John

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

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

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

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, 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.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.