers, avoiding the reminders that she's not good enough, avoiding the reminders of the mistakes that she's made, and then she talks to Jesus. And this conversation changes everything in her world. Now, so something to understand, you saw that she was surprised that Jesus even approached her and talked to her. So remember, she's trying to avoid people. She's trying to avoid the people of her town. So she's going even further than what she needed to. And as she approaches Jesus, she's certainly thinking, okay, today's not the day that I'm gonna get a break from it. Because in this conversation, in this man, like with the man and woman, there was so many reasons why she would feel rejected by him. As she approached and as she got closer, as she saw that not just is he a man, but he's a Jew, as she got closer, she realized, oh man, there's religious tensions here that go back thousands of years. There's racial tensions there. There's cultural tensions that say men are not allowed to talk to women in public. Most husbands didn't even talk to their wives in public, much less a single man talking to a single woman in public. It just didn't happen. And as she got closer and closer and closer to the well, what had to start resonating with her a little bit more is, okay, today is going to be another day, just like the rest. But that's not what happened. Jesus talked to her. He broke cultural and religious norms, and he treated her like a person. Treated her not like she just had something, that he wanted something from her, but she had value in her world. And then there's a funny part of the conversation where they're talking about the water, and he's like, Jesus tells her, hey, so the water I've got, like, you won't ever be thirsty again. She's like, you ain't even got a bucket, man. Like, you asked me for water. How you got water? Like, what are you talking about? And then this happens in verse 14. Maybe not 14, 15. Actually, I'm going to go to 13. Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. Whoever drinks the water that I give them will never thirst. This is quite true. So she goes and approaches and has this conversation, and then comes the question, right? Jesus brings up this very thing that has shaped her life. Jesus brings up what is likely the very thing that is causing her to feel rejected by the people in her town and need to be approved. It's the very thing that's made her feel not good enough. And Jesus, you had to bring that up? Like, you can't really, like, Jesus knows everything everything. He knows everything. Like he just told her. So you have to kind of ask this question. Like Jesus, why did you have to bring this up? I really don't think it was because he wanted to remind her. See, you're not quite perfect, are you? See, here's this thing in your life. You got to get this worked out. You got to fix it. She didn't need reminding of that. I think that Jesus brought up the question because he wanted to let her know, you don't have to do that here. You don't have to pretend with me. You don't have to feel the weight of your failures. You don't have to feel like you are the sum total of your mistakes. You don't have to feel like you have to be someone else in order to be accepted, approved, and loved by me. For the first time in probably a very long time. This lady who has been rejected time and time again comes to a conversation with someone who knows everything and welcomes her in. And suddenly there's a rest. I don't have to chase. I don't have to be. I can just be. I don't have to conform to what your idea of good and bad is. I can just rest in the approval of Jesus. And it changes her life forever. You can come on up here. It changes her life forever. What's incredible is you read throughout the rest of the story, there's a boldness and confidence after finding this approval that she runs back to the town. She runs, she leaves her water jug. She runs back to town, back to the place where she has faced rejection over and over again, back to the place where she's reminded you're not good enough, back to the place that people have told her and made her feel like you don't belong here. You're not one of us. You aren't good enough. We'll never approve of you until you fix everything. She's a boldness and a confidence that takes her back to that place and resting in the approval of Jesus, she becomes the person these people need in their life. She has influence on her community. She has influence in the people's lives around her. Resting. Listen to me. This is just an aside. I said I wasn't going to say it, but I want to. And so here we are. The people in your life that you feel like you have to measure up for, the people in your life who rely on you and depend on you, the people in your life who need something from you, what they need from you is to be the person that Jesus is asking you to be. Jesus is not going to lead you to be a poor wife, a poor husband. This lady, this, the first evangelist, I think she, she was, she was the first person to hear, hey, wait, you're the Messiah? And she went back to her, and she had influence in the lives of people who wanted nothing to do with her. When the voice of Jesus became the voice that she rested in, when the voice of Jesus became the voice that she found her approval, she found her identity, she found her life in, it changed her world. She realized that she didn't have to be all things to all people. There were certainly still people there, still people in her community that didn't respect, that didn't like. They may have still whispered. There were certainly people in her community who still didn't listen to what she had to say. But the beautiful part about it is after she found rest in the approval of Jesus, she didn't need them to anymore. They were no longer shaping who she became. Whose voice are you listening to? In certain seasons of your life, whose voice are you listening to? Do you know what Jesus thinks about you? Like, do you know what God thinks about you right now, knowing you fully? Ephesians 2.10 is one of my favorite verses. It's the Apostle Paul. He says that you are God's masterpiece chosen in Christ Jesus to do the good works that he prepared for you ahead of time. He says you are God's masterpiece. There's some versions that say worksmanship, craftsmanship, but the Greek word that Paul used there is poe. Let me look at it. I want to make sure I say it right. Well, I'm going to read it. Those are the right letters. I'm going to say it wrong. Poema. He says, you are God's poema. It's where we get our word poem from. Do you know what God thinks about you? You are his poetry. You are God's poem. His work of art that before time began, he loved. You do all of the things that you do, but do it from an awareness that you have of God who looks at you as his work of art. Let's pray. God, thank you so much. Thank you for the love, the life, the grace that you offer. God, there's going to be seasons, some of us more often than others, when the need and desire for approval begins to become our focus, when image management becomes the thing that we work on the most because we need people to let us in. God, what I ask you to do is just with the softness and gentleness of your Holy Spirit, remind us. Remind us who we are in you. Remind us of the life, the freedom, and the rest that we found in you as our Savior. And let us live our life, God, from a position of approval from God instead of seeking the approval of man. We trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.